Read news and updates from the Cushwa Center’s network of scholars.
Scott Appleby, David Lantigua, and Sarah Shortall (University of Notre Dame) each contributed articles to the Contending Modernities series The Legacy of Pope Francis (contendingmodernities.nd.edu). Shortall’s “The Enigma of Pope Francis” (July 2025); Appleby’s “Papal Sins Part I: Opposition to Pope Francis in the American Catholic Church” and “Papal Sins Part II: The Four Papal ‘Sins’” (August 2025); and Lantigua’s “Pope Francis, Liberalism, and a New Theology of Poverty” (September 2025) variously reflect on Francis’s reception in the United States, his confounding of political binaries, and his focus on poverty and the Global South.
Paolo L. Bernardini (University of Insubria) has co-edited (with Erica Baricci and Elisa Bianco) Guida dell’Europa minore (Mimesis, 2025), consisting of the travel writings of Mario Manlio Rossi (1895–1971), documenting his exploratory trips in postwar Europe. Bernardini has also published Le lettere e gli spiriti: Itinerari eccentrici nella letteratura italiana (Aesthetica, 2025), a collection of essays reconsidering the Italian literary canon from Dante to the present.
Jethro A. E. A. Calacday (University of Cambridge) has published “The Politics of Recognition in US-Philippine-Vatican Relations, 1898–1899” in Diplomatic History 49 (2025); and “Negotiating Church and State in the Revolutionary Philippines, 1898–1900” in Church History 93 (2024). He has also co-authored the article “Patrona del Bicol: The Virgin of Peñafrancia and the Making of a Region, 1850s to 1924” published in Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints 73 (2025). In 2022, Calacday won a D’Agostino Grant from the Cushwa Center for research for his doctoral thesis, “American Imperialism and the Roman Catholic Church in the Philippines,” which he successfully defended earlier this year and is currently reworking as his first monograph. He is one of six inaugural global fellows at Notre Dame’s Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion.
Adrian Ciani (University of Toronto) has recently published Contesting Zion: The Vatican, American Catholics, and the Partition of Palestine (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025), examining the Vatican’s reactions to the rise of modern political Zionism and its early relations with the nascent state of Israel. The book examines this relationship through a transnational lens, with a particular focus on the political activity of American Catholics, who were primary advocates of the Vatican’s policies for the future of Palestine both in Washington and at the UN. Ciani presented a draft of this study at the Cushwa Center’s Rome conference in June 2017, North Atlantic Catholic Communities in Rome: 1622–1939.
Kara French (William & Mary) began serving this fall as director of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program at William & Mary, where she is associate professor in the Harrison Ruffin Tyler Department of History.
Benjamin Hazard (University College Dublin and Irish Manuscripts Commission) has published Luke Wadding: A Life: Religion, Politics and Culture, 1588–1657 (Peter Lang, 2025).
The History of Women Religious of Britain and Ireland (H-WRBI) will host its annual conference at Queen Mary University London, June 11–12, 2026, on the theme of “Women Religious: Patronage and Networks from Medieval to Modern.” Find the call for papers at historyofwomenreligious.org. Send abstracts to hwrbi.conference@gmail.com by January 30, 2026.
Paula M. Kane (University of Pittsburgh) received the American Catholic Historical Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award for 2025, recognizing lifelong contributions to the field of Catholic studies.
Deborah E. Kanter (Albion College) has published Pioneers of Latino Ministry: Claretians and the Evolving World of Catholic America (NYU Press, 2025), building on her prize-winning Chicago Católico: Making Catholic Parishes Mexican and taking the story national—from Texas to Chicago, California to New Jersey, with stops including Oregon, Kansas, Louisiana, and beyond, to Central America.
Scott Keefer, archivist for the Daughters of Charity in Emmitsburg, Maryland, shares news of the launch of a collaborative digital project with DePaul University’s Vincentian Studies Institute to make available the Seton family’s manuscripts held in Maryland. A first batch is now live, with additional releases forthcoming. View the collection at via.library.depaul.edu/seton_family_papers.
David Lantigua (University of Notre Dame) published an article on the Americas, racism, and Indigenous peoples in The Thomist’s special issue (April 2025) on Thomas Aquinas and racial justice. The volume also includes contributions by Therese Cory (Notre Dame) on implicit bias and by Andrew Prevot (Georgetown University) on slave spirituals. Lantigua also contributed “Leo XIV, América, and the Revolution of Love” to the Berkley Forum series “Perspectives on the Pan-American Pope,” published in August 2025 at berkleycenter.georgetown.edu.
Sarah C. Luginbill (Trinity University) published the article “The Eucharist in a Suitcase: The Chaplains’ Aid Association and Catholic Material Culture in World War I” in the summer 2025 issue of American Catholic Studies. The article draws on research supported by a Cushwa Center Research Travel Grant in 2024.
Joseph Mannard (Indiana University of Pennsylvania) has published The Two Worlds of Ann Gertrude Wightt: How a Runaway Nun Became a Grand Lady of Washington, DC, Society (Georgetown University Press, 2025).
Tom McDonough (American Family Project) announces the Orestes Brownson Essay Contest for university students, inviting essays on any Brownson-related topic. Submissions are due December 31, 2025. Winners will be announced by March 1, 2026, and an awards ceremony will be held in Washington, D.C., on April 15, 2026. All contestants will be invited to a daylong conference at The Catholic University of America on April 16, 2026, marking the 150th anniversary of Orestes Brownson’s death (April 17). Learn more at amfamproject.org.
Kevin M. Schultz (University of Illinois Chicago) has published Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History (University of Chicago Press, 2025), a century-spanning account of American liberalism’s rise and fall, and the erosion of centrist politics. The book has been excerpted in Harper’s Magazine and Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera and has prompted podcast appearances and a book tour from Los Angeles to Rhode Island.
Christopher Shannon (Christendom College) shares the call for papers for a conference, Eternity in Time: Thinking with the Church through History, scheduled for February 20–21, 2026, in Front Royal, Virginia. In November 2024, Pope Francis published an apostolic letter calling for the renewal of the study of Church history as an essential subject in seminary education. He insisted, as well, “that all of us—not just candidates for the priesthood—need a renewed sense of history.” Pope Francis observed that the neglect of the study of history has too often led to “an overly angelic conception of the Church, presenting a Church that is unreal because she lacks spots and wrinkles.” Neither mere chronology nor naïve triumphalism, the authentic study of history must foster “the cultivation of a clear sense of the historical dimension that is ours as human beings.” So too, rigorous, scholarly history “summons us to ethical responsibility, sharing and solidarity.” This conference wishes to bring together scholars from all fields of the humanities to reexamine the place of history in Catholic higher education and the public witness of Catholics seeking to evangelize contemporary culture. Possible presentation topics include the relation between history and philosophy, the place of history in patristic thought, Newman’s conception of the development of doctrine, the thought of Christopher Dawson, the relation between language and culture, liturgy and history, the historical particularity of Catholic cultures, history and literary form, the relation between faith and reason in the study of history, masterworks of Catholic history, and the role of history as a bridge between the Church and the World in contemporary public discourse. Father David Endres (Editor of U.S. Catholic Historian and Dean of the Athenaeum of Ohio) will deliver the conference keynote lecture. Submit 250-word abstracts to at cshannon@christendom.edu by December 1, 2025.
Steven Torres (Lewis University) successfully defended his dissertation, “Empowering Communities at the Margins: The Significant Role of Catholic Sisters in Educational Equity,” in February 2025. The dissertation presents case studies on the Sisters of Charity of New York, the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament.
Thomas A. Tweed (University of Notre Dame) has published several online pieces building on material in his new book, Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History (Yale University Press, 2025). The Yale University Press Blog ran his essay, “Did Washington Kneel in Prayer at Valley Forge?” on July 1, 2025. Audible released the audiobook of Religion in the Lands That Became America that same month.
Dennis J. Wieboldt III (University of Notre Dame) shares five recent publications: “Natural Law for the Laity: A Case Study in Catholic Education on the Airwaves,” in Theology and Media(tion): Rendering the Absent Present (Orbis Books, 2024); “Civil Rights and Prophetic Indictment: A Discursive History of Jesuit Superior General Pedro Arrupe’s On the Interracial Apostolate,” Journal of Catholic Social Thought 21 (2024); “Christian History Meets Constitutional History: John Courtney Murray’s Augustinian Political Theology of the American Founding,” Horizons 51 (2024); “How ‘Religious’ Is a ‘Religious Employer’?: Church History and the Future of American Religious Liberty Litigation,” N.Y.U. Journal of Law & Liberty 18 (2024); and “Making Natural Law ‘Useful in the Solution of Practical Problems’: Global Catholicism and Human Rights in The Catholic Lawyer, 1955–1964,” Catholic Historical Review 111 (2025).
Deanna Witkowski is the recipient of a 2025–26 research grant from the Crossroads Project supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and Princeton University for “Jazz in the Pews: Mary Lou Williams, Eddie Bonnemère, and The Community of St. Thomas the Apostle.” The project explores the partnerships between these two Black Catholic composers and St. Thomas as part of the Harlem-based church’s jazz ministry from 1967 to 1971. The resulting multimedia project will be posted at SPIRIT HOUSE (crossroads-spirithouse.org) in spring 2026.
These announcements appear in the fall 2025 issue of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.