Although it may seem a bit premature (or presumptuous) for co-directors to deem just their second year on the job a momentous one for the Cushwa Center, when glimpsing the 2024–25 calendar, such superlatives seem fair. Of course, the booster spirit has always been strong at Cushwa, so too a certainty in the sparkling import of its coming attractions. As my colleague David Lantigua wrote in this space last spring, Cushwa owes its drive to its founder, Jay Dolan, whose boosterism ran deep. His was a boundless confidence that guaranteed Cushwa’s next steps would always be big ones. Yet even Jay Dolan, I believe, would look at the coming months as a special—indeed, historic—juncture in the life of the center.
Obvious evidence of this awaits us in April, when Cushwa will celebrate its 50th anniversary by welcoming esteemed scholars and guests to Notre Dame for a conference on “Catholic Modernity in the Americas: Land, Culture, Politics.” Threading Cushwa’s longstanding commitment to the study of American Catholicism through a widening canvas of hemispheric ecclesiastical and societal change, this congress will encourage participants drawn from a range of disciplines, institutions, and places to ponder Catholicism’s (and religion’s broadly) encounters with 500 years of modern development, all with an eye to contemporary concerns. We are thrilled that the internationally acclaimed sociologist José Casanova (Georgetown University) will deliver our keynote address on “Three Phases in the Globalization of Catholicism in the Americas,” and equally excited to hear from the panelists and attendees who will help ensure that Cushwa’s 50th is as intellectually generative as it is commemorative in its honor of an institution that has left its mark on campus and beyond.
As much as “Catholic Modernity in the Americas” will serve as the crowning affair in the 2024–25 academic year, other happenings will also serve as milestones. Last year, Cushwa renamed its signature biannual seminar the “Jay P. Dolan Seminar in American Religion”; to inaugurate the new era, we expanded the schedule to include two symposia that addressed the lasting impact of Vatican II on Catholicism and rising influence of “nones” and “nonverts” (disaffiliated religious adherents) on the American cultural landscape. Representing the best in Cushwa’s mandate to gather people from diverse communities to converse about major books and big ideas, with the expressed goal of getting to know Catholicism and modern religion as a whole better, the spring Dolan Seminar was a huge success.
On October 4–5 of this year, Cushwa aims to build on that momentum by featuring a book and a lecture on the globalization of U.S.-borne faiths. While discussion of Emily Conroy-Krutz’s Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations will anchor our Saturday morning Dolan Seminar, the weekend will kick off on Friday afternoon when Candy Gunther Brown delivers the annual Cushwa Center Lecture on “Francis S. MacNutt and the Globalization of Charismatic Christianity.” On their own and certainly in combination, these two singular events will help set in motion what we anticipate for Cushwa’s 50th anniversary conference: lively interrogation of large-scale forces of change and substantive shifts within that have altered modern American faith’s pathways at home and abroad. That same ecumenical energy is sure to animate the other initiatives (too many to list) that will center our attention during these coming months, including two other Cushwa-supported forums that will serve as bookends to the year: the “Pius XII and the 1950 Holy Year” conference that will be held at Notre Dame Rome in November 2024 and the Thirteenth Triennial Conference on the History of Women Religious, titled “Lives and Archives,” which will take place at Notre Dame (South Bend) in June 2025.
For all of the sparkling proceedings ahead, I am most excited about momentous developments that will enrich the day-to-day operations of 407 Geddes Hall. After a yearlong hiatus, Cushwa has again welcomed postdoctoral fellows into the fold. Melissa Coles brings her expertise in the historical study of Catholicism, Indigenous traditions, environment, and pilgrimage to Geddes in time to help with preparations for the 50th conference celebration, which will coalesce around such themes. Joining us as well is Angela Xia, whose study of faith and modernity is similarly shaped by an interdisciplinary purview. Angela is interested in how religious notions of old age and eldercare have informed the ethics and infrastructure of American healthcare—points of contact between church and state, faith and medicine, religious practice and politics that will also be on the radar when Cushwa’s 50th anniversary confab convenes.
While Angela and Melissa will offer the Cushwa team fresh perspective, continuity in the life of an institution matters too, and in that regard David and I cannot be more thrilled to highlight another change. Since 2015, Shane Ulbrich served as assistant director of the Cushwa Center, diligently managing the office and all that entails as well as supervising the center’s outreach initiatives, public events, and the finances and operations behind it all. Since David and I came on board as co-directors, Shane has provided the institutional memory and moral (and practical) support that has been essential to our transitions. We are pleased to say that on July 1 of this year, Shane was officially promoted to associate director. On one hand, this new title merely affirms the critical role he has long performed and will continue to perform as the linchpin of Cushwa programming. Yet it also signifies new beginnings, not just for Shane, whose job description will—to his liking as well as ours—expand, but also for the center as it embarks on a new stage of innovation and growth.
So, as we look forward to the coming months, we cannot help but boast about Cushwa’s many exciting next steps. Set against a backdrop of profound political happenings, punctuated by a historic federal election, we are also fully aware that these progressions need to transpire with eyes trained on the life of the nation as well. Be it through direct involvement in September’s “Summit to Defend Democracy” with ecumenical partners at Georgetown, or in sustained conversation with other scholars, centers, media, and citizens about Catholicism’s past and present role in civil society, we at Cushwa are eager to execute our packed-full schedule of programming not just with an inward focus on the functions of church and academy, but with an intent to advance the public good.
Darren Dochuk
William W. and Anna Jean Cushwa Co-Director
This director’s note appears in the fall 2024 issue of the American Catholic Studies Newsletter.