Actor and director Ethan Hawke joined Fordham’s Angela O’Donnell and David Gibson at a May 3 private screening of Wildcat, a movie about Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor directed by Hawke and starring his daughter, Maya Hawke. 

In a Q&A after the screening, attended by 300 people at a Manhattan movie theater, Ethan Hawke said it was an “absolute honor” to be with O’Donnell and thanked her for writing her book Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor (Fordham University Press, 2020), which deepened his understanding of the writer.

The film follows the life of O’Connor, who is celebrated for short stories such as those in Everything That Rises Must Converge (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1965) but also criticized for her views on race.

Fordham has been a center of research and events related to O’Connor’s work since 2018, when the writer’s estate granted $450,000 for an endowment at Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, where O’Donnell is the associate director.

A Writer’s Complexities

Although his mother had introduced him to O’Connor when he was a child, Hawke said, reading Radical Ambivalence helped him better understand how complex a person O’Connor was. He mentioned the book in an essay he wrote for Variety explaining why he and Maya ultimately decided to go forward with the film.

“I’m just so grateful for your time and for your enthusiasm and open-mindedness,” he said of O’Donnell’s writings on O’Connor. “I can’t imagine knowing as much as you know about Flannery. I have to bottle it into an hour and a half.”

O’Donnell said the Variety article was the first time she learned that Hawke had read her book, and said she was deeply moved by the film. 

“When I wrote the book, I was hoping that it was going to be useful to people in some way and not just something that academics would read,” she said. 

Hawke credited Maya with pushing the film to completion and suggested that O’Connor’s faith, coupled with her unflinching exploration of the way religion and morality sometimes collide in horrific ways, makes her appealing to a generation that is otherwise turning away from organized religion.

“A lot of people are scared to talk about faith. If we were all at Thanksgiving dinner together and I said, ‘Hey, can we talk about God?’ about half of you would go to the bathroom because you’re worried people are going to have an agenda,” he said.

“What I try to do with the movie is model Ms. O’Connor, which is that she’s not trying to convince you to believe anything. She’s trying to be a good artist and present something for you.”

The document set forth an ambitious seven-year plan for the University that touches on everything from facilities and curriculum to student involvement, all with the ultimate goal of combating climate change.

Just this month, Fordham received a $50 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency that the University will use to team up with community partners to address the issue.

Below are a few of the sustainability-related efforts, developments, and accomplishments that took place in the final quarter of 2023. Look for more updates in 2024!

Facilities

Going Hybrid
On Oct. 23, three hybrid minivans, including a wheelchair-accessible minivan, joined the fleet of Fordham’s Ram Vans. They replace gas-powered minivans previously used for wheelchair-accessible requests, trips to the Calder Center, and charter trip services. The vans use less gas, produce less CO₂, and can run up to 560 miles on one tank of gas.

Dining

Micro Farms
This fall, Aramark installed vertical hydroponic units called Babylon Micro Farms at dining halls on the Lincoln Center and Rose Hill campuses. They grow fresh greens and herbs in a water-based solution (instead of soil, which requires frequent watering.) The greens are harvested for use in dining hall dishes and special student events.

Compared to traditional methods, each micro farm uses 96% less water, zero pesticides, 65% less fertilizer, and zero miles to transport. As a result, between January and June 2023, using them allowed Fordham to save 19,247 gallons of water, prevent 2.5 pounds of nitrogen from entering waterways, and reduce 32 pounds of food waste.

Academics

In the Classroom
Six undergraduate community-engaged learning classes offered in the Fall 2023 semester featured elements promoting sustainability: Anthropology of Food (Anthropology), Economics and Ecology of Food Systems (Economics), Thinking Visually (Visual Arts), Human Physiology (Biology), Consumer Behavior (Gabelli School of Business), and Leadership Integrated Project (Gabelli School of Business). At Fordham Law School, environmental law courses offered this semester included Environmental Law and Energy Law.

Fordham Law students wrote blog posts for the school’s Environmental Law Review on the Flint and Jackson water crises, NYC Local Law 97, the environmental damage caused by the fashion industry, and cell-cultivated meats.

Reading Laudato Si’
The Curran Center for American Catholic Studies held three seminars on Zoom this semester dedicated to reading Pope Francis’ encyclical Laudato Si’ and the 2023 follow-up, Laudate Deum. Visit the center’s website for more information on future seminars.

A Systems Approach
This semester, the Social Innovation Collaboratory and Career Center hosted a collaborative workshop on systems thinking, focused mainly on sustainability. The workshops, which were open to all undergraduate students, allowed them to explore the practice and application of systems thinking, which is rooted in a holistic approach to society’s more complex issues. The process is attractive to companies since it’s rooted in the idea of looking at complex problems with a new perspective. Contact Sadibou Sylla at the Collaborary for information on future workshops.

Students Take the Lead

Green Week: United Student Government sponsored Fordham College at Rose Hill’s Sustainability Week in November. It featured the Fordham Flea Pop-Up as well as a seminar on composting basics.

The Lincoln Center Environmental Club held a clean makeup tabling event on Nov. 30 to showcase the benefits of cruelty-free and clean makeup.

Community Engagement

As part of the Reimagine the Cross Bronx campaign, Fordham staff conducted weekend “walkshops” in the neighborhoods surrounding the highway. Funding came from a $25,000 grant from the New York City Department (DOT) that the Center for Community Engaged Learning received in October.

Fordham staff and students also held special Halloween and Thanksgiving-themed events at the Highbridge Farmers Market and community space, which was recently expanded thanks to an AARP grant.

Faculty News

Marc Conte, Ph.D., professor of economics, published “Unequal Climate Impacts on Global Values of Natural Capital” in the journal Nature.

Stephen Holler, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, published “Education for Environmental Justice: The Fordham Regional Environmental Sensor for Healthy Air,” in the journal Social Sciences.

David Gibson, director of the Center for Religion and Culture (CRC), received $84,840 from the Porticus Foundation for the annual conference The Way Forward: Laudato Si’, Protecting Our Common Home, Building Our Common Church. The conference will take place in February at the University of San Diego.

Isaie Dougnon, Ph.D., associate professor of French and Francophone Studies and International Humanitarian Affairs, received $24,790 from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for research based on a local perspective on water and migration in West Africa.

Alumni

Giselle Schmitz, GSAS ’22, spent this fall working with the Coral Triangle Center in Bali, Indonesia—a nonprofit that connects governments, corporations, and local groups to help strengthen marine resources in the region.

In Case You Missed It

It was a busy fall in terms of sustainability efforts! Here are some stories Fordham News covered that you may have missed: In October, the annual Fordham Women’s Summit focused on sustainability.  In our theology department, a lecture for first-year students featuring Union Theological Seminary professor John J. Thatamanil connected religious supremacy to the destruction of the natural world. Four students have joined the Office of Facilities Management’s newly created internship program, while alumni are helping protect New York City’s birds and helping farmers adapt to climate change. The Gabelli School of Business hosted two Nobel Laureates at a conference on ESG.  At the Law School, more than 20 students gathered in Central Park for a clean-up event for the annual Public Service Day, while alumna Melinda Baglio was honored for being a changemaker in the clean energy field.

Upcoming Events

Faculty Happy Hour: Sustainability and Environmental Justice
Open to all faculty interested in sharing ideas about sustainability.
Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024. RSVP: Julie Gafney, [email protected]

STEM Career Fair, Thursday, Feb. 15, Great Hall, Rose Hill Campus. Visit the Fordham Career Center next month for details.

Women of Color in STEM Career Panel, Wednesday, Feb. 28, Virtual. Visit the Fordham Career Center next month for details.

Social Impact and Non-Profit Micro-Fair, Thursday, March 14, 12th Floor Lounge, Lowenstein Center, Lincoln Center campus. Visit the Fordham Career Center next month for details.

Save the Date:
Climate Action Summit with President Tetlow: April 8, Rose Hill Campus

We’d Love to Hear From You!

Do you have a sustainability-related event, development, or news item you’d like to share? Contact Patrick Verel at [email protected].

But Raúl E. Zegarra, Ph.D., says that’s all wrong.

“We’re not seeing the decline of religion, but the transformation of religion into new forms and the building of new sacred spaces,” said Zegarra, the winner of the Fordham Curran Center for American Catholic Studies’ fourth annual New Scholars essay contest.

“And liberation theology has been essential in the process of building those new spaces.”

It’s an argument that Zegarra, an assistant professor of theology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, makes in his winning essay, “The Preferential Option of the Poor: Liberation Theology, Pentecostalism, and the New Forms of Sacralization.”

The article was published in the journal  European Journal of Sociology (Cambridge University Press) in April. In addition to receiving a $1,500 cash prize from the Curran Center, Zegarra was invited to speak at Fordham. He’ll give his talk virtually on Nov. 13 at 5:30 p.m.

Zegarra said he wrote the paper because he knew the narrative about declines in religion clashed with reality on the ground, particularly in South America, where he has done research.

Latin America was where liberation theology flourished with the official blessing of the Catholic Church in the 1970s and ’80s, but the church’s support withered in the face of a backlash.

What Zegarra found is that the backlash might have forced the Catholic Church in Latin America to withdraw its support for the liberation theology movement, but the ideals behind it have lived on through secular institutions.

The New Sacred Spaces

“A lot of the work done for the poor and for social justice started to move to other areas of society—the universities, the nonprofits, human rights activists,” he said.

“For many of these [Catholics], these became the new sacred spaces to care for their neighbor and to love God in that way. The sacred doesn’t disappear; it just takes a new form.”

John Seitz, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology and associate director of the Curran Center, said Zegarra’s research is important because it fosters a conversation about Pentecostalism and Catholicism in Latin America and also features on-the-ground research from communities in Peru.

‘A Product of Religious Commitment’

Zegarra also helps loosen the definition of what counts as liberation theology, which Seitz sees as a positive sign.

“Raúl is pointing to secular organizations and saying that they’re made up of Catholics who are committed to liberation theology principles. We can think then about recognizing the sacred nature of these organizations, even though they’re not ecclesial organizations,” he said.

“How do we decide that religion is gone? It depends on how you define religion. Raúl shows that these organizations are a product of religious commitment and ideas oriented toward the advocacy of human flourishing and the uplift of the poor.”

The gathering was convened by the pope so that representatives from all areas of the church, from cardinals to lay people, could focus on synodality–the process of working together on how the church will move forward. This meeting is the first of its kind to include women as voting delegates.

“I feel so blessed to be a part of this,” said Mollie Clark, a Fordham junior.

“Women’s voices are being honored and heard for the first time in the synodal process. This is such an affirming thing,” said Clark, who acknowledged “a lot of internal struggle at times” with the church’s stance on women’s participation. “I know that God is listening to my voice.”

A Global Conference

David Gibson, director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture and a former Vatican reporter who will accompany the group, said, “It’s simply a global conversation that is the fruit of two years of listening.” 

Pope Francis asked for churches and dioceses all over the world to survey clergy and lay members alike as a prelude to the meeting, which he opened on Oct. 4. As part of this process of synodality, or “journeying together,” the same discussions were happening in nations across the globe about how to be a more inclusive church, a less clerical church, said Gibson, as well as how to increase the role of women and young people.

Fordham is the only Jesuit university to send a student group to Rome for this synod convened by Pope Francis–the first Jesuit pope.

Church on the Go

In the spring, Vanessa Rotondo, Fordham adjunct professor and deputy chief of staff to the  University’s president, Tania Tetlow, organized a screening of the Hulu documentary The Pope: Answers and was amazed at the high student turnout.

That event inspired her to propose a course called Church on the GO: Theology in a Global Synod to further “develop student understanding of the postmodern church in tandem with and in light of the Synod on Synodality.” Earlier this year, she traveled to Rome to pursue permission for its students to take part in synod-related events.

Student Itinerary

Rotondo and Gibson developed a series of activities for the students while they are in Rome. They will hear from synodal leaders such as Sister Nathalie Becquart, a voting member who helped facilitate the pope’s canvassing of church members worldwide; join press conferences; and take part in community engagement projects with both Villa Nazareth, a house of humanistic and spiritual formation for college students, and Sant’Egidio, a social service agency focused on global peace and interfaith dialogue. The group will also spend time at the School of Peace, where they will participate in an interfaith prayer service and prepare and distribute meals to people experiencing hunger and homelessness. 

Rotondo also devised two leadership sessions with the grassroots organization Discerning Deacons that are rooted in active listening and the synodal process. The goal is to give the students a sense of how the synod is working and train them in Ignatian reflection so they can devise an action plan to enhance Fordham’s mission and Catholic identity when they return.

‘Our Church is Alive’

AnnaMarie Pacione, a Fordham sophomore in the group, said the synod gives her hope.

“Our church is alive, and it’s growing, and it’s breathing and listening to everyone, as it should,” she said. “It’s more reflective of God’s love, Jesus’s love, as I know it, with this commitment and responsibility to listen to voices that have been suppressed in the past.”

A Blog for Dispatches

The students will post to the Sapientia blog of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture throughout their weeklong trip and will document their experience on the Instagram account @synodalfordham.

In addition to Clark and Pacione, the Fordham students include Eli Taylor, a theology master’s student; Fordham College at Rose Hill seniors Augustine Preziosi and Sean Power; Fordham College at Rose Hill junior James Haddad; Fordham College at Rose Hill sophomores Abigail Adams, Seamus Dougherty, Jay Doherty, and Kaitlyn Squyres; and Fordham College at Lincoln Center junior William Gualtiere.

John Cecero, S.J., Fordham’s vice president for mission integration and ministry, and Michael Lee, Ph.D., director of the Francis & Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, are accompanying the group.

“People traditionally view Catholic art as enchanting, with statues, stained glass windows, and beautiful cathedrals. But there are other ways for Catholics to imagine their faith through art,” said Sullivan, a senior urban studies and theology double major at Fordham College at Rose Hill who has been working on the documentary since last summer and is planning to complete it by the end of the year. 

An Interview with Cardinal Timothy Dolan 

Sullivan’s 20-minute documentary, “Questions on the Catholic Imagination(s),” offers unique perspectives from religious figures like Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York. In the film, Cardinal Dolan says that God communicates with people through whispers. And through those whispers—or hints—from the divine, Catholics create art. Some examples are the 2018 Met Gala, themed “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination,” and the exhibit “Revelation” by artist Andy Warhol, whose Catholic upbringing is infused in some of his work, said Sullivan. 

Catholics Who Break the Mold

Sullivan, an aspiring filmmaker, was inspired to create his documentary after reading New York Times and Vox articles that offered new takes on Catholicism, targeted toward younger Catholics. (In his documentary, he also interviews the articles’ authors.) Sullivan started working on his film last summer, thanks to funding from Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture and his 2022-2023 Duffy Fellowship. On May 22, he screened his work in progress at the Howard Gilman Theater. 

Coincidentally, his film premiere took place shortly before Pope Francis attended a conference on the Catholic imagination in Rome, which was attended by artist Andres Serrano and Fordham’s Angela Alaimo O’Donnell—two key people who were interviewed in Sullivan’s film.

Sullivan said he hopes his documentary, which includes some controversial perspectives, will expand the minds of his audience. 

“I want to show that there is a rainbow of Catholics out there who don’t quite fit into the perfect mold that the church might make us feel like we need to fit into,” he said, citing an example that Fordham’s Bryan Massingale, S.T.D., mentions in the film. “Father Massingale talks about how the church often tries to make mathematical equations about human morality. What it doesn’t take into account are the complexities of humanity.”

‘New York Is My Campus’

Sullivan has been familiar with the Jesuits since birth. He was born in Georgetown University’s hospital to an Irish-Catholic family, and graduated from Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C. 

“Attending a Jesuit high school, which emphasized social justice, was infectious for me,” Sullivan said. “I wanted more of it. That’s what propelled me to another Jesuit school—Fordham.” 

During his first year at Fordham, he often rolled his eyes at the phrase “Fordham is my school, New York is my campus” because it felt cheesy, said Sullivan. But this year, he realized the phrase was right: 

“From seeing Andy Warhol’s exhibit sign in the Fordham subway station, to conducting all my interviews in New York City and then showing my film at Lincoln Center—that was ‘New York is my campus’ on full display.”

The Global Aesthetics of the Catholic Imagination, which took place May 25-27, featured a private audience with Pope Francis, who in his remarks encouraged attendees to “not domesticate Jesus” in their works.

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, associate director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, agreed with Francis and said that his comments were the highlight of the conference for her.

“There is a sense in which, over the centuries, we have received many images of Christ. But the true Christ escapes any attempt at trying to domesticate him, to capture him and say, ‘This is Jesus, and only this is Jesus,’” she said.

A ‘Superabundant’ Experience

She said the conference’s watchword was “superabundant,” a word Pope Francis used to describe the place where people experience God, “like a continually overflowing basin.”

O’Donnell was moved by Francis’ challenge to “go beyond set bounds, to be creative without downplaying your own spiritual restlessness and that of humanity, to embrace poetically the anxious yearnings present in the human heart.”

Her own writing is often set in the context of her Catholic faith, and at the conference, she participated in three panels, Contemporary Catholic Poetry, The Presence of Dante in the Contemporary Catholic Imagination, and The Global Reach of Flannery O’Connor.

Exploring the ways Christ is present across cultures was a key aspect of the conference, as it was the first international iteration of a series of gatherings dedicated to the Catholic literary imagination that began in 2015, and which Fordham hosted in 2017.

Scorsese’s New York

A close second high point for O’Donnell was Scorsese’s lengthy conversation with Antonio Spadaro, S.J., editor-in-chief of the journal Civilta Cattolica which, along with the Curran Center and the office of Mission & Ministry at Georgetown University, and Loyola University Chicago’s Hank Center for Catholic Intellectual Heritage, sponsored the conference.

Scorsese shared memories of growing up in New York City’s Little Italy and aspiring to follow in the footsteps of a priest at the Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral. He reflected on films such as Mean Streets, in which actor Harvey Keitel’s character asserts that “you don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets,” He also made news by announcing that he is planning to follow up his 1988 film The Last Temptation of Christ with a new movie about Jesus.

Tempted by the Ordinary

O’Donnell was particularly moved by his thoughts on The Last Temptation of Christ. The last part of the movie features Jesus imagining what would have happened if, instead of giving himself up for death, he’d married Mary Magdalene and started a family.

“What Scorsese said about this, which I thought was so beautiful, was, Satan offers Jesus food, money, and all the power in the world, and he’s not tempted by that,” O’Donnell said.

“What he’s finally tempted by is the beauty of ordinary human life. He doesn’t give in to that temptation, but nonetheless, this is a very affirming vision of what it is to be a human being.

“I was very struck that [Scorsese] … acknowledges that human life is very beautiful, especially as he’s made movies that incorporate violence, suffering, and all the very dark elements of human experience.”

But this semester, the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, which supervises the program, partnered with the Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL), to expand on what it means to serve others.

“The old Jesuit motto is ‘men and women for others,’ but now at Fordham, we’re more about ‘men and women with and for others,’ said Michael Lee, Ph.D., professor of theology and director of the Curran Center.

“I think that that’s key here.”

In January, a group of eleven students in the concentration began meeting every two weeks as part of an “Ignatian Community of Practice.”

Guided conversations have focused on their responsibilities to their communities, the ways different faith traditions address social challenges, the ethical obligations that come with their academic work, and continuing along a path of discernment.

Lee said the meetings are part of a shift of the guiding philosophy of the concentration’s service requirement—from a “service-learning” model to a “community-engaged” or “community asset-based” approach. Elements from the meetings will be incorporated into the Discernment Seminar, a class that all Catholic American Studies students are required to take their sophomore year. As a result, when they engage in service in the future, all of them will work with community partners from whom they will learn as partners. This could entail assisting at organizations such as P.O.T.S., a community group near the Rose Hill campus, the Mary Mitchell Family and Youth Center, or The Bronx is Blooming.

“I want us to think about our place in the neighborhood and within the wider public, and think about not just a service requirement, but a way of partnering with neighbors and mutually learning,” he said.

Lifting Up Community Voices

Grace Powers, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill, is one of 11 students in the concentration who were invited to join the Ignatian Community of Practice. Four years ago, she left a small Kentucky town of roughly 4,500 people to find a more diverse, LGBTQ-friendly populace in New York City. A sociology and history major, Powers says Fordham’s Jesuit heritage has also expanded her perspective of her Catholic faith.

“I’ve come to really appreciate how the Jesuits incorporate Catholicism into daily life,” she said.

“Community engagement and accompaniment focuses more on going into a community and uplifting the voices that are there and listening to their perspectives about what they need.”

She has found particular appeal in the Catholic saying that there are “two feet of justice”: works of mercy and charity, and works of social action. If the first entails volunteering at a soup kitchen, the second might be discussing why a soup kitchen exists in the first place.

From the Bronx to El Salvador

Vanessa Rotondo, associate director of campus engagement and senior advisor for Ignatian Leadership at CCEL, said her partnership with the Curran Center is a natural extension of CCEL’s focus on programs that build community engagement in the Bronx through research projects on health care, housing, and education.

“We saw the students in the American Catholic Studies concentration as the perfect partners, given their intent is to understand emerging Catholic identity as it’s understood by its Greek translation of ‘universal.’”

In one of the meetings, the group covered the underpinnings of Jesuit education; another took place with Frankelly Martinez, program manager at Christian Aid in the Dominican Republic, and Francisco Mena Ugarte, executive director of Christians for Peace in El Salvador. Several members of the community also traveled with Lee to El Salvador as part of his class El Salvador: Revolutionary Faith.

The group’s final meeting will feature Fordham alumni who speak with students about how these lessons and experiences can be applied after graduation.

A Time for Quiet Reflection

Nolan Chiles, a senior integrated neuroscience major, said many students in the group have known each other since their first year at Fordham, so the dialogue tends to be richer than it might be with strangers.

“At the end of our meetings, we do a quiet reflection for a couple of minutes. Sometimes we’ll say a prayer, and then we’re all encouraged to go around in a circle and share whatever it was that came to light for us,” he said.

“It’s a great time to hear other students’ takes.”

Students in the Ignatian Community of Practice participate in an interfaith dialogue on March 29 with  Vinny Marchionni, S.J., Tabatha Holley, lead pastor of New Day Church, and Hanadi Doleh, director of community partnerships at Interfaith Center of New York.

Merton, an influential Catholic monk and writer, was well known for works such as No Man Is an Island and The Seven Storey Mountain, an autobiography that sold more than 1 million copies. Merton wrote more than 50 books in addition to hundreds of articles on issues such as civil rights, nonviolence, nuclear arms, and interfaith understanding. However, Merton is sometimes considered controversial, not only for his writings, but also for an affair he had when he was in his 50s.

In the summer of 1966, as he was recovering from back surgery, Merton met a nurse called “M,” in her early 20s and the two had a relationship that lasted several months.

This affair has made some Catholic leaders and authors turn away from him, while others gloss over it in their pieces about Merton, who died not long after the affair in 1968. But for Hillis, author of Man of Dialogue: Thomas Merton’s Catholic Vision, the affair is a central part of who Merton was and how we understand him.

“The reality is Merton acted irresponsibly, and without a full appreciation of the power differential that existed between him and M—none of this can and should be ignored,” said Hills in a lecture for the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies on Jan. 31. “But I do think it merits a more serious exploration. None of [the writers]examine Merton’s agonized details or thoughts about his love for M, her love for him, and the threat that this relationship posed to his vocation.”

Hillis spoke in detail about Merton’s journals from this time, while acknowledging that M’s side was never told. He explained how Merton’s passages sounded more like “the reflections of a heartstruck teenager than a 51-year-old respected monk and writer.”

“His account shows him at his most selfish and self-absorbed, but it also shows him grappling with his own evident shortcomings, with what I think is honesty and humility,” said Hills, who also spoke about Merton’s affair with students in Professor Angela O’Donnell’s class earlier that day.

Merton often wrote pieces that showed his conflicting feelings, and his love for M was no exception.

“There can be no hesitation about my position here. I have vows and I must be faithful to them,” he wrote in April 1966. “Once again it was clearer than ever that we are terribly in love, and it is the kind of love that can virtually tear you apart.”

While the affair was known before, more details and his inner conflict became clear after Merton’s journals were released 25 years after his death.

“It’s the forthrightness of his journals that continues to attract readers like me,” Hillis said. “Merton allowed himself to become an open book, warts and all.”

Merton even acknowledged this himself, stating that he planned to keep all the references to M in because he “wanted to be completely open both about my mistakes, and about my effort to make sense out of my life.”

Hillis said that this humility showed “the complexity of who he was as a human being striving to do God’s will, and often failing.”

Personal Appreciation for Merton

For both Hillis and Michael Peppard, Ph.D., professor and associate director for prestigious fellowships for the Curran Center, Merton played a central role in their careers.

“Thomas Merton is responsible for me getting my first job out of college,” Peppard said, adding that he was a finalist for two jobs after he graduated, one in Washington, D.C., at a place with a “decent salary and some cultural status,” and another teaching at a Jesuit high school.

“I had a decision to make, and what did I have on the airplane with me on the way to that final interview? I had Merton’s No Man Is an Island collection of essays,” he said. The essays, which featured passages on service, inspired him to accept the Jesuit teaching job—if it was offered.

“My final interview was with the department chair, and he asked me who my favorite theologian was. I wanted to say Merton, but I was a little bit nervous because Merton is not everyone’s cup of tea,” he recalled. But he said it anyway. “The department chair smiled very broadly and it turns out he went on to become a scholar of Merton and is currently the president of the International Thomas Merton society, so it was the right answer.”

Hillis said that Merton also helped him get his job. He had been having a “vocational crisis” when he was in his 20s and read The Seven Storey Mountain, which “is all about someone having a vocational crisis.”

“I started reading everything that Merton wrote, and in what I call ‘fit of youthful exuberance,’ I got a tattoo of a drawing that Merton did of a monk,” he said. “I mentioned this to the search committee at Bellarmine, and I think they thought, ‘we should probably get the guy that has Merton literally tattooed on his arm.’”

Merton wrote that “too often our saints are portrayed in a way that masks their humanity,” and Hillis said that it’s precisely Merton’s humanity that attracted people to him.

“Each time I got to the Abbey of Gethsemani and make a visit to Merton’s grave, I’m struck by the ways in which pilgrims venerate his burial place; marking his resting place are rosaries, prayers, guitar picks, sobriety tokens, art, and wood carvings,” Hillis said. “There are many, and I include myself among them, who understand Merton to be the kind of Christian who speaks profoundly to them, precisely because he was human.”

For Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, a new book of poetry serves as a tribute to both types of “holy lands,” be they far or near.

Holy Land, (Paraclete Press, 2022) a collection of 87 poems that won the Paraclete Press Award in 2021 and was published in October of this year, was in fact inspired by a trip that she took to Palestine in 2019.

The first chapter, Christ Sightings, is based on her time in Palestine. What follows is a series of chapters—Crossing Ireland, Ancestral Lands, Sounding the Days, Literary Islands, and Border Songs—that were inspired by her travels to places that may not be the Holy Land, but are holy to her just the same.

Crossing Ireland features poems O’Donnell composed after visiting the Emerald Isle, while Ancestral Lands features meditations on her native northeast Pennsylvania. The poems in Sounding the Days and Literary Islands expand the notion of holy lands into the spiritual, emotional, and intellectual realms. The book ends with 15 triolets inspired by the crisis at the United States-Mexico border that dominated the news in 2019.

The book’s first poem, “The Storm Chaser,” was inspired by a visit to the Sea of Galilee. The view of the sea has changed little in the 2,000 years since Jesus and his disciples were said to have spent time there, so O’Donnell said it was easy to create a picture in her head of what it would have been like then.

Running along the Sea of Galilee,
I see you in your boat, tall brown
man that you are, standing in the prow,

“All of these stories that I had been hearing all of my life in church in the Gospel readings suddenly became so much more powerful and real when I was in the landscape where they unfolded,” she said. 

“There was something electrifying about walking literally in the footsteps of Jesus and being in those spaces where these events took place.”

As moved as she was by the geography there, O’Donnell said she knew didn’t want to limit herself strictly to one location.

“It’s arguable that there are no places that aren’t holy, that aren’t sanctified in some way by human experience,” she said, noting that Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, is considered sacred ground because nearly 50,000 soldiers died there during the infamous Civil War battle.

“I used to take my kids there, and I remember having this eerie sense of so many lives being lost in this peaceful, rural place. You know, the very dirt of the ground being watered by the blood of human beings. That’s a sacred ground.”

When she started considering other holy lands she’s visited, it dawned on her that many of them are places that most people don’t think of as holy. In “304 Washington Street,” for instance, she considers growing up in a small town just south of Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Squat and square, her pea green shingles
made her strange on our straight street
lined by wood white houses,
their faces bland and neat.

“Northeastern Pennsylvania was very beautiful at one time and then was ruined by coal mining. The land is sacred in the sense that that’s where my immigrant ancestors settled down, where they lived and died, and that’s where my family flourished,” she said.

From there, O’Donnell made a leap to the idea that parenthood can be holy ground, as can being a sibling. And if one lives a creative life, the bonds one forms with practitioners of the past are also relevant. In the Literary Islands chapter, “Flannery’s Last Day” marks the anniversary of the Aug. 3 death of Flannery O’Connor, whose family trust endowed Fordham with a grant in 2018 to promote scholarship of the writer. 

Today of all days you would show up
making sure you are not forgotten.
Your suffering at the end was true,

The final chapter, Border Songs, was arguably the toughest in which to envision a connection with God, she said. The poems are meant to be “poetry of witness,” a term that the Nobel-prize winning Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz coined to describe his writing about the experience and aftermath of World War II. She wrote the poems in an attempt at accompaniment, as the world watched the horrors at the border unfold during the spring and summer of 2019.

“I felt as though it was important to meditate, to pray for, and to memorialize these people who are forgotten—people who no one cares about, people who are alienated and don’t belong,” she said.

She decided the best form to use was the triolet, a song-like poem which features several lines that are repeated several times.

“The idea is to create this haunting incantatory effect, particularly when the poem is read and listened to out loud,” O’Donnell said. 

One of the first ones she wrote, “Border Song #2,” was inspired by a report that immigrants who were taken into custody were having their rosary beads confiscated. 

They confiscate your rosary when you come.
I cannot go to sleep without one.
Thumbing each bead until the night is done.
They confiscate your rosary when you come.

She penned 15 triolets in short order.

“I didn’t have to look very hard.  Every day, there was a new outrage, a new photograph or quotation that I would see in the news that would trigger another triolet,” she said.

She noted that in his 1946 book Man’s Search for Meaning, Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl declared that God was with him in the concentration camp, “suffering and dying with us every day.”

“That sense of God dwelling in brokenness and in sorrow and horror as well as in the sunny places that we remember happily—that’s part of what this book is about,” she said. 

“There is divinity in everything—even in those dark places that we don’t necessarily want to be. There are times when we have to celebrate the darkness, and some of these poems attempt to do that.”

That was one of the lessons of “A Theology of Voice: VOCAL and the Catholic Clergy Abuse Survivor Movement,” an article by Brian Clites, Ph.D., chosen by Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies in May as the winner of its third annual New Scholars essay contest.

Clites, an associate director at the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities and an assistant professor of religious studies at Case Western Reserve University, first published the paper in the journal U.S. Catholic Historian. In addition to receiving a $1,500 cash prize from the Curran Center, he was also invited to speak at Fordham. He’ll give his talk virtually on Sept. 29 at 1 p.m.

The article traces the origins of VOCAL (Victims of Clergy Abuse Linkup), which was among the first and most prominent advocacy organizations for American survivors of childhood clergy sexual abuse. It was a predecessor of the currently active SNAP, (Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests), and was notable, Clites said, because its leaders explicitly recognized the spiritual dimensions of the abuse they suffered, which they called “soul murder.”

VOCAL and the Divine Powers of the Voice

VOCAL was founded in 1992 and was one of the world’s largest and most prominent communities of clergy sexual abuse survivors until the untimely 2002 death of its leader, Father Thomas H. “Tom” Economus. It sought to promote healing and justice through a systemic and distinctively Catholic discourse about “voice.”

Clites said that when he first began working on the paper, which is part of a larger book project, in 2011, he was struck by how little academic research had been devoted to the sexual abuse crisis, and how often the concept of the voice was referenced in contemporary Catholic survivor groups, such as “Voice of the Faithful” and “Speak Truth to Power.”

“I was thinking, ‘Why are Catholic survivors so invested in this term voice?’ It seems to mean so much more to them than I’ve read about or understood. I also really didn’t understand why they also put so much emphasis on the term “survivor.” That term is ubiquitous now for cancer survivors and Holocaust survivors, but they used it in such a personalized and spiritual way,” he said.

“In a way, this article is me reflecting after 10 years of being among survivors, reading their literature, and learning why those terms mean so much to them.” Clites was able to learn about VOCAL/Linkup through interviews with surviving members, as well as copies of the group’s triennial newsletter, The Missing Link.

Transforming from Victim to Survivor

What all those survivor groups shared was an understanding that a person’s voice is the foundation of the transformation from victim to survivor.

“Until you found your voice, you couldn’t be a survivor and were still stuck in victimhood. So voice was a way of reclaiming agency,” Clites said.

“[The VOCAL members] really weren’t thinking about it in terms of legal agency. They were much more focused on thinking about it in spiritual terms because they’d been abused by men who were God’s ambassadors on Earth.”

Many of the VOCAL members who Clites spoke with told him they’d lost the ability to pray and talk to God.

“It was, ‘I need to speak about my abuse so that I’m comfortable enough with it so that even if I can’t forgive my abuser, or pray the way I used to, I can still be open to that relationship with God and Jesus and the Blessed Mother,’” he said.

Inspiring and Being Inspired by Other Movements

One of his major findings was that when VOCAL/Linkup members formulated the “Theology of Voice,” they were informed a great deal by feminism, the LGBTQ movement, and to a lesser extent, the AIDS movement.

“Their understanding of voice has precedent, but they take it to a whole other level and make it spiritual and moral in a way that it was not in American popular culture before Catholic survivors started thinking about it,” said Clites.

“Look at the MeToo movement and the public outrage over non-disclosure agreements. The fact that there’s a debate about the wisdom of them anymore owes a lot to Catholic survivors. They were probably the most influential group in amplifying people’s sensitivity to the injustice of NDAs.”

Remaining Catholic

What surprised Clites the most was learning that in the very beginning of the sexual abuse crisis, survivors went to the church first to seek spiritual healing. The stereotype of them as people who are hurt and out for revenge is not accurate.

“What I learned is, survivors are still in the church. Survivors are Catholics sitting next to us in the pews, or forming and leading their own Eucharistic communities, or continuing to be ordained as nuns and priests.”

“This was a problem they sought redress from within the church, and they chose to stay in the church. There are survivors who are too angry at God to pray right now or abandoned their faith or moved to another, but the majority of Catholic survivors have remained Catholic. That was shocking because I didn’t see that in movie and book accounts of it,” he said.

John Seitz, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology and associate director of the Curran Center, said Clites’ elevation of survivors’ voices was a big part of the reason why the center chose to honor his work.

“It’s possible to get tangled up in lots of other ins and outs of the crisis, the functioning of the church, the intricacies of the coverups, and the policies that get implemented or not,” he said.

“But Brian has done a lot of on-the-ground research getting to know these survivors and their communities.”

Confronting a Culture of Secrecy

The Curran Center is a co-sponsor of the multiyear, multi-institution Taking Responsibility Project, making Clites’ paper exactly the kind of scholarship it wants to promote, he said

“When we take sex abuse on fully and realize its breadth and depth, we realize that the stories we told before about Catholicism need to be revised in light of a pretty widespread culture of secrecy in the church among leaders that’s trickled down into the community more broadly,” he said.

“Our narratives about subjects that don’t even have anything on the surface to do with sex abuse may have to be revised. It’s really a watershed moment in Catholic studies.”

“I don’t quite remember where I had learned about prejudice and discrimination for the first time, but I didn’t understand it and I kept asking my mom, ‘Why do people treat people differently because of the way they look?’” she said, “And she couldn’t give me the answers.”

“What she did was, she kept supplying me with books, so I was reading biographies of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Sojourner Truth, and all kinds of people who have experienced prejudice and oppression and fought to overcome it. That really stuck with me.”

In April, Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies chose Schmidt, a 2021 graduate of Loyola University, as the second winner of its New Scholars essay contest. For her paper “’Regulations for Our Black People’: Reconstructing the Experiences of Enslaved People in the United States through Jesuit Records” (International Symposium on Jesuit Studies, March 2021), Schmidt was awarded a $1,500 cash prize.

“It’s quite an honor for my work to be recognized in this way. It’s so important that this award is promoting new scholarship that focuses on underrepresented and marginalized groups in Catholic history,” said Schmidt, who is the research coordinator for the Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project, a joint initiative of the Society of Jesus and St. Louis University.

The research is in some ways the pinnacle of an academic career that began with the books her mother gave her. In high school, Schmidt worked as a volunteer and employee at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati and served as a community-engaged fellow at Xavier University as an undergraduate.

After completing her bachelor’s degree in history and classics, she knew she wanted to be a historian of slavery and African American history, and went on to earn a master’s degree and Ph.D. in public history. The Slavery, History, Memory, and Reconciliation Project, which was created in 2016 as a way to explore the Jesuits’ connections to slavery, was a natural fit, she said.

“Knowing how much the Jesuits had shaped me, I knew I needed to understand more. I had to understand what enslaved people’s lives were like with the Jesuits, and how the Jesuits justified holding people in slavery in their religious context and their mission,” she said.

John Seitz, Ph.D., an associate professor of theology at Fordham, said what made Schmidt’s work stand out was the way she expanded the scope of sources to tell the story of enslaved people.

“The great thing about this work is not only that it exposes a world that we’ve had a very difficult time seeing through the historical record,” he said. “But it’s also such a meticulous and creative way of reading records [bills of sale, sacramental records, correspondence between Jesuits]that ostensibly don’t really have anything to do with what she’s interested in exploring, which is the lives of enslaved Catholics people.”

Seitz noted that Schmidt’s research is in keeping with a broader national reckoning.

“With the rest of the country, Jesuit institutions more broadly are having a movement when more and more people are agreeing that it’s time to come to terms more honestly and in a more transparent way with painful histories, including Jesuit ownership of slaves. Kelly’s work is remarkable in helping this effort,” he said.

“She provides a foundation for the kinds of work that needs to be done for reconciliation, healing, and reparation, which is a long road.”

In addition, he said that Schmidt exhibited a spirit of generosity in the paper by laying out a roadmap for future scholars who might want to replicate the research.

“She’s been through all these many, many layers of papers that are scattered and diffuse. She doesn’t just hide that; she talks about the process in this essay, and in talking about the process, she provides a great gift to her fellow scholars in the future who may want to do something similar, to recreate this hidden world,” he said.

For Schmidt, the process of researching the lives of those enslaved by Jesuits in the South and Midwest was both challenging and inspiring.

“I felt challenged in my faith, seeing exploitation that happened to people through the church, but then, as I learned more and more about the enslaved people I was studying, I was just continuously blown away by how resilient they were in their faith, and how even their enslavement to Catholic slaveholders didn’t stop them,” she said.

“They were so committed to their faith and using it to uplift themselves and push for the way things ought to be.”

The larger lesson, she said, is that all history is interconnected, and one can’t simply go to the archives and find one box labeled “slavery” and learn the full story of the past.

“We have to look far and wide to piece together the story, and we have to look past different dioceses and religious orders. Slavery wasn’t isolated to one institution, so you have to look through state records, local records,” she said.

“Doing it, we pieced together the lived experiences of enslaved people whose stories haven’t been told.”