The Cushwa Center’s 50th anniversary celebrations spanned the whole of 2025, beginning with the conference Catholic Modernity in the Americas. They continued in the fall as several new initiatives and gatherings highlighted core themes of the center’s founding mission. The annual Hibernian Lecture in September evoked a key aspect of Jay Dolan’s early vision, exploring the Irish American experience in relation to neighboring immigrant communities. The Dolan Seminar weekend celebrated a landmark publication by one of Notre Dame’s most distinguished scholars of American religion. The annual Cushwa Center Lecture considered the history of a Catholic publishing house founded five years before the Cushwa Center, similarly inspired to advance new research and writing animated by the Second Vatican Council. Finally, the center co-hosted a November symposium with the Hesburgh Libraries to honor the life and work of Notre Dame theologian Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, O.P. The event marked the opening of a digital archive, the Gustavo Gutiérrez Merino, O.P., Collection, which preserves extensive theological conferences Gutiérrez convened over the course of 50 years in Lima, Peru.
An Irish–Jewish immigrant alliance
In September, the Cushwa Center welcomed Hasia Diner to deliver the 2025 Hibernian Lecture, “How the Irish Taught the Jews to Become American.” Each year, with support from the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians, an invited speaker gives an address on some aspect of the Irish experience.1 Recent lecturers include Frank Shovlin (“Like a Prayer: the Novels of John McGahern”), Julie Morrissy (“Revolutionary Traces: Radical Women, Commemoration, and Public Space”), Enda Delaney (“Faith and Fatherland: Belief and the Irish Catholic Experience”), and Declan Kiberd (“Ireland Now: Excavating the Present”).
Diner is the Paul and Sylvia Steinberg Professor of American Jewish History Emerita at New York University. At NYU, she directed the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History and served as interim director of the Glucksman Ireland House. She is a member of the American Academy of Jewish Research and the Society of American Historians as well as a Fulbright and Guggenheim recipient. Among her numerous books are Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (Harvard, 2003); The Jews of the United States: 1654 to 2000 (University of California, 2006); We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust (NYU Press, 2009); and Roads Taken: The Great Jewish Migration to the New World and the Peddlers Who Led the Way (Yale, 2015).
Diner’s Hibernian Lecture drew on research for her most recent book, Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance between the Irish and the Jews in America (St. Martin’s, 2024). In her telling, the interaction between the Irish and the Jews in the 19th century resulted in a sort of “alchemy” that “remade the nation.” She noted the importance of chronology; with Irish immigrants arriving in the United States well in advance of Jewish immigrants, it was the Irish who built enormous institutions, both literal and cultural, from which Jewish immigrants could learn to “become American.” The Irish had succeeded so well in building thriving communities that by the time Jewish immigrants arrived, they could benefit from the Irish as both guides and exemplars of success in the still-young United States. While acknowledging the historical reality of some expressions of antisemitism among Irish Americans, including religious preaching and popular publications, Diner insisted that these were outliers. The productive relationship between the Irish and the Jews was far more formative.
Diner structured her lecture around the four ways in which the Irish contributed to Jewish success in the United States: vocal defense, embrace of political power, labor activism, and education. Irish defense of Jewish immigrants and American Jews spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, beginning at least as early as articles in the Boston Pilot—significantly, a publication of the Archdiocese of Boston—decrying antisemitism in the 1870s and 1880s. Immigrant and American Jews also sought the academic attention of former state assemblyman and New York judge Charles Daly, who published the laudatory history The Settlement of the Jews in North America in 1893. The Knights of Columbus, emblematic of patriotic Irish Americans, defended Jews in the face of the Klan, recognizing the commonality of religious and ethnic discrimination leveled by the terror organization after the turn of the century.
Diner then detailed the second way the Irish assisted Jews in integrating into American society: pragmatic assistance in return for political support. She quoted the long-serving Massachusetts politician James Michael Curley on the source of his appreciation for Jewish constituents: “They vote.” Irish politicians could award contracts, assign jobs, and assist with other political-legal matters and ask for strong Jewish support to continue such patronage. In this the Irish addressed some of the most practical needs facing new and recent immigrants to the United States, removing logistical barriers to Jews “becoming American” as the Irish had.
Third, Diner noted Irish mentorship of nascent Jewish labor leaders. She described how poor working conditions often offended Jewish immigrants’ sense of why they had even come to the United States. Having no previous organizing experience, Jews seeking better conditions necessarily turned to those who had already achieved great success in labor. Diner mentioned the specific contribution of women to this process, with female Irish American labor leaders like Mary Kenney O’Sullivan training both Jewish women and men to create powerful organizations to advocate for workers’ rights.
Finally, Diner pointed to the service of Irish Americans in the classroom. As with labor, it was often women helping Jews “become American.” Under the tutelage of Irish American teachers—whose jobs were not uncommonly secured through Tammany Hall dealings—Jews learned English and saw models of middle-class American life to emulate. This educational influence continued past the secondary level as Jewish students enrolled in Catholic professional schools offering law, pharmacy, medicine, and dentistry, which solved problems for each community: financially precarious Catholic schools found students willing to pay tuition, and Jewish students received an education denied them by other institutions with antisemitic admissions policies. Diner offered the example of Fordham’s law school, which by 1930 counted Jews as half its student body.
During the Q&A session, Diner delved into the workings of Tammany Hall for the lecture’s undergraduate attendees. Patrick Griffin (History, Notre Dame) mentioned Irish-Jewish collaboration to promote contemporary athletics, as well as periodic joint undertakings in organized crime. Diner thanked the Ancient Order of Hibernians and Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians for their support of this lecture series. She delivered this year’s lecture with verve and wit, interspersing her research on Irish-Jewish collaboration with contemporary songs from Tin Pan Alley and demonstrating her mastery of storytelling. As one such song ends, “There’s a sympathetic feeling / Between the Blooms and McAdoos / Why, Tammany would surely fall and really be no hall at all / If it wasn’t for the Irish and the Jews.”
Seeking the sustainable sacred
On September 27, the fall 2025 Jay P. Dolan Seminar in American Religion featured Thomas Tweed, Professor Emeritus of American Studies and History at Notre Dame. Prior to retirement, Tweed held the Harold and Martha Welch Professorship of American Studies. Among Tweed’s publications are Our Lady of the Exile: Diasporic Religion at a Cuban Catholic Shrine in Miami (Oxford, 1997); Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Harvard, 2008); and America’s Church: The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation’s Capital (Oxford, 2011).
Prior to the Saturday morning seminar itself, Tweed delivered a Friday afternoon lecture, “The Sustainable Sacred,” offering an overview of the argument in his latest book, Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History (Yale, 2025). Tweed began by noting just how fraught at present are conversations about America’s past, as well as his wish for the lecture to contribute to the 2025–26 Notre Dame Forum theme of “Cultivating Hope.” He continued by describing the extraordinarily long gestation of the book, beginning with his own reading of Sydney Ahlstrom’s A Religious History of the American People (Yale, 1972) as a graduate student. Tweed immediately noticed what Ahlstrom had missed: “There were no Puritans on my [childhood] street in Philadelphia.” In other words, who counted as “the American people” in Ahlstrom’s work, which quickly became magisterial, clearly excluded those outside of certain traditions and certain parts of the country. Tweed recalled airing this concern at a conference in 1988, launching nearly four decades of work to expand on what Ahlstrom and others had missed.
After completing his own work on religion as a matrix of the processes of crossing and dwelling, Tweed became interested in religion as emplacement, but not one constrained by institutions—in other words, “places and processes over pastors and pulpits.” Here, he draws on niche construction theory, “which posits multiple forms of inheritance—not from genes”; Tweed counts genetic, cultural, and environmental inheritance all as part of humanity’s process of niche construction.2 This framework structures Tweed’s new history of religion, “a story that begins with the notion that humans inherit, modify, and bequeath an eco-cultural niche, a lived world with shared symbols, communal ceremonies, special objects, and sacred landscapes.”3 However, he also notes, niches may not necessarily persist once humans create them; niches can collapse in the absence of conditions required for their sustainability. Such conditions apply at the levels of the individual (safety, health, meaning, and belonging), the community (equity, productivity, freedom, participation, and peace), and the environment (optimal climate, renewable resources, integrity, and biodiversity).4
A wide range of human activity today has contributed to the destabilization of niches, leading to their fundamental unsustainability due to loss of some of the conditions mentioned above. Tweed mentioned recent, economic examples—such as uranium mining and petroleum refining—that have negatively impacted not only our literal ecology but also the niche ecologies into which humans have organized their societies. On a larger scale, Tweed mentioned four basic stages of human activity around which niche construction has taken place: foraging, farming, factories, and fiber optics. Within these activities, the presence of religious ideas, practices, adherence, and leadership contributes to either promoting or hindering sustainability.
When considering the ultimate significance of the book—the “Who cares and so what?”—Tweed suggested three ways that looking at the history of religion through niche construction advances our understanding of history in the Americas. First, the timescale required necessarily recovers the pre-Columbian past of the lands that became America, expanding scholars’ chronology to a starting point long before that of Ahlstrom and subsequent canonical historians. This approach also helps show how other communities and societies have addressed problems that we might encounter ourselves, including our current environmental crises. Finally, Tweed noted that the sheer diversity of human communities included in such a scale and scope further proves the impossibility of identifying any kind of superiority of one racial group over another.
An extended Q&A segment saw robust conversation between attendees and Tweed. Rev. Paul Kollman, C.S.C. (Theology, Notre Dame) asked about the relationship between the material and immaterial (i.e., the essential elements of religion) in niche construction theory: Where do non-material resources fit in? Tweed responded that he sees value in expanding the “things” that comprise a niche, including cultural practices, genetics, symbolic objects, worldview assumptions, and received narratives. Many of these things, or their meanings, are visible only through what material evidence has been left behind, so there is no real reason not to include them in niche construction. Mahan Mirza (Keough School, Notre Dame) mentioned that the “Great Acceleration” described in Tweed’s book depicts a world headed toward collapse and asked what Tweed thought future niches might look like.5 Tweed acknowledged again that niches can, and will, break when they become unsustainable. Niche disappearance is possible when the necessary conditions no longer obtain. However, the long-term perspective that informs the book also gives us in the present an opportunity to see what has worked in the past and attempt to apply it to our own conditions.
Saturday’s Dolan Seminar took up Tweed’s book itself, with opening commentaries from Melissa Borja (University of Michigan), Katherine Carté (Southern Methodist University), Jon Coleman (History, Notre Dame), and Grant Wacker (Duke Divinity School). Coleman began the session by highlighting the book’s demonstration of how historians of religion and historians of the environment can productively overlap; for example, some causes driving ecological crises, like mass consumption and overconsumption, also drive dramatic shifts in religion. Coleman noted that the niches described in the book are hybrid creations of nature and humanity, which infuses a type of morality into the urgency of environmental crises; to Tweed, Coleman noted, nature includes humans, societies, politics, and the environment itself. He also observed that unlike animals, humans “hop” niches and can occupy more than one at once, with significant implications for their sustainability.
Carté pointed out that the concept of niche challenges the concept of the nation and its primacy in historical narratives. She noted that nations are political entities first and foremost, “expressions of power projected onto a map.” But individuals and communities, inhabiting niches, can come and go, cross and dwell, across and irrespective of national lines. Furthermore, with the creation of an elite necessarily resulting from the appearance of the nation, niches allow scholars to examine geographical areas without undue concern for social hierarchy.
Borja called attention to Tweed’s book as a new grand narrative that in some way revives a tradition arguably bookended by Ahlstrom in 1972. Religion in the Lands That Became America has a broad geographic scope, an ambitious timeframe, and enters into dialogue between the past and the present. Uniquely, Borja argued, Tweed grounds the story of religion in the land and not the immaterial. A periodization not structured around political events also sets Tweed’s narrative apart. She commended Tweed’s disconnection of religion from traditional structures, focusing on concepts like digital, broadcast, and workplace religion over defined denominations.
Wacker praised the book enthusiastically, focusing on three signature accomplishments. First, he lauded Tweed’s writing style, likening it to the polished skill of Francis Parkman and George Bancroft. In Wacker’s telling, “deceptively simple sentences consisting of common words” mark the book’s prose. Second, Wacker praised Tweed’s inclusion both of those who played a role in so-called “pre-history” as well as those who rarely “make the cut” elsewhere in historiography. Finally, Wacker suggested Religion in the Lands That Became America may be a benchmark for defining a new canon in the history of American religion. It is not insignificant, he noted, that Yale University Press published both Sydney Ahlstrom’s 1972 history and Tweed’s in 2025.
In his response to the commentators, Tweed expressed gratitude for the seriousness with which they considered the book. Among his thoughts about the commentators’ various points was a clarification of his book being a “grand narrative” and thus ostensibly standing apart from other, more narrowly focused works. Tweed noted that, for example, every educator’s classroom syllabus will reveal a narrative being told. The task of the historian is to be conscious of a book’s narrative and tell it better rather than worry over whether the narrative is too strong.
The Q&A segment ranged widely over American religion, writing style, and more. Candy Gunther Brown (Indiana University Bloomington) asked about the disparity that can arise when strong figures in history may act in ways that are selfish and harmful, sustaining a niche in some sense but running counter to the moral and religious systems in which they operate. Tweed acknowledged such a historical reality but responded that he simply tries to describe processes as faithfully as possible, without overtly criticizing anyone; readers might come to their own judgments. Peter Thuesen (Indiana University Indianapolis) continued Grant Wacker’s praise of Tweed’s prose, commenting on the deft use of less formal phrasing from time to time. Tweed’s response included both the stylistic and the strategic; some statements simply work better in a vernacular voice and reaching the widest possible range of readers means using whatever prose is most effective for the audience the author imagines. He also acknowledged, however, that doing so may require sensitive negotiation with editors. Finally, the Cushwa Center’s Darren Dochuk asked Tweed what is next on his scholarly agenda. Tweed declared his intent to encourage everyone who’s trying to write the next Great Book to simply go and do it.
A half century of Catholic publishing
Robert Ellsberg delivered the 2025 Cushwa Center Lecture on November 6, titled “Publishing in Service to the World Church: My Life at Orbis Books.” The Cushwa Center Lecture series began in 1984 and, while initially an occasional event, now occurs annually “for Notre Dame students, faculty, and community members beyond the University to hear from distinguished scholars and writers about the relationship between religion and public life.”6 Recent lecturers include Candy Gunther Brown (“Francis S. MacNutt and the Globalization of Charismatic Christianity”); Garry Sparks (“Five Hundred Years of Mayanized Christianity”); and Maureen H. O’Connell (“Finding Mom in a St. Patrick’s Day Minstrel Show”). Ellsberg serves as publisher, executive director, and editor-in-chief of Orbis Books. Ellsberg began his editorial career working alongside Dorothy Day at The Catholic Worker. His many authored or edited books with Orbis include All Saints: Daily Reflections on Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time (1997); Blessed Among All Women: Reflections on Women Saints, Prophets, and Witnesses for Our Time (2006); and Pope Francis’s A Stranger and You Welcomed Me: A Call to Mercy and Solidarity with Migrants and Refugees (2018). His most recent book, from Liturgical Press in October 2025, is Blessed Among Us: Day by Day with Saintly Witnesses, Volume 2.
Ellsberg recounted the history of Orbis Books, which the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers founded in 1970 under the leadership of Fr. Miguel d’Escoto to platform theologians from the global South. In this, Ellsberg said, the history of Orbis is in some ways indicative of the history of the Church in the second half of the 20th century. The new publishing house called attention less to abstract theology emanating from the Church’s Roman center and more to the theology of the “world church” (an idea often attributed to Karl Rahner in the wake of the Second Vatican Council). Ellsberg described this mission as living out an open image of the Church arising from the Council Fathers at Vatican II. Yet as Ellsberg noted, the Council itself responded to questions that Western societies of the global North had posed to the Church. Thus the early work of Orbis also entailed expanding beyond the specifics of the Council—here, he cited the 1968 gathering of Latin American bishops in Medellín, Colombia, as a specific catalyst—and exploring the concerns of those societies which, in the 1970s and 1980s, were undergoing massive change (and often suffering).
Liberation theology played an essential role in this exploration and in the Orbis catalog. In 1973 Orbis published A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, an English translation of Gustavo Gutiérrez’s landmark 1971 text, Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas. The press published 15th and 50th anniversary editions in 1988 and 2023, and multiple additional volumes and compilations by or involving the Peruvian theologian. Giving a visible platform to liberation theology of course brought Orbis into one of the most contentious theological debates of the 20th century. Ellsberg described the involvement of Orbis Books with several controversies—not limited to liberation theology—over the course of his editorship. These moments highlight the tension that sometimes arises between publishing in theology and the presence of a centralized theological authority. Ellsberg mentioned, for example, Orbis’s publication of titles by Brazilian theologian Leonardo Boff, whose book Church: Charism and Power came under Vatican censure in 1985.7 Orbis also published the Jesuit Jacques Dupuis’s Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism in 1997; this book, too, was the subject of a “Notification” from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.8 The CDF issued the same against Jesus Symbol of God, by Roger Haight, S.J., published in 2004.9 Ellsberg also provided the example of Jon Sobrino, S.J., and the “Notification” issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in 2007 regarding his books Jesus the Liberator and Christ the Liberator.10 While in some ways these events ultimately called far more non-specialist attention to these theologians than they may have otherwise received, they illustrate well the ongoing struggle of making theological sense, from within well-defined intellectual boundaries, of a world increasingly defined by religious pluralism, societal suffering, and international discord.
More recent Orbis publications, Ellsberg said, suggest what could be the priorities of theology today. He noted greater emphasis on a theology informed by the real experience of individuals and communities, as well as the greater visibility of religious pluralism in some parts of the world—challenging the centuries-old primacy of Greek philosophy as a precursor to Catholic theology. He also pointed to Orbis’s growing list in Black Christianity dating to the 1980s, which directly addresses one of the American Church’s longest standing theological lacunae. Ellsberg also mentioned Orbis’s publication of several works by Pope Francis, marking a significant and unique intervention in the development of Christian theology.
During the Q&A session, Daniel Horan (Saint Mary’s College) asked about the future of Orbis publishing and the direction that Ellsberg sees theology moving. Ellsberg suggested that theology may become less academic, with a move toward narrative, affective, or activist theology. He also cited shifts in general interest in religion as an idea, acknowledging that publishing theology reflects, rather than creates, interest in religion. Another attendee asked about the challenges of reaching new audiences. Ellsberg pointed to the need to enter into dialogue with a more secular audience—an essential process of moving beyond theologians talking amongst themselves and an acknowledgment of demographic reality today.
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.
1 The Ancient Order of Hibernians was founded in 1836 and claims the mantle of “America’s oldest Irish Catholic fraternal organization.” While initially founded to provide practical support to newly arrived Irish immigrants, today the Order also provides “a continuing bridge with Ireland for those who are generations removed from our ancestral homeland.” See “About the AOH,” aoh.com/about-the-aoh. The Ladies Ancient Order of Hibernians, founded as the Daughters of Erin, dates to 1894. See “National LAOH,” www.laohmich.org/national-laoh.
2 Thomas A. Tweed, Religion in the Lands That Became America: A New History (Yale, 2025), 9.
5 Ibid., 372. The “Great Acceleration” is one of four “Sustainability Crises” Tweed describes from the 12th century onward. On the Great Acceleration, beginning in the 1950s, Tweed notes “effects of global industrialization and urbanization sharply accelerate. Onset of the period when human intervention in natural systems is predominant. Abrupt rise in carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrates in polar ice levels. Ecological damage intensified by religious, economic and political divides.”
6 “The Cushwa Center Lecture,” cushwa.nd.edu/events/the-cushwa-center-lecture.
7 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Notification on the book ‘Church: Charism and Power’ by Father Leonardo Boff OFM,” Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, March 11, 1985, vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19850311_notif-boff_en.html.
8 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Notification on the book Toward a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism (Orbis Books: Maryknoll, New York 1997) by Father Jacques Dupuis, S.J.,” Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, January 24, 2001, vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20010124_dupuis_en.html.
9 Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, “Notification on the book ‘Jesus Symbol of God’ by Father Roger Haight S.J.,” Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, December 13, 2004, vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20041213_notification-fr-haight_en.html.
10 Cardinal William Levada, “Notification on the works of Father Jon SOBRINO, SJ,” Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, November 26, 2006, vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20061126_notification-sobrino_en.html.