The Ansari Institute for Global Engagement with Religion awarded the 2023 Nasr Book Prize to Anthony Annett, a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Center for Sustainable Development, for his book Cathonomics (Georgetown, 2022). Formally known as the Randa and Sherif Nasr Book Prize on Religion and the World, the award highlights the work of scholars who reimagine the connection of religion and global affairs. It is funded by Drs. Sherif Nasr and Randa Nasr, co-founders of siParadigm Diagnostic Informatics in Pine Brook, New Jersey. The Ansari Institute conferred the book prize in conjunction with a panel discussion at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago on Thursday, August 17. The institute will also host a multi-faith symposium on Notre Dame’s campus on February 14–15, 2024, with scholars who will discuss the book from the perspective of various faith traditions. Details about the Nasr Book Prize are available at ansari.nd.edu/academics/nasr-book-prize/.
The Archives of the Associated Sulpicians of the United States has opened several new collections, including: Very Rev. Edward R. Dyer, P.S.S. (1854–1925); Very Rev. John Fr. Fenlon, P.S.S. (1873–1943); and Very Rev. John J. Lardner, P.S.S. (1893–1948), who served successive terms as U.S. Provincial over the period 1902–1948. The collections will be a particular interest to those studying the development of the Roman Catholic seminary system in this country. The Archives are on deposit at the Associated Archives at St. Mary’s Seminary & University. Detailed finding aids for the collections are available at stmarys.edu/archives.
Steven M. Avella (Marquette University) recently published Indomitable Sacramentans: A Social History of Catholics in the State Capital (America Through Time, 2023). The book recovers the role of lay people as central actors in the growth of Catholicism in Sacramento. This history “from the bottom up” reveals important contributions to the use of urban space, education, social service, and health care.
Paolo L. Bernardini (University of Insubria) has been awarded the “Premio Internazionale Luigi Tartufari per la Storia - 2023” by the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome. This prestigious international prize for historians is awarded to honor lifetime career achievement. The award ceremony will take place in Rome at the Palazzo Corsini on November 10, 2023.
Philip Byers was appointed the Halbrook Chair of Civic Engagement at Taylor University. In July 2023, Byers completed his third year as a postdoctoral research associate with the Cushwa Center.
Heath W. Carter (Princeton Theological Seminary) has taken on a new role as Director of PhD Studies. In the 2023–24 academic year, the seminary will be launching a newly conceived doctoral track in Religion in the Americas. He will continue to serve as associate professor of American Christianity.
Valentina Ciciliot (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice) co-edited a new special issue of the Journal of Modern and Contemporary Christianity, on the theme “Breaking Through the Stained-Glass Ceiling? Case Studies on Female Catholicism and Its Transnational Developments Since the 1950s.”
Carl Creason (Northwestern University) defended his dissertation, “‘For the bodies and souls’: Catholic Women, Works of Mercy, and Institution Building in the Ohio River Valley, 1855–1880.”
Janine Giordano Drake (Indiana University) will publish The Gospel of Church: The Battle between Organized Labor and American Churches in the Early Twentieth Century with Oxford University Press in autumn 2023. The book explores the possibility that formal, church-related Christianity would recede from American life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and that a religiously unaffiliated working class would inaugurate a secular cooperative commonwealth. Contrary to popular conceptions of the Social Gospel movement, well-resourced clergy worked to combat the possibility that socialists would inaugurate a secular, modern welfare state that made little room for churches.
Bruno Dumon (MSH Lyon St-Etienne) published a new edited book, Les congrégations féminines missionaires: Éducation, santé et humanitaire: une histoire transnationale (XIXe–XXe siècles) (Viella, 2022).
Paula M. Kane (University of Pittsburgh) published “A Tender View of Conservative Evangelicalism in Higher Ground,” in the edited volume Protestants on Screen: Religion, Politics and Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Rev. Joseph A. Komonchak (The Catholic University of America) published, with Mary Kate Holman, A School of Theology—Le Saulchoir (ATF Press, 2023), a translated and edited version of a book first published in 1937 that describes how theology was being done at Le Saulchoir, the Dominican studium where Marie-Dominique Chenu and Yves Congar lived and worked and from which many of the major theological and pastoral initiatives of the 1940s and 1950s originated.
Suzanne Krebsbach presented the paper “Enduring Influence of French Colonial Catholicism in Charleston, South Carolina” at the Conference on Theology in the Caribbean Today, held June 27, 2023, in St. George’s, Grenada.
Massimo de Leonardis (Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - Milano) published the article “La Santa Sede e gli ‘imperi,’” in Quaderni di Scienze Politiche.
Carmen Mangion (Birkbeck, University of London) published “Representing Catholic Medical Missions in the English Press: Education, Professionalism, and Internationality (1950–1970),” in the edited volume Les congrégations féminines missionaires: Éducation, santé et humanitaire: une histoire transnationale (XIXe–XXe siècles) (Viella, 2022).
Tony Oleck (Notre Dame) published “Foreign Relations and Peace: ‘The Hope of a Better World’—Hesburgh and the Catholic University in a Nuclear Age” in the volume Hesburgh of Notre Dame: Assessments of a Legacy, edited by Todd C. Ream and Michael J. James (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
Jonathan Riddle (Pepperdine University) began a tenure-track position as assistant professor of history in autumn 2023. He recently published “Physiology, Vitalism, and the Contest for Body and Soul in the Antebellum United States” in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.
Benjamin Wetzel (Taylor University) won the Joe Burnworth Teaching Award, recognizing a faculty member who has exhibited promise and made noteworthy contributions to the institution’s academic and community life within five years of appointment. Before working at Taylor, Wetzel earned his Ph.D. in history at Notre Dame and completed a year as a postdoctoral research associate at the Cushwa Center.
These announcements appear in the fall 2023 issue of the Cushwa Center’s American Catholic Studies Newsletter.