The project was spurred by a 2018 report by the Society of Jesus that publicly disclosed the names of its members who were credibly accused of sexually abusing minors, as well as a report that year by a Pennsylvania grand jury that found similar findings in diocesan priests. It was funded by a $1 million gift from a private donation.

On Thursday, Jan. 26, the group released its final report, featuring research projects conducted by 18 teams from 10 Jesuit universities. In addition to Fordham, the initiative included lay and clergy faculty from Creighton, Gonzaga, Georgetown, Loyola Chicago, Loyola Maryland, Marquette, Rockhurst, Santa Clara, and Xavier universities.

The research projects addressed topics connected to the Society of Jesus, but were not limited strictly to it. There was often overlap with other parts of the Roman Catholic Church, such as specific parishes. They covered six themes: Jesuits and Jesuit Education; Education; Institutional Reform; Moral Injury and Spiritual Struggle; Race and Colonialism; and Survivors and Survivor Stories.

In addition to team projects, the initiative featured a three-day conference hosted at Fordham in April 2022 as well as eight webinars, four of which were devoted to historically marginalized U.S. communities.

Bradford Hinze, Ph.D., the Karl Rahner Professor of Theology and director of the initiative, said after two and half years, he is more impressed than ever with how much time and energy scholars have devoted to try to address past wrongs and prevent future ones. Their dedication has been “a bit overwhelming,” given how painful the subject is, but is also a source for optimism.

“My big take away is that we need to find ways of building greater relationships of collaboration and more transparency,” he said, “because here we have a lot of lay people—not all are lay people, but most are—who are committed to the Jesuit identity and mission.”

That commitment manifested itself in reports that varied from one about an individual abuser by the team at Creighton University to one examining the best way to tell survivors’ stories by Georgetown University’s Gerard J. McGlone, S.J. A report from Fordham professor C. Colt Anderson, Ph.D., that focused on reforming Jesuit schools noted that “pastoral care principles influence disciplinary processes.”

“There is an emphasis on being patient and merciful that allows for inferior performance and outright misbehavior,” he wrote.

“As a member of a religious order told us, there is confusion between what is simply sinful and what is criminal.”

Key Findings and Recommendations

The report includes six key findings and specific recommendations for learning and action.

The first of the group’s findings is that there is “a divide emerging in research and practice between those focused primarily on “safeguarding” and those focused on what the group is calling “historical memory work.” Safeguarding is focused on preventing present and future abuse, while historical memory work produces research on what happened in the past, in many cases performing a very close analysis of instances of abuse.

Hinze said the group chose to emphasize the importance of historical memory work in response to the forward-facing nature of the Society of Jesus’ most recent Universal Apostolic Preferences, which are in essence the religious order’s list of priorities. He noted that representatives from the Society of Jesus in Rome had been very cooperative, but the group still felt the need to highlight the importance of looking to the past.

“The Apostolic preferences all aim to start from right now and look forward. But if you only do that, you don’t really spend time pondering, reflecting upon, and truly meditating on what were the causes and contributing factors that led up to this, and what were the historical, institutional, and cultural repercussions,” he said.

Another finding highlights the fact that although the first sexual abuse cases in the United States were widely reported as early as 2002, very little research has been done to examine how much abuse was committed against Black, Latin American, Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native American populations.

Fordham Faculty Perspectives

Bryan N. Massingale, S.T.D., the James and Nancy Buckman Chair in Applied Christian Ethics at Fordham, contributed in this area; his study, “Clergy Sexual Abuse in African American Communities,” will be published in October. He surveyed the literature about the sexual abuse crisis to see how many church dioceses tracked the race and ethnicity of survivors and found that only one did, and it only started doing so in 2015.

This is a glaring omission, he said.

“We know for a fact that in many cases, dioceses and religious orders deliberately sent priests with problematic histories into Latino and Black communities, precisely because these communities would be the least likely to report instances of abuse,” he said.

It’s for this reason, Massingale said, that although 4% of American Catholics are Black, it’s fair to assume that more than 4% have experienced sexual abuse. Compounding the problem, he said, is the fact that Black people may not relate to the ways others are processing their abuse. In the course of his research, he spoke informally with two Black men who’d experienced abuse, and discovered that they refused to accept the popular “victim survivor” label.

“They said ‘I’m not surviving anything. I’m coping.’ And it struck me that maybe another reason why we need to pay attention to this is because even the language we use doesn’t resonate universally across human communities,” he said.

Lisa Cataldo, Ph.D., associate professor of mental health counseling and spiritual integration at Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, said her future teaching will forever be informed by the work she did with the initiative. In her research project “Bearing Witness When ‘They’ Are Us: Toward a Trauma-Informed Perspective on Complicity, Moral Injury, and Moral Witnessing,” Cataldo attempted to answer a question she asked herself when the Pennsylvania Grand Jury report was published: Why am I still shocked?

“We’ve been hearing about this since 2002, if not before,” she said.

“I realized that this cycle of being OK, and then being overwhelmed with shock and horror, and then having the feeling sort of recede into the background, is the same cycle that a trauma survivor experiences.”

No solution to a trauma-based problem can work unless it addresses the trauma, she said.

“All the safeguarding that has been put in place has been very effective, and it’s absolutely vitally important. I’m not discounting any of that, but you will never heal without addressing the trauma, and that means having accountability, responsibility, dialogue, honesty, and truth telling,” she said.

“It’s like closing the barn door after the horses are out.”

Telling It Like It Feels

Cataldo suggested that a crucial part of the healing process should involve people who Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit dubbed the “moral witnesses.”

“In order to really stand up for and call attention to the suffering imposed on one group by another group of people, the moral witness has to be someone who speaks the truth,” she said.

“But the moral witness doesn’t just tell it like it is. The moral witness tells it like it feels. To be a moral witness, the person needs to have been either a survivor themselves or have something at stake. You have to have skin in the game.”

The participants in Taking Responsibility fit that bill, she said, by virtue of working for Catholic institutions and working to highlight the painful truth.

The project has inspired Cataldo to do more herself. This fall, she will oversee the unveiling of GRE’s Advanced Certificate in Trauma-Informed Care program. Importantly, she said, the certificate program explores how spirituality can be both a balm for people healing from trauma and a shield that prevents them from acknowledging their own trauma.

“It’s very important to understand how unexamined religious practices and religious structures like the Catholic Church can sometimes re-traumatize or compound the trauma of people if they don’t understand how trauma and faith intersect,” she said.

This January, he will become a visiting scholar at the New York University Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, where he will collaborate on a project that combats similar hate speech.

Only this time, Anderson is dealing with religious nationalists: those who use religion as an excuse to advance their own non-religious purposes—often involving hateful actions and language—in their native countries.

He calls Poland, a country where the majority of the population is Roman Catholic, a severe example. Many Catholic Poles claim that because immigrants and refugees are neither Catholic nor Polish, they can’t be true members of their country, he explained. Anderson argues that not only is their rhetoric is inherently wrong, these false statements also undermine the credibility of the Catholic Church and, he added, negate the church’s overall goal: commitment to the common good of humanity worldwide.

“The declaration of human rights, the United Nations—Catholic churches adopted that, which means that all of this nationalist kind of language is contrary to what the church believes,” he said. “Catholics are not called to identify themselves with any particular nation or with any particular culture. Catholics are supposed to see themselves as belonging to a heavenly kingdom.”

As a young boy, Anderson lived in a Catholic household that embodied those beliefs. His father was a news cameraman who covered the career of Martin Luther King Jr., the deadly 1958 bombing of a black Birmingham church, and civil rights activities; his mother was a progressive Catholic and social worker who worked with “the poorest of the poor,” he said.

“The environment I grew up in was one where Catholics were really encouraged to see African Americans as our brothers and sisters,” he said, “and really push back on the language of exclusivism and denial of people’s rights.”

By finding ways that Fordham can collaborate with NYU, Anderson hopes to develop educational programs for religious leaders that explain why religion and nationalism are unrelated. He says it’s important to train leaders—pastors, bishops, religion teachers—on how to train people to respond to religious nationalism. He added that it’s also critical to show religious leaders how to illustrate the flaws with religious nationalism, and explain to everyday people how it cannot be legitimately claimed as a religious movement. Anderson, who is exploring various foundations and other granting agencies that would fund these programs, aims to apply for three or four grants. He says securing a grant related to Catholic nationalism is especially critical.

The Roman Catholic Church is the largest Christian church—home to more than one billion members. Catholic nationalism is popping up in multiple places across Europe, including Estonia, Lithuania, Germany, France, and Austria, he added.

“There are priests and bishops in Poland and elsewhere who are presenting Catholic nationalism as a real option, and they’re not being disciplined at all. They’re being allowed to act more or less as independent operators,” he said. “I’m hoping to motivate the bishops to see that this is a real significant problem. It’s going to undermine how people see the credibility of the church, even more than we’re dealing with already.”

This is the second project he has conducted with NYU. In the first partnership, Anderson developed educational programs for seminarians that provided strategies they could use to promote civil discourse in politics. 

“If we can teach people, hopefully in the Catholic schools and in other institutions on the ground, then when they get older and they’re approached by these religious nationalists,” he said, “they will see the problems with it. Or at least they’ll be prepared to respond.”

“This is one of the first collaborations at this time between a major Catholic university and an archdiocese to produce these kinds of online classes, and it’s something that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has been encouraging bishops and universities to do,” said C. Colt Anderson, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education.

The adult faith formation curriculum at Fordham is geared toward employees of the diocese, catechists, and lay leaders who are already working in some capacity with the church or ministry, said Anderson.

The online program consists of six courses— Introduction to Catholicism, Understanding the Creed, Understanding the Holy Scripture, Unveiling the Sacraments, Moral and Social Teaching, and Trinity and Christology—all of which were reviewed and approved by Anderson and the Archdiocese of New York’s Office of Adult Faith Formation. Each course runs for approximately six weeks, but the University plans to offer two courses for the fall, spring, and summer semesters.

“The courses are not just one long, continuous talking head video or audio,” said Anderson. “Instead, each lecture is about 7 to 12 minutes long, which means that students can participate at whatever rate they want. They can choose one lecture a day or do them all at once. It gives them maximum flexibility.”

The program will begin on Feb. 6 with an introductory course on Catholicism that aims to help participants recognize the connection between their lives as Catholics and a God who uses history as a form of communication.

By working with the Archdiocese of New York, the GRE hopes to help the diocese expand its reach and better communicate the teachings of the Catholic Faith to its community.

“It’s part of an initiative to meet the Jesuit mission of serving the local church,” said Anderson. “We’re trying to produce these courses in a way that speaks to the broad range of Catholics in the church around issues like unity, but we’re also making a new effort to communicate matters of faith in a way that postmodern people might be able to hear.”

“He was yelling into the phone, ‘Get that woman home! How dare you—she belongs with her husband! Those children belong with their father!” MacNichol said of the experience that launched her 30-year career combating domestic violence.

“I was really shaken. I call that my baptism by fire. It was a call to make it my ministry to figure out how faith, theology, and religious communities intersect with this terrible problem.”

MacNichol, PhD, the co-executive director of CONNECT, a New-York-based nonprofit organization dedicated to preventing interpersonal violence and promoting gender justice, was the keynote speaker at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education’s fourth annual pastoral counseling conference on May 6.

The daylong conference, “Spiritual Geographies of Domestic Violence,” discussed the stark realities of interpersonal violence and the ways faith communities can better serve survivors.

Intimate partner violence and domestic violence is defined as any actual or threatened physical, sexual, psychological, emotional, verbal, spiritual, or economic abuse that impairs one’s ability to function in a “self-determining or healthy way,” said MacNichol. Abuse is often coercive and recurrent, and the intent is for the abuser to maintain power and control.

Faith-based and religious communities could be invaluable resources for women, men, and children in crisis, but lack of education and unwillingness to confront these issues cause these groups to mishandle abusive situations, MacNichol said.

“The bible is full of family violence,” said MacNichol, who was recently named one of New York’s New Abolitionists. “We need to start asking ourselves what in our theologies promotes domestic violence? What in our interpretations of scripture and communal practices allow us to turn a blind eye to, or even rationalize and directly participate in, domestic violence?”

Many people judge the severity of abuse by whether or not the victims are physically injured, but MacNichol stressed that all types of abuse can cause lasting harm. The stress of nonphysical abuse can have dire impacts on victims’ overall health. Moreover, because the damage is not visible, victims are more likely to question whether the situation is, in fact, abusive.

“There has never been a domestic violence survivor that hasn’t said to me that the emotional abuse was worse than the physical,” she said. “You can see bruises, and they heal. But you can’t see spiritual and emotional wounds, and these take a long time to heal.”

We need to become more aware and less tolerant of invisible abuses, MacNichol said, or else a wide swath violence will remain undetected and unresolved. Faith communities have the ability—and the responsibility, she said—both to lead these conversations and to reduce inflicting further harm on victims (for instance, working to save an abusive marriage at all costs, rather than helping an abused spouse who is trying to escape).

“When you’re preaching on Sunday, think about how it might sound to someone who is struggling with violence,” MacNichol said. “We have to think about [how we]can create safe spaces where people can come for help… where we can accompany them through the maze of self-doubt and shame.”

The conference also featured Jill Snodgrass, PhD, an assistant professor of pastoral counseling at Loyola University Maryland and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. Her talk, “The Prison Paradox: Liberated from Abuse Behind Bars,” detailed the pervasiveness of interpersonal violence and trauma histories among women in prison and the irony that these women find safety only after landing behind bars.

More importantly, you cannot charge someone with sin, because sin is a subjective reality.  It is radically subjective because it is about the relationship between God, who is not an object, and a person, who is not an object. Whereas Catholic doctrine identifies certain actions as objectively immoral, it does not equate what is immoral with sin.  A person has to believe that an action is sinful for it to be so. If a person willfully did something that he or she believed was sinful, even if it was morally good, then it would be sinful for that person.  So it is not our task or our place to charge people with sin, especially if the goal is evangelization. We should keep in mind the fact that contrition over sin is a gift of the Holy Spirit. It is not the result of browbeating.

St. Catherine of Siena perceived that the desire to punish is simply inconsistent with the Christian mission to save souls. When a person believes that he or she has the standing to act as the judge of another, St. Catherine said that the person had forgotten the infinite nature of his or her sins. Catherine wrote: “In this way [leaving judgment to Christ]you will come to me [God] in truth, and you will show that you have remembered and observed the teaching given you by my Truth, that is, to discern my will rather than to judge other people’s intentions.” (Dialogue #103)  Since judgmental people can no longer look at the sins of others with sympathy, they also lose their ability to discern the will of Christ. They forget that Christ gave humanity the church for the mission of salvation.

The question of whether or not a living person is justified–which is the question of whether or not he or she is part of the church–cannot be answered by us. The Council of Trent taught that the formal cause of our justification is the justness of God. This justness is real; and, it is a gift given to us through the action of the Holy Spirit.  So no one is justified for following the rules, for being right, for helping the poor, for personal virtue, or for meritorious conduct. The Holy Spirit apportions justification to each individual as the Holy Spirit wills in view of each person’s disposition and cooperation.

To judge, we would need to know a person’s disposition, which is a way of speaking about everything that we can attribute to genetics as well as environmental factors. Of course, none of us knows this perfectly about ourselves. Moreover, we would need to know is how much grace the Holy Spirit has given. Finally, we would need to know how much people actually cooperated with the grace that was given to judge them. Is the person who had a bad start in life, who received less grace, but who cooperated fully with the grace received, better or worse, than the person who had every advantage, who was showered with grace, but who only cooperated minimally?

Pope Francis pointed the way to becoming a more evangelical church with his simple and humble question: “Who am I to judge?” He has not denied that there is sin, or that there is a judge, or that people need to embrace a life of ongoing conversion. All he has denied is that it is our role to judge people, which liberates us to discern the will of Christ and to love one another.

The main office at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE) was unusually serene during the height of a steamy summer. With many faculty and students away, C. Colt Anderson, Ph.D., who on July 15 marked one year since becoming dean of the school, had a rare moment to reflect.

“Have you ever been on a really big roller coaster and sat in the front car?” Anderson mused. “That’s what the last year has been like. There have been moments of anxiety, but moments of exhilaration as well.”

In truth, a career of navigating abrupt curves in the track has aptly prepared Anderson to lead GRE. Early on, he had seemed destined to teach Catholic studies at the University of Georgia, having caught the attention of the chair of the religious studies department there. While Anderson was still an undergraduate, the chair offered him a full assistantship as a graduate student with the alluring goal of later recruiting him to join the faculty.

“Where I grew up, it was less than 2 percent Catholic,” said Anderson, a native of Savannah, Ga. “So I thought I was going to be a Catholic voice in the Deep South and teach where there were no Catholic resources. But in the end, that didn’t work out.”

While in his first year of doctoral work in historical and medieval theology at Marquette University, he received a call from the religious studies chair at the University of Georgia.

“He said, ‘Colt, I have bad news. The university has changed its priorities—they’re doing away with medieval and Catholic studies,’” he said.

“So there I was. In Milwaukee. In the brutal cold of the American Siberia during January of my first year,” he said. “I decided the only way out is through.”

He forged on, taking a job in advertising as a scriptwriter and film producer to support himself while writing his dissertation. Though an unusual occupation for a medieval theologian, the job combined his theological expertise with a family background in media (his father is an Emmy award-winning cinematographer and his stepmother was an editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

“I took what I knew about rhetoric from medieval preaching—for instance, the use of symbol and image—and simply applied it to help companies like Coca-Cola,” he said.

His dual experience in media and theology later inspired Christian Eloquence: Contemporary Doctrinal Preaching (Hillenbrand, 2004), a book intended to train seminarians in preaching using techniques in both medieval rhetoric and modern communication.

“The first principle [of both]is always, ‘Who is my audience? What are they concerned about and how do they perceive what I’m selling?’” he said.

He went on from Marquette to teach at Mundelein Seminary in Illinois, the largest Roman Catholic seminary in North America. Three books and nearly a decade later, he became associate professor and ultimately vice president for academic affairs and academic dean at Washington Theological Union in Washington, D.C.

Anderson’s career was ascending rapidly; but when Washington Theological Union announced its closure in 2011 due in part to dwindling numbers entering the priesthood, he found himself, for a second time, at an unexpected bend in the track.

The curve would ultimately lead him to Fordham, where he landed the deanship at GRE.

“Sometimes life doesn’t work out exactly as you planned,” he said. “And sometimes it works out better than you planned.”

With just over 200 students, GRE is Fordham’s smallest school. But its size, Anderson came to realize, hardly reflects its steady growth. The school’s population has increased substantially since its launch in 1968, and it leads the other schools in offering online courses to a growing number of distance learners.

“Students do their courses online, then come to campus once or twice a year for a week of intensives,” Anderson said. “We’re able to offer training to people in Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana—places where there aren’t resources of this kind.”

Since his arrival, Anderson has seen many of his short-term goals for GRE come to fruition: Approval is pending for an online version of the doctor of ministry degree, the masters in religious education has been revamped, and two new masters degrees in Christian spirituality and pastoral studies are slated to begin in the fall of 2014. The school also plans to establish two joint degree programs with the Graduate School of Business Administration in digital ministry and in mission administration.

Going forward, his goal is to continue to refine GRE as a center of excellence in ministry, religious education, and church leadership.

“I’d like to see us become a platform for renewal, meaning a place for all voices,” he said. “The biggest challenge I see facing the U.S. church is polarization. Part of the way to overcome that is to create a platform where people can come together and have real dialogue, where all voices can truly be respected.”

It’s a goal meant to benefit not only GRE, but also the church at large.

“My conviction is that this school and schools like it are critical for the future of the church,” he said. “We’re the applied side of theology. If schools like this were to go away, who would train the catechists, the directors of religious education, the chaplains? Those are the people that we need if we’re going to pass our faith on.”

The main office at the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE) was unusually serene during the height of a steamy summer. With many faculty and students away, C. Colt Anderson, Ph.D., who on July 15 marked one year since becoming dean of the school, had a rare moment to reflect.

“Have you ever been on a really big roller coaster and sat in the front car?” Anderson mused. “That’s what the last year has been like. There have been moments of anxiety, but moments of exhilaration as well.”

In truth, a career of navigating abrupt curves in the track has aptly prepared Anderson to lead GRE. Early on, he had seemed destined to teach Catholic studies at the University of Georgia, having caught the attention of the chair of the religious studies department there. While Anderson was still an undergraduate, the chair offered him a full assistantship as a graduate student with the alluring goal of later recruiting him to join the faculty.

“Where I grew up, it was less than 2 percent Catholic,” said Anderson, a native of Savannah, Ga. “So I thought I was going to be a Catholic voice in the Deep South and teach where there were no Catholic resources. But in the end, that didn’t work out.”

While in his first year of doctoral work in historical and medieval theology at Marquette University, he received a call from the religious studies chair at the University of Georgia.

“He said, ‘Colt, I have bad news. The university has changed its priorities—they’re doing away with medieval and Catholic studies,’” he said.

“So there I was. In Milwaukee. In the brutal cold of the American Siberia during January of my first year,” he said. “I decided the only way out is through.”

He forged on, taking a job in advertising as a scriptwriter and film producer to support himself while writing his dissertation. Though an unusual occupation for a medieval theologian, the job combined his theological expertise with a family background in media (his father is an Emmy award-winning cinematographer and his stepmother was an editor for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution).

“I took what I knew about rhetoric from medieval preaching—for instance, the use of symbol and image—and simply applied it to help companies like Coca-Cola,” he said.

His dual experience in media and theology later inspired Christian Eloquence: Contemporary Doctrinal Preaching (Hillenbrand, 2004), a book intended to train seminarians in preaching using techniques in both medieval rhetoric and modern communication.

“The first principle [of both]is always, ‘Who is my audience? What are they concerned about and how do they perceive what I’m selling?’” he said.

He went on from Marquette to teach at Mundelein Seminary in Illinois, the largest Roman Catholic seminary in North America. Three books and nearly a decade later, he became associate professor and ultimately vice president for academic affairs and academic dean at Washington Theological Union in Washington, D.C.

Anderson’s career was ascending rapidly; but when Washington Theological Union announced its closure in 2011 due in part to dwindling numbers entering the priesthood, he found himself, for a second time, at an unexpected bend in the track.

The curve would ultimately lead him to Fordham, where he landed the deanship at GRE.

“Sometimes life doesn’t work out exactly as you planned,” he said. “And sometimes it works out better than you planned.”

With just over 200 students, GRE is Fordham’s smallest school. But its size, Anderson came to realize, hardly reflects its steady growth. The school’s population has increased substantially since its launch in 1968, and it leads the other schools in offering online courses to a growing number of distance learners.

“Students do their courses online, then come to campus once or twice a year for a week of intensives,” Anderson said. “We’re able to offer training to people in Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana—places where there aren’t resources of this kind.”

Since his arrival, Anderson has seen many of his short-term goals for GRE come to fruition: Approval is pending for an online version of the doctor of ministry degree, the masters in religious education has been revamped, and two new masters degrees in Christian spirituality and pastoral studies are slated to begin in the fall of 2014. The school also plans to establish two joint degree programs with the Graduate School of Business Administration in digital ministry and in mission administration.

Going forward, his goal is to continue to refine GRE as a center of excellence in ministry, religious education, and church leadership.

“I’d like to see us become a platform for renewal, meaning a place for all voices,” he said. “The biggest challenge I see facing the U.S. church is polarization. Part of the way to overcome that is to create a platform where people can come together and have real dialogue, where all voices can truly be respected.”

It’s a goal meant to benefit not only GRE, but also the church at large.

“My conviction is that this school and schools like it are critical for the future of the church,” he said. “We’re the applied side of theology. If schools like this were to go away, who would train the catechists, the directors of religious education, the chaplains? Those are the people that we need if we’re going to pass our faith on.”

Anderson comes to Fordham after serving as vice president for academic affairs and academic dean at Washington Theological Union in Washington, D.C., since 2008.

“Dr. Colt Anderson brings an excellent record of scholarship, teaching, and academic administrative leadership to his new role as dean of the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “He has a deep commitment to the Catholic, Jesuit, and ecumenical mission of Fordham University and the expertise necessary to work with a talented faculty in the building on GRE’s rich history to shape a compelling educational vision and direction for the school.”

Before transitioning to the administrative level, Anderson taught in higher education for more than a decade. He began his academic career at the University of Georgia as an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies.

He subsequently held the rank of associate professor in the History Department at the University of St. Mary of the Lake/Mundelein Seminary, where he also taught courses in medieval and reformation church history, ecumenism, interfaith dialogue, and ecclesiology.

At Washington Theological Union, he was associate professor in the Spirituality Department, where he taught graduate courses in medieval spirituality, systematic theology, and Catholic social teaching.

An accomplished scholar as well as educator, Anderson has authored several books, including The Great Catholic Reformers: From Gregory the Great to Dorothy Day (Paulist Press, 2007) and Christian Eloquence: Contemporary Doctrinal Preaching (Hillenbrand, 2004). He has also published numerous articles, essays, and reviews in scholarly journals. He has served on several editorial boards, and as a judge for the Catholic University of America Press.

“[At Washington Theological Union] Dr. Anderson has collaborated with faculty to reorganize the curriculum, significantly cut costs, increase the productivity of academic programs, launch a new Doctor of Ministry program in Catholic spirituality, and gain approval for a new distance learning degree in Catholic Leadership for Health Care from Middle States and the Association of Theological Schools,” Father McShane said.

Anderson received his bachelor’s degree with honors in philosophy and his master’s degree in religious studies from the University of Georgia, and his doctorate in religious studies from Marquette University.

He replaces John Harrington, Ph.D., dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, who has served as interim dean of GRE for the last year.