DePaul U. has hired two Catholic scholars for its new Catholic Studies program — Peter Casarella, of Catholic U., where he headed a Center for Medieval and Byzantine Studies, and Farrell O’Gorman, from Mississippi State U.’s English department.
Casarella has written about Christian Neo-Platonism, theological aesthetics, St. Bonaventure’s Trinitarian theology of creation, the idea of emergence in contemporary physics, and the Hispanic/Latino presence in the U.S. Catholic Church, according to a release.
He and his wife, then expecting their second child, and their one-year-old lived with students at Catholic U., in a get-close-to students dormitory arrangement. He has his doctorate from Yale.
O’Gorman has a “critically recognized” novel to his credit, “Awaiting Orders” (Idylls Press, 2006), in which he tries “to explore how a Christian message of hope and redemption can attain credibility,” said the America magazine reviewer — a far cry, to be sure, from what fiction readers are used to these days.
A native South Carolinian and four-year U.S. Navy veteran after completion of Notre Dame’s Great Books program, he was a resident teacher at the National Endowment for the Humanities institute last summer on “Reconsidering Flannery O’Connor” in O’Connor’s home town, Milledgeville, Georgia. He has his doctorate from U. of N. Carolina, Chapel Hill.
The whole thing sounds good, even if “Catholic Studies” at a Catholic institution seems redundant, at least in the humanities. On the other hand, such a program can offer a meaty alternative for the Catholicism-interested, and the two hires seem up to that challenge. More such hires may be coming, said Nicholas G. Hahn III, president of the DePaul Conservative Alliance, all of it thanks to the spiritual revival he helped usher in.
Other such programs are installed at U. of St. Thomas, in St. Paul MN; Georgetown, in Wash. DC; Seton Hall, in Phila.; and (can you believe it?) at the football juggernaut and longtime Notre Dame nemesis, U. of Southern California, which has an Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies.
Other programs are at John Carroll in Cleveland; U. of Manitoba; Fordham (American Catholic Studies); Seattle U.; and Xavier U. of the South, New Orleans (Black Catholic Studies). The list goes on, per Google (I admit it); so it’s no anomaly if it ever was.
Elsewhere in Chicago, among Catholic institutions presumably big enough to afford Catholic studies as such, Loyola offers a minor in same. But do they have the likes of this Casarella-O’Gorman one-two punch DePaul-style?
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Jim Bowman, a regular columnist for The Chicago Daily Observer, is its religion editor.
Insider says:
The laundry list of Catholic Studies programs is misleading. Some merely permit students to take a major or minor by enrolling in certain already existing courses that deal with "Catholic topics." That might mean a course in sociology of religion taught by an anti-Catholic atheist.
Others involve an endowed chair and are largely PR moves at secular schools with significant Catholic student blocks. Since hiring for these chairs usually resides somewhere in the existing (non-Catholic faculty), over time these positions can migrate toward hiring nominal Catholics who at best marginally represent the Catholic worldview.
At Catholic schools, a Catholic worldview may be embedded more thoroughly in a unit that doesn't have "Catholic studies" in its title (e.g., the Liberal Studies program or the Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame).
Other programs have individual units, equal to departments in hiring authority. St. Thomas in St. Paul is one of those. But when a Catholic university goes that route, the rest of the facultly, long since secularized and answering to the secular Academy's rules about what constituts prestigious scholarlyness, object that such new units will be pious, naive, unscholarly ghettos. It's not true, of course, but it's the argument made, and that's why schools resist giving real authority to hire and tenure to such "Catholic Studies" programs.
If one wishes to understand what went wrong with Catholic universities and what can be done about it, the first step is understanding the flow charts and down-and-dirty power structures.
Jim Bowman says:
Here's to inside dope when not from a dope, which this isn't. If he has other ideas, he can find me at jimbowman at http://ameritech.net.
Insider says:
Uh, the credit for the changes at DePaul owe a lot to Cardinal George's quiet nudging over many years. And the reason a Catholic Studies program is not at all redundant is that creating a unit separate from the other humanities departments with its own authority to hire and tenure is crucial. Reform can get nowhere at universities in existing departments because they hire and tenure people like those already teaching. The only way to launch a new trend is to go outside the existing departments. These are elemental facts of university life.