The Cushwa Center celebrated its first 50 years with the conference Catholic Modernity in the Americas: Land, Culture, Politics, hosted April 10–12, 2025, at the University of Notre Dame. With this landmark conference, the center strove “to explore Catholic modernity as a global reality shaped by the Church’s former peripheries.” It did so over the course of 20 panels, a keynote address by José Casanova (Georgetown University), a banquet address by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell (Fordham University), and the Jay P. Dolan Seminar in American Religion, which featured The Uses of Idolatry (Oxford, 2024) by William T. Cavanaugh (DePaul University).
A memorial Mass offered for Cushwa founding director Jay P. Dolan, who died in 2023, preceded the conference’s wide-ranging discussions. Father Wilson Miscamble, C.S.C., celebrated the Mass at Notre Dame’s Basilica of the Sacred Heart. He noted in his homily that “through his efforts, Jay helped build the fields of American religious and Catholic history, and he would be deeply proud and grateful to see the wonderful assembly of scholars and topics assembled for this conference.” Miscamble described Dolan as “not some sort of disinterested observer . . . rather he was an engaged scholar who believed that history could play a role in deepening the faith by clarifying and appreciating the struggles and successes of ordinary Catholics.”
“Catholic modernity” concerns the multiform entanglements, limits, contestations, and overlooked possibilities of faith under and after liberal modernity. In such a frame, the Church in the Americas is no mere European projection, but is instead uniquely constituted by the region’s specific histories, peoples, and geographies.
In opening conference remarks, Cushwa co-director Darren Dochuk described the enormous diversity of scholars present for the conference, coming from ten countries on three continents. He mentioned the center’s integral role in modern scholarship on the Church in America: “Created in 1975 as an epicenter for the study of the American Catholic experience, Cushwa remains a vital clearinghouse for anyone seeking to understand the Church’s spatial, cultural, and political traction on national terrain.” Center co-director David Lantigua expanded on the thematic scope of the conference with comments on what it means to consider “Catholic modernity.” This term, Lantigua argued, “is less about how Catholicism should accommodate and conform to the modern spirit. It is more about exploring the internal limits, uncomfortable entanglements, critical contestations, and overlooked possibilities of faith under and after liberal modernity. From this vantage point, modernity is not conceived as a monolith, but as multiform.” Lantigua summarized the great 21st-century turn in American Catholic history by noting that “the Catholic Church in the Americas is not a mere projection of European culture, but a unique forging of the faith constituted by the region’s specific histories, peoples, and geographies.”
Exploring Catholic modernity in the Americas
The conference’s opening session included the panels “Catholicism, Gender, and Family,” “Devotional Culture,” “Progressivism and Catholic Education,” and “Vatican II and America.”
In that last panel, Susanna De Stradis (Mississippi State University) described new archival findings from the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office—today known as the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith—under Pope Pius XII. De Stradis’ research significantly complicates the field’s understanding of the Pacelli pontificate and its attitude vis-à-vis American theologians and other clerical personalities. Rather than characterizing the Pian era as purely reactionary, De Stradis highlighted sharp disagreement within the Roman Curia over how to address the public work of American theologians, not least due to differences in approach between leading churchmen like cardinals Alfredo Ottaviani and Michael Browne, O.P., as well as Jesuit priest Sebastiaan Tromp.
José Diaz-Dorronsoro (Pontificia Università della Santa Croce) explored the vital contribution of Americans and their entourages to the creation of a comprehensive communications service at the Second Vatican Council. He noted, for example, Cardinal Francis Spellman’s advocacy for a dedicated press center; the service of Edward Heston, C.S.C., as head of the English section of the Vatican press office; and the then-innovative offering of press conferences, with theological experts available to answer questions from journalists about the Council’s proceedings.
Fernando López-Arias (Pontificia Università della Santa Croce) focused more closely on the contributions of one American—namely, Godfrey Diekmann, O.S.B.—to Council communications. Diekmann took a leading role in communicating the work of the Council, especially as it pertained to the Church’s liturgy, which Diekmann viewed as integral to other aspects of human experience. Diekmann brought a commitment to modern, professional media standards, which entailed all outlets covering the Council receiving materials simultaneously; openness to representatives of non-Catholic media; and coordination of media operations through a clear leader.
Finally, Peter Thuesen (Indiana University Indianapolis) detailed the contributions to the Council of Cardinal Richard Cushing, something of an American bishop par excellence. Thanks to Cushing’s early interest in ecumenism and interfaith work as archbishop of Boston (Thuesen noted that Cushing himself had silenced Father Leonard Feeney) the cardinal became a leading proponent of what became Dignitatis humanae, the Council’s Declaration on Religious Freedom. Cushing helped the Council fathers support religious liberty without endorsing “indifferentism” or an “unfettered freedom of conscience.”
The first day’s sessions concluded with a keynote address by José Casanova (Georgetown University, emeritus) titled “Three Phases in the Globalization of Catholicism in the Americas.” After an introduction by past Cushwa director Scott Appleby, Casanova’s address explored three key eras in globalization, which he defined as the increasing connectivity of people and cultures as well as an increasing global consciousness of this same connectivity. In Casanova’s configuration, Catholic globalization took place chronologically, beginning with royally sponsored conquest and missionary expeditions, especially with the contributions of the Society of Jesus, which was globally oriented from its founding. The next phase of Catholic globalization saw the nationalization of Catholicism in the Americas, which in the United States included the heavy influence of Rome itself. Finally, the events of the Second Vatican Council and decolonization initiated the third era of Catholic globalization, leading to a Church today that can claim, as Casanova suggested, to be one of the few truly global voices in the world.
The second day’s opening panels included “Eugenics, Birth Control, and Medical Authority in Modern Mexico,” chaired by Cushwa postdoctoral fellow Angela Xia. Panelists addressed various ways Catholics reconciled their faith with eugenic ideas and justified the use of hormonal birth control pills in 20th-century Mexico. Through an examination of the perspectives of doctors, priests, and lay women, presentations emphasized the contested nature of Mexican Catholics’ opinions on birth control.
Ricardo Álvarez-Pimentel (Baylor University) opened the conversation with a paper titled “Eugenics and the Fear of Indigenous Women’s Sexuality in the Juventud Católica Femenina Mexicana (JCFM).” The paper traced how the upper-class women of JCFM, a Catholic magazine in Mexico, wed their faith to eugenics through the lens of Spaniard superiority. Álvarez-Pimentel argued that in the opinion of Juventud women, eugenic ideas reined in rural Indigenous women’s morally vulnerable sexuality and contributed to the spread of Catholicism.
Martha Liliana Espinosa Tavares (DePauw) gave a paper titled “‘Blessings to the Pill’: Catholic Interventions in the Mexican Human Trials with the Birth Control Pill,” which offered insights into the ways clinics attempted to avoid antagonizing the Catholic Church amidst the testing of Syntex birth control pills. Tavares outlined how the Mexican Association for Family Welfare encouraged perceptions of the pill as natural and hormonal to adhere to Catholic teaching.
In “Bridging the Worlds of Science and Theology in the 20th Century: One Priest’s Advice about the Birth Control Pill in 1960s Mexico City,” Natalie Gasparowicz (Duke University) illustrated Catholic use of scientific knowledge in support of birth control—particularly the pill—in the late 1960s. Catholics engaged in debates both about the degree to which the pill represented a natural form of birth control and whether the Church should exercise authority to instruct couples on birth control. Some Catholics argued the pill increased the success of the rhythm method; following the publication of Humanae vitae, some Catholics in Mexico accused the Church of overreaching its authority.
Friday’s Session 8, “Vatican Diplomacy and the Americas,” featured presentations on the evolving relationship between the Holy See, governments in countries in the Americas, and Catholics living in those countries. Each panelist shed distinct light on a similar set of questions: How did the Vatican interpret the “mission and interests of the Church” in South America and beyond? In what ways did these clash with local practices and desires? And to what extent did the Catholicization of these lands and emerging democracies coincide with their Romanization?
Maddalena Burelli (independent researcher) presented on the complex and often fraught implementation of the Council of Trent’s decrees in the “new world.” She specifically considered the disparity between Tridentine prescriptions and local practices for determining succession after the death of a bishop (an especially pressing and practical question insofar as some sees would remain without a bishop for over a decade). For more than two centuries, and despite Trent’s formal instructions, local custom reigned; yet by the mid-1800s, the Holy See’s desire to more strictly enforce Trent’s decrees challenged these practices. Burelli also observed that political contentions complicated intra-ecclesial disputes over governance; the Holy See’s reluctance to acknowledge new nations’ independence meant that diocesan structures were slow to adjust to new political realities.
Pablo Mijangos (Southern Methodist University) picked up this thread in his presentation on the mid-19th century’s Latin American concordat negotiations. Pope Pius IX’s priorities in these international negotiations became exceedingly clear in the wake of the revolutions of 1848: above all, to secure the Catholic Church’s control over education. The Vatican’s concordats with Bolivia (1851) and especially Guatemala (1852) evidenced this development most clearly; in those countries, the capital archbishops functionally became the national ministers of education.
As the United States rose to international prominence at the turn of the 20th century, Vatican diplomatic relations involving the new global power only grew more complex. Jethro Calacday (Cambridge University) elaborated on a significant example of this process: President Taft’s diplomatic mission to the Vatican in 1901–02. Born of the interplay of leading prelates’ ecclesiastical ambitions, American economic interests in the Philippines, and the Vatican’s desire for rapprochement with an emerging international power, the mission engendered substantial changes to the Vatican’s prior stance toward the Philippines. Calacday argued that the mission resulted in nothing less than the alignment of internal ecclesiastical policy with American colonial politics and the sacralization of American empire in the Philippines.
To conclude the panel, Bonar L. Hernández (Iowa State University) discussed the politics of papal diplomacy in Guatemala during the 1950s. As a result of clerical shortages during the 1920s and the consequent importation of Spanish clergy (with distinctly European and Vatican-centric predilections), discord between Indigenous Catholics and the clergy’s attempts at Romanization continued for decades, only intensifying as Vatican power in Guatemala grew. Hernández articulated the further complication of Indigenous-Vatican relations by American interests—as especially evinced in the U.S.-backed 1954 coup and the Vatican’s response.
Session 10 featured “New Perspectives on Poverty and Liberation in Latin American Catholicism.” María Soledad Del Villar (Boston College) analyzed late-20th-century clandestine publications from Chilean ecclesial base communities (No Podemos Callar and Policarpo). These texts not only offer a window into local churches’ resistance to human rights violations committed by the government, but also a case study in the evolution of the portrayal of female agency. Del Villar observed a gradual inclusion of female—and occasionally feminist—perspectives and a growing acknowledgement of women as protagonists rather than simply as victims. She noted that this very movement’s future generations would later question certain presuppositions regarding gender roles. She concluded that an authentic dialogue between feminism and liberatory theology never occurred in these magazines—an issue for theologians to discuss in the present.
Pablo Forni (Universidad del Salvador) presented on one of Argentina’s signal contributions to contemporary Catholic theology: the “theology of the people” (distinct from the better-known Latin American “theology of liberation”). To do so, he concentrated on the life and work of one of the movement’s founders, Father Rafael Tello (1917–2001). Rather than appropriating social scientific tools and Marxist economic analysis as in liberation theology, the theology of the people centered on Argentinian popular culture and that culture’s deep—and deeply Christian—history. To resist the threats posed by both American consumerism and attempts to “Romanize” the Catholic Church in Argentina, Tello proposed that the Argentinian people reach into their cultural roots so as to (re)invigorate their distinct religious feast days, pilgrimages, and devotions (especially to Our Lady of Luján). Ultimately, the theology of the people transcended the geographical confines of Argentina and, in the person of Pope Francis, reached the Vatican itself.
Taken together, these speakers detailed the vibrant and consummately practical nature of lived and living theologies in South America.
The panel “Race, Environment, and American Parishes,” chaired by Katie Comeau (Notre Dame), considered the contexts in which parishes have opened and closed, including race, environmental pollution, and ethnic distinctiveness. Philip Alexander Chivily (Florida State University) began the panel with “The Birth, Life, Death, and Legacy of Charlottesville’s Rose Hill Black Catholic Redemptorist Community,” detailing the opening and closing of St. Margaret Mary’s Parish in Charlottesville, Virginia (1953–1966), in the context of the Civil Rights Movement. Chivily described the parish as a “pillar” of Rose Hill’s Black neighborhood. Black Charlottesvillians utilized a Catholic identity to integrate themselves into Catholic communities and develop a distinct spirituality.
Mark M. Gray and Emma Mitchell (Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate) followed with a presentation titled “Environmental Justice and the Locations of Catholic Parish Closures and Openings in the Archdiocese of St. Louis, Archdiocese of Baltimore, and Diocese of Cleveland.” Their research considered correlations between environmental pollution and parish openings and closings. The pair found that greater proximity to pollution (determined by the presence of underground storage tanks and hazardous waste in water) indicated greater likelihood of eventual closure during the period under consideration. Gray and Mitchell identified potential corollary causes for parish closures, offering socioeconomic data overlaid on pollution maps.
Finally, with a paper titled “Upon this Rock I Shall Build My Church: Catholic Church Construction and Ethnic Cultural Identity in Gilded Age Appalachia,” Joseph Pearson (Union College) argued that German church architecture in Gilded Age Kentucky provides a lens into ethnic and religious distinctiveness. Church architecture exemplified Catholic and German identity in a land that did not want them. Yet Appalachian geography also impacted the German traditional Gothic style, forming a hybrid Carpenter Gothic architecture.
Tom Tweed (Notre Dame) chaired the panel “The Clergy Abuse Crisis: Land, Space, and Place.” Panelists reflected together on how to highlight stories of abuse, addressing themes of institutional good and evil, the language of vulnerability, and the impact of anti-Catholicism.
In “Father Louis Miller, Survivors, Camp Tall Trees, and the History of Clergy Abuse,” Peter Cajka (Notre Dame) began with a conceptual contribution to the history of clergy sex abuse: that memory—that of both abuser and survivor—impacts narratives differently. Cajka explored this idea through the case of Father Louis Miller’s abuse of boys at Camp Tall Trees. Miller claimed he did not know he had a “problem” prior to ordination; if he had known, he never would have sought ordination. Yet the testimony of victim Joseph Ball Jr. contradicted Miller’s self-narration. Cajka concluded by challenging historians to address the role of memory in sex abuse history.
Julia Feder (Saint Mary’s College) analyzed the role of place in oral history research on Daniel Kenney, S.J., in “‘Not Just Omaha’: Place, Mission, and Abuse after Vatican II.” Feder argued that Omaha’s Catholic post-Vatican II culture made Kenney’s alleged abuse of students at Creighton Preparatory School in the 1970s and 80s difficult to recognize. Once claims of his abuse of minors became unignorable in 1989, the Midwest Jesuits moved him to Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota in 1992 and then to Nairobi, Kenya, in 1993, further obscuring Kenney’s past and casting him as a priest who was willing to serve those “on the margins.”
In a presentation titled “Jean Vanier, L’Arche, and Catholic Monsters,” Jessica Mesman (Christian Century) asked if theology lies at the root of abuse. Mesman challenged listeners to discern whether theology could be disentangled from the ways it has been weaponized to coerce women into abuse.
Finally, Kate Moran (Saint Louis University) characterized the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum as a space both of confinement and care in “Wayward Girlhood and U.S. Colonial State: The Sisters of Mercy and the Founding of the San Francisco Magdalen Asylum.” Moran depicted young girls in Magdalen homes as both vulnerable and strategic. “For some, it was a place of terror, and for others, it was the best option they had,” Moran said.
Toasting 50 years
Friday evening featured the conference’s celebratory reception and banquet. Cushwa co-director Darren Dochuk offered introductory comments, noting the presence of the center’s previous directors and many members of the Cushwa family. John McGreevy, the Charles and Jill Fischer Provost and Francis A. McAnaney Professor of History at Notre Dame, delivered welcome remarks before the start of dinner, congratulating the Cushwa Center and its many collaborators on the remarkable accomplishments of its first 50 years, and recounted his own formative experience attending Cushwa seminars over the course of decades. Noting the sustained contributions of eminent scholars such as Martin Marty, Mark Noll, Nathan Hatch, Phil Gleason, and Jon Butler, McGreevy said that “from the beginning, the Cushwa Center’s ambitions were more than parochial.” He lauded the center’s roster of current and past directors, who have ensured that Jay Dolan’s “commitment to excellence mark[s] the center even now.”
After the meal, Dochuk resumed the evening’s program, recounting the very first gathering of the Center for the Study of American Catholicism, the inaugural American Catholic Studies seminar in March 1975, at which one banquet attendee—Sister Mary Ewens, O.P.—had participated. He also related the history of the Cushwa family’s generous support, from Margaret Hall Cushwa’s endowment of the center in the early 1980s to the continued support of William and Anna Jean Cushwa and other family members in the years since. Thanks to the family’s support, Dochuk said, “The Cushwa Center has enriched the work of everyone in this room in some way . . . beyond this room, thousands of scholars have benefitted.”
Dochuk introduced immediate past director Kathleen Sprows Cummings (Notre Dame), noting her many accomplishments as director, especially in enhancing the center’s international research profile.“There is no institution that means more to me than the Cushwa Center,” Cummings said in her own reflections, noting that she had been involved for more than half of her own and the center’s life. She commented on Jay Dolan’s commitment to the new social history of Catholicism in the years after Vatican II, a time for Catholics and historians to see the Church and tell its story in a new way. She mentioned in particular the landmark 1982 conference, Perspectives on American Catholicism, which featured a cohort of interdisciplinary scholars (over a third of them women) who now lead the fields of Catholic history and other studies.
After a toast from past director Timothy Matovina (Notre Dame), Dochuk introduced Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, who teaches English, creative writing, and Catholic studies at Fordham University, where she serves as associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies.
O’Donnell’s banquet talk, “The Holy Land Is Everywhere: The Poetry of Witness and the Ignatian Imagination,” began with the observation that “Catholic imagination takes many forms,” including architecture, music, and the written word. O’Donnell recalled Pope John Paul II’s 1999 letter to artists on the essential contribution that artists, including writers, make to the life of faith. In that letter the pope wrote that “art is by its nature a kind of appeal to the mystery. Even when they explore the darkest depths of the soul or the most unsettling aspects of evil, artists give voice in a way to the universal desire for redemption.”1 O’Donnell pointed to Ignatius of Loyola as a paradigmatic example of the Catholic imagination. Writing his Spiritual Exercises in a cave near Manresa, O’Donnell noted, the founder of the Jesuits modeled a practical and personal approach to prayer by imagining himself in the spaces and moments occupied by Jesus of Nazareth. Imagining oneself in these scenes allows an individual, in a sense, to become a co-creator, as such imagination requires mentally providing details and circumstances that may not explicitly appear in the Gospels. O’Donnell argued that poets also deploy such a task of imagination, placing themselves into the past and the experiences of others in order to better understand and write about the human condition. O’Donnell also called attention to the imaginational similarities between the Christian call to serve the poor and the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, roughly “repairing the world.” Repairing the world requires imagination, O’Donnell said, in order to see God in the face of the poor and the suffering and in the midst of war, disease, and environmental disaster.
O’Donnell read from her own corpus of poetry, including poems inspired by the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh; “Christ Sightings” and “Stormchaser,” which rose from time spent in the Holy Land; “Border Songs”; and sonnets on Lazarus and the woman found by Christ in adultery. She returned the theme of desolation, calling attention to the Ignatian admonishment about the ease of seeing God in overt beauty. Ignatius challenges us to see God in the people and places bereft of holiness, abandoned, and desolate: to look into the darkness in order to see the light. We may live in a broken world, O’Donnell noted, but we must love it no less.
O’Donnell closed with words from Pope Francis, who had addressed a gathering of writers that O’Donnell attended: “This, then, is the challenge facing the Catholic imagination in our time. It is a challenge entrusted to you, not to explain the mystery of Christ, which is ultimately unfathomable, but to enable us to touch him, to feel his closeness, to let us see him as alive and open our eyes to the beauty of his promises, because his promises appeal to our imagination. They help us to imagine in a new way our lives, our history, and the future of humanity.”2
Dolan Seminar: William T. Cavanaugh’s The Uses of Idolatry
On Saturday, conference attendees and other guests convened for the Spring 2025 Dolan Seminar on American Religion. This semester’s gathering discussed The Uses of Idolatry (Oxford, 2024) by William T. Cavanaugh (DePaul University). Cushwa co-director David Lantigua provided opening remarks before introducing Rev. Kevin Grove, C.S.C. (Notre Dame), Johannes Hoff (University of Innsbruck), and Atalia Omer (Notre Dame), who each offered commentary on the book’s contributions to topics ranging from nationalism and consumerism to digital spaces and undergraduate student formation.
Father Grove began by reflecting on Cavanaugh’s discussion of selfhood. By exploring the work of Augustine and Jean-Luc Marion, Grove remarked, Cavanaugh presents a poured out, negated, kenotically given self. As such, Grove asked, what sort of shared understandings of the self and of sin might successfully counteract idolatry (which Cavanaugh defines succinctly as “inordinate devotion to what is not God”)? Grove also turned to Cavanaugh’s discussion of belief in God, asking how idolatry functions for those who believe in God but whose vision of God reflects a sort of “divine butler” called upon in times of distress.
Johannes Hoff offered insights from his research on anthropology in the age of artificial intelligence. Automation bias, coupled with algorithms like Google’s PageRank, perpetuates and reinforces the narcissism that Cavanaugh describes as central to idolatrous worship. With these and other digital advancements threatening to command human worship, Hoff suggested how idolatry provides a more helpful framework for “discerning spirits” than the enchantment/disenchantment narrative that Cavanaugh critiques. Hoff concluded his comments with a critique of the Christology implicit in Cavanaugh’s final chapter, pointing out a potential overemphasis on the “unmixedness” of the divine and human attributes of Jesus Christ.
Atalia Omer described reading the book as an exercise in nostalgia, involving many figures from her doctoral exams on civil religion and nationalism studies. However, she noted the absence of important voices that critique the canon of nationalism studies, such as Saba Mahmood and Talal Asad. Additionally, she asked whether a broader range of perspectives—from feminist to postcolonial critique—could have shed more light on different notions of “imagined community” and opened the space for a more robust analysis of secularity and political rights. She also noted the lamenting tone of the book, wishing Cavanaugh would have moved beyond lament to incorporate more robust critiques of colonialism, heteronormativity, and racism. Omer asked whether an ethics of relationality could have aided Cavanaugh’s arguments by opening up clearer avenues for pluralistic flourishing in his account. She also wondered whether Cavanaugh could have de-centered U.S. Christianity from the story in order to offer greater insights into concerns about nationalism in other contexts.
Cavanaugh offered a response to each of the commenters. He commended Hoff’s expansion of the book’s insights into the digital space, agreeing that the digital narcissistic feedback loop convinces us of our self-mastery when we scroll, though we have a profound sense that we use technology at the mercy of its creators. In response to Hoff’s critique of his Christology, Cavanaugh emphasized the role of humility in his account of the “knowability” of Jesus Christ. His own account makes more of an argument about our ability to know than about Jesus. Turning to Omer’s comments, he acknowledged the limits of a project focused on the American Christian narrative. In response to Grove’s questions about belief in a “divine butler,” Cavanaugh argued that those who “believe without belonging” to a particular faith tradition or congregation still belong in one way or another. Interrogating these different kinds of belonging reveals what we actually believe.
The seminar provided ample time for question and answer with the audience. Michelle Molina (Northwestern University) opened by asking whether Émile Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence helps capture the phenomenon of nationalism. Father Bill Miscamble, C.S.C. (Notre Dame), asked whether and under what circumstances we might accept some forms of nationalism. Cavanaugh’s responses highlighted the need for a theological critique of nationalism that moves beyond a Durkheimian functional analysis to consider which gods merit worship. In response to Miscamble, Cavanaugh noted common misconceptions about nationalism as a response to globalization. He argued that nationalism can itself be a form of universalization—a monoculture “engineered from above.” Cavanaugh raised the possibility of looking for kinds of belonging both above and below the nation-state to move beyond harmful nationalisms.
Philip Chivily (Florida State University) asked about ecclesial disputes among Roman Catholics, wondering whether devotion to particular liturgical practices can itself become disordered and idolatrous. Cavanaugh affirmed the importance of concerns over sectarianism within the Church, noting that this had been a concern of Pope Francis. He agreed that liturgy can become a sort of mirror, driving narcissistic self-admiration, rather than a window or door onto the divine. However, Cavanaugh also noted the existence of multiple idolatries in the Church from various perspectives. Dennis Wieboldt (Notre Dame) asked about practices the panelists have found successful for helping students recognize how they might be falling into the trap of idolatry. Cavanaugh’s answer focused on ways of restructuring our lives to tap into the joyful and the beautiful. He also described an optional exercise in asceticism built into his Christianity and Consumerism course at DePaul University that students respond to positively. Grove added that students concede profound self-awareness of their idolatrous tendencies, and he encouraged creating opportunities for conversation and mechanisms of care and relation among students to counteract the isolation that idolatry fosters. After these and other questions that made for a lively discussion, Lantigua closed the seminar and conference by thanking Cavanaugh, the commenters, and conference attendees for their participation that morning and in the days prior.
Katie Heatherly is a student in the doctoral program in the Department of History at Notre Dame.
Katherine Mascari is a student in the doctoral program in the Department of Theology at Notre Dame.
Anthony Scordino is a student in the doctoral program in the Department of Theology at Notre Dame.
Michael Skaggs (Notre Dame ‘13 and ‘17) is an independent historian and co-founder of Chaplaincy Innovation Lab, where he serves as director of programs.
Feature image: Indigenous women and children in front of the mission church of Santa Teresita de Kavanayén in Venezuela’s Gran Sabana, c. 1955. Pictorial Parade via Getty Images.
Notes
1. Pope John Paul II, “Letter to Artists,” April 4, 1999.
2. Pope Francis, “Audience with participants in the Conference organized by ‘La Civiltà Cattolica’ with Georgetown University,” May 7, 2023.