Since the 1970s, Fordham students have been studying and contributing to the spirit of innovation and community renewal that has come to define what it means to be a Bronxite.

Fifty years ago, a new art form burst forth on the streets of the Bronx, born from rich musical traditions and a spirit of innovation in neighborhoods of color ravaged by deindustrialization and written off by most of the country. In the ensuing decades, the Fordham community has not only studied and celebrated hip-hop as a revolutionary cultural force but also helped preserve its Bronx legacy—through efforts to recognize the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue as the genre’s birthplace, and through oral-history interviews with some of hip-hop’s seminal figures.

“I think the lesson is, let’s explore, interrogate, and embrace the cultural creativity of our surrounding areas because it’s unparalleled,” said Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of African and African American studies and founding director of Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project.

Naison teaches a popular class, From Rock and Roll to Hip-Hop, that draws on artists like Cardi B, Nas, and Run-DMC to understand the music and its part in U.S. history—and to explore issues he’s spent his career teaching. “I’m not a hip-hop scholar,” he said. “Rather, I’m someone who works to have community voices heard.”

And just as the music has evolved over the past 50 years, so have efforts to revitalize the borough and tell the stories of its residents.

Challenging ‘Deeply Entrenched Stereotypes’

Amplifying community voices is at the heart of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Fordham launched the project in 2002, at the request of the Bronx County Historical Society, to document and preserve the history of Black people in New York City’s northernmost borough. Naison and his team of Fordham students, faculty, and community historians have spoken with hip-hop pioneers like Pete DJ Jones and Kurtis Blow, but the project is much broader: The archive contains verbatim transcripts of interviews with educators, politicians, social workers, businesspeople, clergy members, athletes, and leaders of community-based organizations who have lived and worked in the Bronx since the 1930s. The archive, which also includes scholarly essays about the Bronx, was digitized in 2015, making the interviews fully accessible to the public.

“Starting by interviewing a small number of people I already knew,” Naison wrote in Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life in the Bronx from the 1930s to the 1960s (Fordham University Press, 2016), “I stumbled upon a large, passionate, and knowledgeable group of people who had been waiting for years to tell stories of communities long forgotten, communities whose very history challenged deeply entrenched stereotypes about Black and Latino settlement of the Bronx.”

For Naison, the project highlights how the borough, defying the odds, rebuilt neighborhoods following the arson of the 1970s and the crack epidemic of the 1980s. The neighborhoods, with lower crime rates, saw community life flourish again, and in recent decades, the Bronx became a location of choice for new immigrants to New York. BAAHP research includes interviews with Bronxites from Ghana, Nigeria, Mali, Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, among other nations. It gives voice to growing, diverse immigrant communities that have enlivened Bronx neighborhoods where Jewish, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and Dominican people lived before them. “The Bronx is this site where people mix their cultures and they create something new,” Naison said. “It makes this a lot of fun to study.”

Shaping Global Perceptions

Brian Purnell, Ph.D., FCRH ’00, helped facilitate at least 50 BAAHP interviews from 2004 to 2010, when he was the project’s research director. He said the archive is useful for anyone studying how cities have changed over the decades.

“I hope people use it to think differently about the Bronx, to include the Bronx more deeply and broadly in urban studies in the United States,” said Purnell, now an associate professor of Africana studies and history at Bowdoin College, where he uses the Fordham archive in his own research and in the classroom with his students. “I hope that it also expands how we think about Black people in New York City and in American cities in general from the mid-20th century onward.”

Since 2015, when the BAAHP archives were made available online, the digital recordings have been accessed by thousands of scholars around the world, from Nairobi to Singapore, Paris to Berlin. Peter Schultz Jørgensen, an urbanist and author in Denmark, has been using information from the digital archive to complete a book titled Our Bronx!

“Portraying and documenting everyday life in the Bronx, as it once was, is essential in protecting the people of the Bronx from misrepresentation, while at the same time providing valuable knowledge that can help shape their future,” he said. “Just as BAAHP gathers the web of memory, my book is about the struggles that people and community organizations have waged and are waging in the Bronx. And more important, and encouraging, it talks about how they are now scaling up via the Bronxwide Coalition and their Bronxwide plan for more economic and democratic control of the borough.”

Championing Bronx Renewal

The movement Jørgensen describes is one in which members of the Fordham community have long played key roles, according to historian and journalist Jill Jonnes, author of South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City. In the mid-1980s, when she published the first edition of the book, Bronxites were just beginning to reverse the toxic effects of long-term disinvestment and arson that had ravaged the borough.

“Today, we far better understand the interplay of blatantly racist government policies and private business decisions … that played a decisive role in almost destroying these neighborhoods,” Jonnes wrote in a preface to the third edition of South Bronx Rising, published last year by Fordham University Press. “Even as fires relentlessly spread across the borough—as landlords extracted what they could from their properties regardless of the human cost—local activists and the social justice Catholics were mobilizing to challenge and upend a system that rewarded destruction rather than investment.”

One of those Catholics was Paul Brant, S.J., a Jesuit scholastic (and later priest) who arrived at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus in the late 1960s to teach and to pursue graduate studies in philosophy. At the time, faith in the viability of cities was at a low point. Deindustrialization, suburbanization, and two decades of studied underinvestment had taken their predictable toll. The Bronx was experiencing the worst of it, and the people who lived in its neighborhoods were demonized as the cause of the problems.

Brant, who died in May 2023 at the age of 82, wanted to understand what could be done. He earned a spot in New York City’s prestigious Urban Fellows program, meant to harness ideas for a city in crisis. Gregarious and forceful, yet able to work diplomatically, he had the backing of Fordham’s president at the time, James Finlay, S.J., to serve as the University’s liaison to the Bronx. With other young Jesuits, he lived in an apartment south of campus, on 187th Street and Marion Avenue, gaining firsthand insight into the scope of neglect and abandonment afflicting the borough.

“Paul felt, well, look, there’s a lot of people still in these neighborhoods. It’s not inevitable that everything gets worse,” said Roger Hayes, GSAS ’95, one of Brant’s former Jesuit seminary classmates. “What are we going to do?”

Long conversations with Hayes and Jim Mitchell, another seminary friend, convinced Brant that solutions to the Bronx’s problems would come by directing the power of the people themselves. In 1972, they formed a neighborhood association in nearby Morris Heights. They used relationships within the parish to confront negligent landlords. Seeing nascent successes there, they moved to launch a larger group.

In 1974, Brant convinced pastors from 10 Catholic parishes to sponsor an organization to fight for the community, and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition (NWBCC) was born. The group expanded to include Protestant and Jewish clergy—membership was always nonsectarian—and went on to train leaders in hundreds of tenant associations and neighborhood groups, including the University Neighborhood Housing Program, which Fordham helped to establish in the early 1980s to create, preserve, and improve affordable housing in the Bronx, and which has been led for many years by Fordham graduate Jim Buckley, FCRH ’76.

All of these groups were knit together across racial lines and around share interests during the worst years of abandonment and destruction. When they learned that rotten apartments had roots beyond individual slumlords, they picketed banks for redlining, the practice of withholding loans to people in neighborhoods considered a poor economic risk. Before long, Bronx homemakers and blue-collar workers were boarding buses to City Hall, demanding meetings with commissioners and testifying at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

With similar people-power organizations nationwide, they won changes in the nation’s banking laws through the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, drove reinvestment to cities, and sprouted a new ecosystem of nonprofit affordable housing.

Preserving Hip-Hop’s Bronx Birthplace

It’s the stuff of legend now: On August 11, 1973, Cindy Campbell threw a “Back to School Jam” in a recreation room at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, a 100-plus-unit apartment building just blocks from the Cross Bronx Expressway in the Morris Heights neighborhood of the Bronx. Her brother, Kool Herc, DJ’d the party, which came to be considered the origin of hip-hop music.

Fast forward to 2008, when 1520 Sedgwick was laden with debt acquired by Wall Street investors who were failing to maintain the building. Organizers from the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, a group focused on preserving affordable housing, hoped that documenting 1520’s history would help save it. They asked Fordham professor Mark Naison, Ph.D., to help. His research—which led to a lecture on C-SPAN and was highlighted in an August 2008 appearance on the PBS show History Detectives—helped convince the city government to intervene, eventually preserving the building as a decent and affordable place to live. In 2021, its standing became official: The U.S. Congress adopted a resolution acknowledging 1520 Sedgwick as the birthplace of hip-hop.

Learning About Bronx Renewal

Each year, Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning shares this view of Bronx (and Fordham) history with incoming students, particularly those who participate in its Urban Plunge program in late August. The pre-orientation program gives new students the chance to explore the city’s neighborhoods and join local efforts to foster community development.

“For 30 years, the Plunge experience has offered our students their first introduction to institutions like Part of the Solution and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, organizations founded by Fordham community members in collaboration with local residents that have built community, advocated for justice, and provided services and resources for the whole person,” said Julie Gafney, Ph.D., Fordham’s assistant vice president for strategic mission initiatives and executive director of the Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Students learn directly from local residents and policy experts about how they can shape policy decisions and build a better future for Fordham and its neighbors. “We really want to introduce first-year students, along with their upper-class mentors, to what’s driving community work in the Bronx right now,” Gafney said. “It’s an ideal ground for fostering a four-year commitment to community solution-building here in the Bronx.”

Reimagining the Cross Bronx

On August 25, nearly 250 first-year Fordham students fanned out across the Bronx as part of Urban Plunge. They served lunch to those in need at POTS—Part of the Solution, where Fordham graduate Jack Marth, FCRH ’86, is the director of programs; they helped refurbish Poe Park and the community-maintained Drew Gardens, adjacent to the Bronx River; and they visited the NWBCCC, now led by Fordham graduate Sandra Lobo, FCRH ’97, GSS ’04.

Students also learned about the Cross Bronx Expressway, a major highway built in the mid-20th century that has been blamed not only for separating Bronx communities but also for worsening air and noise pollution in the borough, contributing to residents’ high rates of asthma and other respiratory diseases.

Before visiting parts of the expressway, students heard from Nilka Martell, founding director of Loving the Bronx, a nonprofit that has been leading community efforts to cap the Cross Bronx and develop public green spaces above and around it. A few years ago, Martell connected with Fordham graduate Alex Levine, FCRH ’14, who was pursuing the same goal.

At Fordham, Levine majored in economics and Chinese studies and interned at the Department of City Planning in the Bronx. By 2020, he was a third-year medical student at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where he co-founded the Bronx One Policy Group, a student advocacy organization focused on capping an approximately 2.5-mile section of the Cross Bronx that runs below street level. The idea is to cover the road with parks and install vents to remove toxic fumes caused by vehicular traffic. They said the cost of the project, estimated to be about $1 billion, would be offset by higher property values and lower health care costs.

“When you think of preventive medicine, it impacts everyone’s life,” Levine told the Bronx Times in 2021. “If we can get a small portion of this capped, then it might be a catalyst to happen on the rest of the highway. This is a project that can save money and lives.”

Martell said Levine’s group connected her with Dr. Peter Muennig, a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health who had published a study on the benefits of capping the Cross Bronx.

“We created this perfect trifecta,” she said. They brought their idea to Rep. Ritchie Torres, and in December 2022, the city received a $2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation to study how to reimagine the Cross Bronx. Fordham’s Center for Community Engaged Learning later received a $25,000 grant from the New York City Department of Transportation as one of only 10 community partners selected to help the department gather input from residents who live near the expressway.

The feasibility-study funding is just a first step, Martell told students during an Urban Plunge panel discussion that featured a representative of the city planning department’s Bronx office and an asthma program manager from the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. “This isn’t easy,” Martell said. “If this was easy and there was a point-by-point playbook on how to get it done, all these projects would happen.”

But recent Bronx history gives her ample reason to press on. “You know, 40 years ago, we had the restoration of the Bronx River. Fifty years ago, we had the creation of hip-hop.” When there was little support and “no other outlet,” she said, “Bronxites came together to create an outlet.”

“For me, this is what it’s like to be a Bronxite; this is what it’s like to be in the Bronx—to have this kind of energy and these organizing skills to get things done.”

—Eileen Markey, FCRH ’98, teaches journalism at Lehman College and is working on a book about the people’s movement that helped rebuild the Bronx in the 1970s and ’80s. Taylor Ha is a senior writer and videographer in the president’s office and the marketing and communications division at Fordham.

Disorderly Men: A Novel

In Disorderly Men, Fordham English professor Edward Cahill evokes New York City in the mid-20th century, several years before the 1969 Stonewall uprising catalyzed the movement for LGBTQ+ rights. The novel opens with a police raid on Caesar’s, a mob-owned gay bar in Greenwich Village, where Roger Moorehouse, a Wall Street banker and World War II veteran with a wife and children in Westchester, was about to leave with “the best-looking boy” in the place. “Fragments of his very good life—the fancy new office overlooking lower Broadway, the house in Beechmont Woods, Corrine and the children—all presented themselves to his imagination as fitting sacrifices to the selfish pursuit of pleasure,” Cahill writes.

Also caught up in the raid are Columbia University professor Julian Prince and his boyfriend, Gus, a “serious-minded painter” from Wisconsin who gets knocked unconscious by a police baton; and Danny Duffy, a Bronx kid who helps manage the produce department at Sloan’s Supermarket. They’re charged with “disorderly behavior,” and their lives are upended—Roger is threatened by a blackmailer, Danny loses his job and family and seeks revenge, and Julian searches for Gus, who goes missing.

Cahill depicts their crises with pathos, humor, and suspense. And like the best historical fiction, Disorderly Men not only evokes a bygone era but also feels especially vital today.

Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham

The cult writer H. P. Lovecraft was not well known during his lifetime, most of which he spent in his native Providence, Rhode Island. But the so-called weird fiction he wrote in the 1920s and 1930s—a blend of horror, science fiction, and myth—has “entranced readers” and influenced artists in various media ever since, David J. Goodwin writes in Midnight Rambles.

From shows like Netflix’s Stranger Things to the films of Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro to the novels of Stephen King and beyond, artists have been inspired by Lovecraft’s “vivid world-building and bleak cosmogony.” They’ve also been repulsed by his racist and xenophobic views.

Goodwin, the assistant director of Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture, deals with this head-on in Midnight Rambles, a chronicle of the writer’s love-hate relationship with New York and the city’s effect on him and his writing. He describes the brief period—from 1924 to 1926—when Lovecraft lived in Brooklyn, drawn there by Sonia Greene, a Ukrainian Jewish émigré he met at a literary convention in Boston. Their marriage soon fell apart, and he moved back to Providence, where he died in 1937 at age 46. “An extended encounter with a great city reveals and exaggerates the strengths, foibles, attributes, and flaws of a character in a film or a person in the flesh-and-blood world,” Goodwin writes. “This is certainly true of Lovecraft and his years in New York City.”

A Bridge to Justice: The Life of Franklin H. Williams

People tend to view 20th-century civil rights heroes through a “sepia lens,” Sherrilyn Ifill, former head of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, once said. But those leaders were not “superpeople deposited from some other planet.” They were “ordinary people of extraordinary intellect” and courage who still have the power to show us how to create “a true democracy.” Ifill was speaking at a 2018 Fordham Law School event celebrating the legacy of civil rights attorney and diplomat Franklin H. Williams, LAW ’45.

In A Bridge to Justice, Enid Gort and John M. Caher recount Williams’ “profound impact on the (still unfinished) struggle for equal rights.” Born in New York City in 1917, he attended Lincoln University, the nation’s first degree-granting historically Black university, before enrolling at Fordham Law School in 1941. Service in the segregated U.S. Army interrupted his legal studies and “scarred Williams,” the authors write, but he earned his law degree in 1945 and soon joined the NAACP.

For the next 14 years, he worked on seminal civil liberties cases that overturned racially restrictive housing covenants and school segregation. And he often put his life on the line, once barely escaping a lynch mob in Florida, where he defended three Black youths falsely accused of rape. He went on to help organize the Peace Corps; serve as ambassador to Ghana; lead a nonprofit dedicated to advancing educational opportunity for Africans, African Americans, and Native Americans; and chair a New York state judicial commission, now named in his honor, that works to promote racial and ethnic fairness in the courts. Williams died in 1990, but his life story, the authors write, “is an object lesson for those with the courage and fortitude to … help this nation heal and advance through unity rather than tribalism.”

Cross Bronx: A Writing Life

“The most important thing human beings have, the thing that makes us human, are stories,” Peter Quinn, GSAS ’75, told this magazine in 2017. For more than four decades, the Bronx native has been a remarkably accomplished storyteller—as a novelist, chief speechwriter for New York Governor Mario Cuomo, and witty, humane chronicler of New York City and the Irish American experience. In the past two years, Fordham University Press has reissued four of his novels, including Banished Children of Eve: A Novel of Civil War New York, which earned Quinn a 1995 American Book Award; and an essay collection, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (2007). Now comes this delightfully funny and frank memoir of his Catholic upbringing, his enduring affinity for his native borough (“I don’t live in the Bronx anymore, but I’ll never leave”), and the circuitous, consequential path of his writing life. His journey took him from Fordham grad student to chief speechwriter for two New York governors and corporate scribe for “five successive chairmen of the shapeshifting, ever-inflating, now-imploded Time Inc./Time Warner/AOL Time Warner,” a chapter of his memoir he cheekily calls “Killing Time.” He also writes of meeting and courting his wife, Kathy, of the “intense joy and satisfaction of fatherhood,” and of coming to terms with his own emotionally distant father. “Looking back, what I’m struck by most is luck,” he writes. “What I feel most is gratitude.”

South Bronx Rising: The Rise, Fall, and Resurrection of an American City

For nearly 40 years, Jill Jonnes has been among the most persistent chroniclers of the Bronx, giving eloquent voice to the citizen activists who have driven its revival. In 1986, when she published the first edition of South Bronx Rising, Bronxites were just beginning to reverse the toxic effects of long-term disinvestment. “Today,” she writes in the third edition of the book, “we far better understand the interplay of blatantly racist government policies and private business decisions … that played a decisive role in almost destroying [Bronx] neighborhoods.”

The revival began with “local activists and the social justice Catholics … mobilizing to challenge and upend a system that rewarded destruction rather than investment.” Countless Fordham students, faculty, and alumni have contributed to this movement, helping to establish and sustain groups including the Bronx River Alliance and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. It’s not all roses: The South Bronx remains part of the country’s poorest urban congressional district; the “calamity of COVID” hit communities hard; and gentrification threatens to undo hard-fought progress. But Jonnes provides ample reason to celebrate and continue the work.

Our Shared Storm tells the overlapping stories of four characters as they play out in five different future scenarios. Each of the five parts of the book takes place in the year 2054 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of the Parties—better known as the COP—as a superstorm approaches. The characters’ roles, motivations, and actions differ, though, as a result of how their worlds have dealt or failed to deal with the effects of climate change.

There’s Diya, whose job is different in each story, but who is consistently a power player within the world of climate negotiations. There’s Luis, a Buenos Aires local who exists around the periphery of the conference, from being a driver in one story to a kidnapper in another. There’s Saga, a climate activist (and in one story, a pop star) whose level of pessimism—and comfort—in dealing with government delegates oscillates from part to part. And then there’s Noah, whom Hudson described as his “personal id,” a mid-level U.S. delegate (or, in the same story as pop star Saga, an exploitative entrepreneur) who has limited control over his country’s commitments but who does what he can to grease the diplomatic wheels.

“I got this idea of these four characters and figured out how to sort of remix them each time,” Hudson said. “It’s really fun to do [that], to take your characters and rethink who they are in all these different ways. One thing you can do then is try to find these moments of opportunity and figure out where your characters swerve, and then figure out what that says about the different worlds.”

In a blurb for Our Shared Storm, the celebrated science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson wrote that Hudson succeeded in finding creative ways to explore those swerves and the worlds that led to them.

“Hudson has found a way,” Robinson wrote, “to strike together the various facets of our climate future, sparking stories that are by turns ingenious, energetic, provocative, and soulful.”

Negotiating the Future

The book’s futures are based on a set of climate-modeling scenarios called the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways, or SSPs, which were developed by climate experts in the 2010s and used in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth assessment report in 2021. The scenarios range from “Sustainability,” in which aggressive climate goals are met and a more utopian future takes shape, to “Middle of the Road,” a continuation of current trends of inequality and consumption, to three more dire possibilities—“Regional Rivalry,” “Inequality,” and “Fossil-Fueled Development”—each of which would bring its own variety of high-level threats.

Hudson came across the SSP framework after starting the master’s degree program in sustainability at Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation in 2017 and realized that it laid out scenarios for the future much in the same way that so much speculative fiction does, and in this case, with the explicit backing of scientific research.

“As soon as I read about [the SSPs], I was like, ‘Oh, these are science fiction stories,’” he recalled.

After visiting the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Vienna, which houses the SSP database, and meeting with scholars there to talk further about their research, Hudson realized that by writing five futures set in the same time and place with the same characters, he could eliminate variables and make it a kind of experiment.

“Originally,” he said, “a big part of the way I framed it as a master’s thesis was, ‘I’m going to do practice-based research to analyze my own experience writing these stories and figure out just how hard or easy it is to create literature based on scientific models and rigorous ideas about the climate.’”

Then, in December 2018, a member of his thesis committee at ASU, Sonja Klinsky, arranged for him to be part of the university’s observer delegation at COP24 in Katowice, Poland. Attending the conference, and thinking about the storytelling possibilities of a hypothetical climate event affecting that kind of event, helped him flesh out the book’s structure.

“When I talked with IIASA, we had thought, ‘How does each scenario handle a climate shock?’” Hudson said. “What could show how, [if]a superstorm hits, each scenario handles it differently based on the investments they’ve made?”

In the book, the storm is very strong and causes damage in each scenario, but local and global communities’ ability to deal with that damage—and the levels of suffering and violence that go with it—vary widely.

An Intellectual Journey and a Speculative Movement

Hudson grew up in St. Louis and moved to New York City to enroll at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where he majored in political science with a minor in creative writing. He also was the opinions editor for the The Observer, the award-winning student newspaper at the Lincoln Center campus.

“The Observer, doing the opinions page, writing a column—all those things definitely were steps on my intellectual journey … of being really keen on stories about arguments,” Hudson said. “And I think discovering that I liked talking to people about their writing was a big discovery that happened there.”

After graduating in 2009, he spent a year working as a journalist in India, where he had studied abroad as a Fordham undergrad, and when he got back to the States, he became a reporter at the St. Louis edition of Patch. From there, he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, where he did freelance writing and political and nonprofit consulting.

In 2015, Hudson wrote an essay called “On the Political Dimensions of Solarpunk,” which laid out the practical implications of an aesthetic movement that portrays a utopian future in which solar energy is harnessed creatively to build beautiful, sustainable cities and communities. Like the dystopian cyberpunk genre before it, solarpunk is more than just an art movement—it was meant to portray real possibilities for how the world might look in the future.

When trying to define the term in the essay, Hudson wrote, “Let’s tentatively call it a speculative movement: a collaborative effort to imagine and design a world of prosperity, peace, sustainability, and beauty, achievable with what we have from where we are.”

Hudson met, around that time, another writer and futurist thinker, Adam Flynn, who in 2014 had written an essay on solarpunk. The two co-wrote a short story, “Sunshine State,” that won the first Everything Change Climate Fiction Contest sponsored by ASU’s Imagination and Climate Futures Initiative. Seeing the work that was taking place there led Hudson to apply to the university’s sustainability master’s program, from which he graduated in 2020. In addition to his work as a fiction writer, Hudson has stayed on as a fellow at the Center for Science and the Imagination’s Imaginary College, which partners with individuals and groups “advancing [the] mission of fresh, creative, and ambitious thinking about the future.” The college counts Robinson among its resident philosophers, along with other notable writers like Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling.

And while Our Shared Storm began as his master’s thesis, with its publication by Fordham University Press, Hudson hopes that it can help a wider audience see that we still have options for what our climate future will look like.

Science Fiction as an Impetus to Action

While Hudson does believe that speculative fiction can help people imagine a brighter future, he said stories alone can’t save the world.

“I think they’re a necessary, if not sufficient, part of the process, [and] we need a huge tidal wave of mobilization that includes a huge amount of culture making. We’re going to need art. We’re going to need music. We’re going to need TV shows that do for solar panels what TV and movies did for cars back in the ’50s and ’60s, [making] car culture cool. We’re going to have to do that for these technologies of sustainability.”

But without massive organizing and political action, Hudson believes, “we could figure out how to communicate this to the public in a really effective way and still lose.”

Our Shared Storm touches on the conflicts that often arise when people and communities want to effect change—is it easier to accomplish goals through established political systems or through grassroots work that doesn’t rely upon state action?

Hudson has described solarpunk as a countercultural movement. “It should not be about the people in power,” he said recently. “It should be about the people who are not in power, who are sort of challenging those systems.” But after witnessing firsthand—and writing about—the geopolitical mechanisms that dominate spaces such as the annual COP meetings, he has come to appreciate the need to work within traditional political and diplomatic systems.

“I think learning how the institutions work—the national, local, and state governments that are trying to implement the treaties—and then kind of inserting yourself into those processes can be really powerful,” he said. “The stories are there to help people understand these dynamics and institutions, and help them get a little smarter about policy, get a little more strategic about where they put their efforts, [so they’re] not going to get taken for a ride.”

In Our Shared Storm’s most optimistic story, a strong labor movement is key to influencing government policy, and while he acknowledged that there is no one easy solution, Hudson believes that the working class uniting—and pushing for things like a Green New Deal through general strikes—has the potential to positively shape the path ahead.

So, with the scenarios laid out, and with some ideas about the actions necessary to avoid the worst-case ones, what kind of climate future does Hudson see us moving toward? That kind of prognosticating, he insisted, is not part of his project.

“What I was interested in was how we’re shaped by opportunities and material conditions,” Hudson said, harking back to his characters’ changing circumstances and swerving fates.

“All these things that I think end up shaping our lives—those were kind of the pivot points that I wanted [to show readers]. The point being that climate and the investments we make to deal with it are going to be a big factor in shaping those pivot points for billions of people.”

“I would’ve thought, well, I’ve conquered literature, so I might as well take on another art form, perhaps interpretive dance. But Peter kept writing,” he said. “Thank God for dance.”

In September, several months after reissuing Banished Children of Eve, which earned Quinn a 1995 American Book Award, Fordham University Press reissued his follow-up: a noir-tinged trilogy of historical mysteries spanning much of the 20th century, all featuring private detective Fintan Dunne.

“I love Raymond Chandler,” Quinn told this magazine in 2017, but “I always felt that his character Philip Marlowe, he’s really Irish American with his hard-edged blend of cynicism and idealism, and he belongs in New York. So that was the inspiration for Fintan Dunne.”

Set in New York and Berlin during the late 1930s, Hour of the Cat (2005) starts with a homicide investigation—the murder of a nurse, an innocent man on death row—but grows to include the eugenics movement and the lead-up to the systematized murder of World War II.

In The Man Who Never Returned (2010), it’s the mid-1950s, and a retired Dunne is lured by a media mogul into investigating the still-unsolved 1930 disappearance of Judge Joseph Force Crater.

In Dry Bones (2013), Dunne comes face to face with both the Holocaust, through his involvement with an ill-fated Office of Strategic Services rescue mission in Slovakia in 1945, and the moral murk of Cold War espionage on the eve of the Cuban revolution.

Throughout the trilogy, Quinn, who earned a master’s degree in history at Fordham, deftly turns historical themes into suspenseful, literary fiction. As Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy once said, Quinn “takes history by the throat and makes it confess,” invariably aiming his writing at questions that matter.

The Fintan Dunne trilogy is published under New York ReLit, a Fordham University Press imprint publishing reissues of historical, literary fiction about New York or written by authors from New York.

Teaching While Black: A New Voice on Race and Education in New York City

Originally published in 2016, this memoir by Bronx-born writer, educator, and activist Pamela Lewis, FCRH ’03, has been getting renewed attention amid the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a deeply personal account of her experiences teaching in one of the most racially and economically segregated school systems in the country. Lewis details her frustrations working within a system she feels does not value her own understanding, as a Black woman, of what children of color need to succeed. She writes about the effects of “double consciousness” on her and her students, using the term, coined by W.E.B. Du Bois, that refers to the challenge African Americans face when forced to view themselves through the eyes of those around them. Ultimately, Lewis challenges educators to acknowledge the role race plays in their classrooms and, above all, “to not be color blind.” —Nicole LaRosa

Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor

As a fiction writer whose Catholic faith was a driving force in her work, Flannery O’Connor created “powerful anti racist parables,” writes Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Ph.D., associate director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. And yet, in her personal correspondence, she expressed “attitudes that are hard to describe as anything but patently racist.” In Radical Ambivalence, O’Donnell sets out to explore these contradictions “rather than try to deny, defend, or resolve” them. She helps readers see portrayals of race in O’Connor’s fiction from contemporary, historical, political, and theological perspectives. Although the opportunity for O’Connor’s thinking on race to evolve was cut short—she died from lupus at age 39, just one month after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—O’Donnell ultimately hopes to “focus attention where O’Connor clearly wanted it to be, as evidenced in many of her stories: on the ways in which racism and a racist caste system shape (and misshape) white people, its inventors and perpetrators.” —Ryan Stellabotte

Notable New Yorkers of Manhattan’s Upper West Side

Jim Mackin, FCLC ’76, is a retired financial executive turned New York City historian. As the founder of WeekdayWalks, he often guides people on strolls through offbeat areas of the city. In this richly detailed, photo-filled book, he focuses on his own neighborhood, writing about nearly 600 notable former residents of the Upper West Side. He highlights the famous (Humphrey Bogart, Barack Obama, and others), but he also celebrates the uncommon lives of scientists, explorers, journalists, and judges whose stories should be better known. He calls attention to women whose feats have been unsung, such as pilot Elinor Smith and nuclear physicist Harriet Brooks, and writes about the “Old Community,” a tight-knit African American enclave that counted Marcus Garvey and Billie Holiday among its residents. —Ryan Stellabotte

Mark Naison, Ph.D., professor of history and African and African American studies, said Jones’ life made for a great story because it was so “incredibly improbable” but also relatable.

“A lot of people growing up in the Bronx can really identify with his stories, in terms of what’s going in their families and neighborhoods, and what gives you the ability to get out of difficult circumstances and become successful,” said Naison, who co-authored the memoir, which was published in 2009 by Fordham University Press.

On Oct. 16, Naison and the Center for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL) invited a dozen students from Mott Hall Bronx High School to a class he teaches called The Bronx: Immigration, Race, and Culture. Though the books hadn’t come in time for the class, Naison made a compelling case for why the students should read it when they arrive. In the Zoom conversation, the class dissected the story’s main themes, including the importance of mentorship and code-switching, or changing the way you express yourself with different groups of people. They also talked about how books like The Rat That Got Away, whose author was profiled in The New York Times and a 2009 Fordham News story, can have the power to change people’s lives. 

“It’s a book about a young man who grew up in the ‘50s in a housing project in the Bronx when public housing was a really desirable place to live, watched it deteriorate in the face of drug epidemics and the Vietnam War, and then led a double life as a drug dealer and a basketball player and ended up—because he had mentors—being sent to a New England prep school after spending four months in Rikers Island,” Naison said. “It’s a real, true story.” 

An ‘Upside Down’ View on College Classes

In his memoir, Jones writes about how rapping was a popular way of communicating with his peers in the Sixties, said Naison. So Naison showed his students and guests the video of the song “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang—the first hip-hop single to land in the Billboard top 40—and rapped to two different songs himself: “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and his own “Notorious Ph.D.” 

“The students thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen,” Naison said. “This is turning their views of what a college is like—or college professors—a little upside down, but hopefully getting them excited about going to college and then having the opportunity to be creative and expand their horizons.” 

Jainaba Camara, a senior at Mott Hall Bronx High School, said this class was the first college course she had attended. The media often portrays professors as strict instructors who don’t interact with their students, she wrote in an email. But at Fordham, a professor rapped to music, created a space where she felt comfortable sharing her thoughts, and taught her a valuable lesson that will help her prepare for college, she said. 

“Everyone has a story, no matter how boring or uninteresting you think your life is. It was really motivating and gave me the push I needed to start my college essay,” said Camara, who wants to become a nurse or health care professional someday. 

Keeping A Connection with the Community

Alison Rini, a senior English major at Fordham College at Rose Hill, said she recognized some of the high school students. The day before, she had virtually assisted a few of them with their Common Application college essays through a CCEL initiative that started this semester. 

With everything being on Zoom, she said, it’s easy to have class sessions with local high schoolers—“to still keep that connection with the community even though they can’t physically go on campus,” said Rini, who works as a research assistant for the Bronx African-American History Project and the Bronx Italian-American History Initiative. “It was really refreshing to have everyone altogether.” 

In honor of the book’s release, Fordham Law Dean Matthew Diller interviewed Feerick in a conversation that was streamed live on April 23. And on May 27, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, swapped places on with Fordham Conversations host Robin Shannon to interview Feerick for WFUV. In a conversation produced by Shannon and coordinated by Fordham Law clinical visiting professor John Rogan, the two discussed Irish history, Feerick’s family, and his extensive career as a lawyer.

Listen to the interview at Fordham Conversations.

Joseph McShane: Good morning, I’m Father McShane, and I’ve been asked to be the guest host for Fordham Conversations. I must tell you I was very honored to be asked to do this today because it gives me the opportunity to have a long conversation with a dear friend of mine, one of the most respected and loved members of the Fordham community, John Feerick, who had, as many of you know, a legendary run of 20 years as the dean of Fordham Law School. After many years of people asking him to put his thoughts down on paper in the form of an autobiography, he has finally done so. The autobiography has a marvelous title, it comes from Seamus Heaney: “That Further Shore: A Memoir of Irish Roots and American Promise.” It is my honor now to introduce to you all for a conversation, JF.

John Ferrick: Thank you very much, Father.

JM: John, I must say when I was asked to read your autobiography, I accepted not the challenge, but the gift of the opportunity very eagerly. But I have to tell you at the outset, I wondered how would this man, who has spent a lifetime in service doing extraordinary things, but always being a man of great humility, how is he going to write and autobiography which will give us all a sense of who he is and what he had done?

And in the book, I have to say, John, you are yourself. That is to say, you tell a wonderful story, but you always point to other people. You rarely, if ever, allow yourself to be center stage here. I say that at the outset and my cousin, who did the introduction, said something similar. This is a man who has really spent his life doing good, but quietly and unobtrusively. So I’m glad that the autobiography is out and I’m also glad I have the opportunity to tease a few things out if you don’t mind.

JF: Thank you.

JM: John, I’m going to start at your beginnings, which are beginnings that actually pre-date your birth. You go into a great deal of detail in the early part of your autobiography about your Irish roots. From County Mayo, God help us. Your great love for your mother and your father. Could I ask you, how deeply did the Irish nature of your family and your upbringing influence you in those key formative years in grammar school and high school down in Melrose, especially in St. Angela’s Parish? How did all of that play itself out in your life?

JF: It probably plays itself out in a lot of ways. Love of family, love of doing good to the extent you can beyond your family. As I think back on my youth, there was so much happiness in the home, even though my father was away during most of the war years. There was Irish music in the home. There was a constant reminder to us that we had a family in Ireland. My parents never saw their parents again after they immigrated from Ireland. But we were conscious of my mother sending clothes and other items to her family in Ireland. My mother sang and danced. My father played the concertina, which I called an accordion in those years. Their Irish friends came over. There was a joy in the home. There were pictures up on the wall, and one was of somebody wanting to go home. I always thought that reflected my mother thinking of her family in Ireland and my father thinking of his family in Ireland. So my Irish roots really were all over me.

JM: John, I have to say there are sections in the early part of the book where you talk about life in Melrose that had me rolling on the floor laughing. The reason is, it was so similar to the experience that my family had living in the Bronx. Mom and dad playing their roles very, very well. Your mother being the playful disciplinarian and your dad watching over everything, more bluff than anything else, more love than anything else. It was a home in which love was really the language spoken and the atmosphere that prevailed.

There also seems to have been deep faith that you picked up and made your own. You talk about the Ursuline Sisters, you talk about being a student at Bishop Dubois High School with the diocesan priests and the Marist Brothers, you talk about that strange moment where you had to decide, “Am I going to take the offer from Dubois or am I going to take the exam for Cardinal Hayes High School?” And you threw your lot in with Dubois. But through it all there is this marvelous presence of deep faith, and it seems to have come naturally from your home environment.

JF: Well, it certainly came from the environment in my home. We said our prayers at night, we kneeled down. And there were expressions of our faith on the wall and right around the corner. The St. Angela Merici Parish church was a short walk up Morris Avenue from my family’s home on East 161st Street. There were constant reminders of our faith as Catholics. We went to confession on a very regular basis. It was everywhere. My parents expressed the faith and my education, as you point out, was with the Ursuline Sisters. And I became an altar boy at St. Angela Merici parish. I was surrounded, you might say, by a reminder of who I was as a boy and as a member of the Catholic faith.

JM: In describing your own life and your own way of proceeding—and this where the marvelous self-deprecation of JF that we’re all familiar with comes in—you say, “I was a person without much focus and, therefore, early on I began to not have the ability to say no, which has resulted in my being such a volunteer. When someone comes to me and asks for help, I can’t really refuse.” This seems to be, John, from your earliest years, one of the great distinguishing characteristics of your life.

Everyone looks to you for help and everyone looks to you for advice. John, you’ve never been able to escape this openness to service. How do you explain that? This great openness to service that you have shown throughout your life?

JF: In the course of doing the book and looking back, I realized there’s a word that describes a lot of it: restlessness. It was a restlessness on my part. I did all kinds of part-time jobs from my earliest years: shoveling snow, delivering groceries, making Italian sandwiches, delivering newspapers. It was a way to make a few dollars, get tips or get some candy bars from Moe when you delivered the papers on Sunday. Opportunities flowed for young children to do things and to receive some recognition. I did that right through high school, right through college. I was used to doing a lot of things and enjoying what I did. When I entered Fordham Law School, I continued to work in the supermarket for my first year, including during the summer when I worked in a law firm in the afternoons. So I just carried that variety and diversity, and there was nothing I did that I could recall now that I didn’t enjoy doing. That’s what I brought to the practice of law.

JM: John, just as an aside, I have to point out something that I picked up in the book. Here you are an immensely successful man in the world of law, in the world of academic administration, in the world of government and politics, immensely successful. But at every turn in the book, you always seem to be a little surprised that you’re successful, such as when you land the job at Skadden and when you’re sought out by governors. Nobody else is surprised because of who you are in many ways. I say this on behalf of everyone I know: you define goodness, you really do, and selflessness. And you’re also a wise, wise man. I just want to say that because you’re so loved that it has to be said. I don’t know if you’ll even accept it. I know you’re Irish and I’m Irish, and, therefore, we turn away from those things.

You opened a door. You said “Fordham,” that magic word for you and me. What was your experience like as a student at Fordham College and as a student at the law school? You mentioned a few of your Jesuit mentors in the book, what was their impact on you?

JF: As I entered Fordham College, my existence was limited to a few blocks in the Bronx. Even though I went over to Dubois High School in Manhattan by bus or trolley, my life was 161st Street and 162nd Street up to the Grand Concourse and Yankee Stadium. That was my village. It was a very, very small village. That was my world. And when I went to Fordham College, it was a totally new world of priests and lay teachers who cared deeply for their students. There was a sense of community at the school. We loved our sports teams. I got involved in the booster club by my late classmate Bob Bradley. We used to go out to New Jersey to watch the basketball team play. There was a larger world that opened to me at Fordham College. Of all my school days, that was my most peaceful period of time where I saw things I never saw before. The Constitution of the United States, for example. I had fabulous teachers.

My faith was developed. We took 24 credits of philosophy and theology. I had theology and philosophy every year, so it was a constant nourishment of the faith I grew up with in the home, but at a different level.

I met lifelong friends, like Joe Hart whose burial I was at yesterday. I was asked by a Jesuit priest at the cemetery to say something. I said, “At Fordham College, I met such wonderful classmates and some remain lifelong friends of mine.”

The values of my faith and the values of service came home in a bang for me at Fordham College. I was asked to be a class representative in my second year, then vice president of my class in my third year, and then vice president of the student body in my last year. The notion of serving others came home in a big way because of the opportunities that came to me. And none of us were looking for another position, we had opportunities in our present positions to do all you could for your class or the school.

It was wonderful, and I describe in my book how Fordham College and then Fordham Law School impacted me. Fordham Law School was different. It was buckling down in terms of rigor, certainly in first year of law school. We loved our teachers and most of us worked part-time after classes. Because of Fordham College, I had developed an academic record that I didn’t have in high school and grammar school. All of a sudden, I seemed to come alive academically at Fordham College, and that continued right into the law school. I remember during college writing papers on subjects like separation of powers. I used my paper on that subject for testimony I gave to Congress on why the 25th Amendment should be adopted. I was introduced to the concept of separation of powers at Fordham College in my government courses.

I had Father McKenna as a teacher in three or four classes, he eventually, as you know, went to Nigeria. I had lay teachers and members of the Society of Jesus who educated me, not only the basic first or second year of the curriculum, but also in the third and fourth year. I am what I am thanks to my parents and thanks to all those who were my teachers and role models and mentors in so many different ways.

JM: John, you went from the law school to the law firm of Skadden Arps. Even as a very young man, you played a major role in constitutional law with your work on the 25th Amendment. You became overnight an intellectual force and a legal force to be, if not reckoned with, always considered, including in the last few years, and you’ve worn that mantle with dignity and with restraint. But you do know you really are an extraordinarily important figure in American jurisprudence and American political life as a result of that, you do know that I hope?

JF: Well, I don’t feel that. I’m surprised at times when the library at the law school tells me that the book I wrote on the 25th Amendment and also my earlier book on presidential succession are the basic source books on that subject today. I had the opportunity to work on the 25th Amendment as a very young lawyer because I had written an article for the Fordham Law Review on the subject of presidential inability. When President Kennedy died, it was the most recent article on the subject. I had sent reprints before the assassination hoping to interest people in solving a problem that I had learned about. I would have never had thought that the article would have led to my involvement with a group of former attorneys general and very distinct lawyers in crafting an amendment to the United States Constitution.

I had no sense as I was working on it that it was something that was going to be in the United States Constitution. You were hoping, you were doing everything you could to persuade Congress and others about it. I was just working away and hoping, not expecting, that all of a sudden this was going to go into the Constitution because people had been working on the problem for 100 years. But it got solved at that time because of the assassination of a president and great leaders in Congress of both parties. Congress worked together and they allowed a number of us, including myself, an opportunity to make suggestions and even contribute language that’s in the Constitution today.

JM: An extraordinary achievement and, yet again, John, you characteristically throw the spotlight on others. But it is a great gift to the country thanks to that fine mind you developed at Saint Angela’s and then at Dubois and then at Fordham College and the law school. And everyone is in your debt, not just Fordham, but the whole country’s in your debt.

John, I’m going to go to a conversation that you had, if you don’t mind me doing this, with Father Finlay in 1982. A common man born and raised in Manhattan approached a Mayo descendant raised in the Bronx and placed before you what he later told me was the boldest thing he had ever done, but also the cleverest thing he had ever done. He told me about the conversation he had with you about giving up your career at Skadden and becoming the dean of the law school. Do you remember that?

JF: I can’t ever forget that. I have tears in my eyes just thinking about it. He was just a lovely Jesuit who I had met when he was teaching political science at Fordham College. He had asked me to do a class, I think even before the 25th Amendment was in the Constitution, on the subject of presidential inability. My wife came with me to the class. And then years later he asked me to go on the Board of Trustees. He was such an important part of my life. I thought the world of him.

I received a call from him after Dean McLaughlin announced that he was leaving. I had been president of the law school’s alumni association for a number of years for Dean McLaughlin and he had a major influence on my life. Father Finlay and I sat down at the University Club and he asked if I would consider putting my name in for the deanship of the school. In words and substance, he told me how important the law school was to the Society of Jesus. He asked if I would consider coming over and helping develop a vision for the future law school. That was so empowering to me, especially because I had the experience with Dean McLaughlin being involved in the life of the law school and then as a trustee of the University from 1978 until that conversation a few years later with Father Finlay.

It took me a while to process the offer. I was a senior partner at Skadden Arps in years of service, the chair of its hiring committee of lawyers, and on its executive committee. And I said to myself, “Well, if you leave, you’re not going to return.” At the same time, there was something within me that said, “This is your time to embrace full-time, not part-time, an opportunity to render service.” My decision to serve as dean went beyond any service I had done in my life. My father was shocked, I would say, by my decision from an economic standpoint. My mother was beginning to decline and lose her memory at that point, and I don’t know if she quite absorbed what was happening. My wife was very quiet, but I had a sense that in her quietness, she was hoping I would make that decision believing, in part, that I would have more time for her and our six children.

So on the day of the deadline to apply for the deanship, I talked to Professor Joseph Sweeney, who chaired the committee looking for a new dean. I said, “I would like to put my name in for the deanship.” Then on December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, I remember coming home from mass and Emalie saying to me, “Father Finlay called you.” I said, “Uh, oh.” I called him back, and he offered me the deanship.

Being dean just had such a profound impact on me for the rest of my life, up to the present time. In fact, at yesterday’s burial service in Boston of my longest friend, Joseph Hart, the priest there in his few words said, “I understand there’s with us today a friend who was dean of Fordham Law School, and he and Joe had this special relationship.” So even as a former dean you have an acknowledgment, I suppose, of one’s service as dean. And, Father, you’ve been extraordinarily generous giving me the title of dean emeritus. It was a great part of my life. Nothing like it.

JM: John, I should tell you that Seamus, Father Finlay, when he recounted the story, told me that he chose to call you on December 8th knowing that you’d be coming home from mass and, therefore, you’d be most vulnerable. And you accepted on the spot and made his life much easier, much happier. You and I know this, he was a perfect gentleman and a very fine priest and an exemplary Jesuit. He would say that getting you to become the dean of the law school was the crowning achievement of his presidency, and all of us would agree.

John, you took the law school from what was a strong law school, from what was seen as a good, city, meat and potatoes, law school, and you made it a force. You brought it up to new levels. You hired boldly and wisely and well. You encouraged people in their teaching and in their research, and you defined the culture in a new way. It was during your time that the law school adopted a very clear motto and mission. You were the man who told Fordham lawyers that they were to be in service of others, no matter what else they did. As you and I know, that is the mantra that is now deep in the hearts of everyone in the law school and anyone who’s ever gone to the law school. From the moment they entered, that is what they are challenged to be. Not just good practitioners, although you were insistent on that, but lawyers who recognize that life is not complete, you would say, unless it is adorned with service.

Then time and time again, governors turned to you. I know that you had two New York state commissions on government ethics and many other public service roles. You became, for everybody, the go-to guy, the honest man, the honest broker who could be trusted with the most extraordinary things, the most difficult problems, that the city, the state, the profession could face. And you did these things, you took them on and you brought them to completion successfully. You’ve had an impact well beyond the law school. I think this is a great part of your life and a great part of your legacy. I know from all the conversations we’ve had and from reading your autobiography that this is important to you. It goes back to your philosophy that the inner man and the outer man has to be one. Let the inner man be generous and the outer man will show it. Am I misconstruing what it is that you’ve been doing all these years to such effect and so humbly?

JF: There’s so much you’ve just said, Father. I guess I would just say, as to the law school, the best thing I did as dean was to develop an approach to governing that was consensual in nature. Listening to faculty, listening to administrators, listening to the alumni, and hearing so many ideas and suggestions, especially the faculty’s desire to see their respective areas grow. In my position, I was able to support and encourage so many different people who had ideas. They weren’t my ideas flowing down. I got ideas from listening to people. The transformation, as it might be described, of the law school over the last two decades of the last century is really a tribute to hundreds and hundreds of people who served the law school full-time and the alumni of the school who supported, time and again, all of those initiatives. As I say in the book, I was a lucky person to be in a place where I could be part of it.

As to all the commissions, how I disliked doing that kind of work. I didn’t grow up as a prosecutor or in law enforcement as such. I learned you have to take the hits when they come, criticisms when they come, and, at times, affirmation about work that’s been done. I kept seeing the values of Saint Ignatius. I told myself, “Get out there and do the work, and don’t be looking for credit. Just do what’s right and what’s good as you see it.” I held that as I dealt with low moments and high moments. I was constantly reminded of those values. And that’s really what I aspired to express in whatever way that I could in doing all of that work.

I followed the work of Robert Mueller in Washington, and I saw in him a person who had a life of devotion to law enforcement, as FBI director, as a US attorney. Judge Patel, a Fordham Law graduate, knew him very well when she was the chief judge of the federal district court out in San Francisco. She used to describe him to me as a model. When he ran into those difficult moments of being criticized by people upset with the investigation, I understood what he must be feeling, I think, because in a smaller way, in a different way, I experienced similar situations chairing those state commissions. Looking back, I have no regrets. I did my best, and believe that some of the work of the commissions, which involved a lot of commissioners and a lot of people, have improved the ethical climate in New York state to some extent.

JM: There’s no doubt about that, John. Our time sadly is going to come to an end. I’m going to ask the most difficult question of someone like yourself, because you don’t even know how to spell the word “pride” or the word “proud.” But, John, what is it that you’re the most proud of as you look back on what could only be described as a storied career, a stellar life. What are you most proud of?

JF: I would say maybe three things, if I could have a multi-faceted answer. First, I’d certainly include becoming involved in the cause of an amendment to the Constitution to deal with the problems of presidential inability and vice-presidential vacancy. When I was on the ground working on it as young person, I didn’t fully realize the importance of the moment.

Another moment was when I became a dean of the law school and the law school had an aspiration of doubling the space basically at 140 West 62nd Street. There were those, like Jesuit Brother Kenny and others, who said, “There’s no way the law school is going to raise the money to cover the cost of doubling of the space.” I took that as a challenge. I got the alumni and others involved and, ultimately, we made it happen. Father O’Hare came along and was very supportive of us financially. I think we had a debt of $2 million or so to the University when the costs were all in, and I remember meeting the faculty with Father O’Hare and others. I said, “Father, based on the contributions, so to speak, that we’ve made is there any chance that I can get that debt off the law school?” And he said, “That’s a good idea, we’ll do it.” But it was that project, the doubling of the size of the law school, that certainly was a high point for me. I think it gave me credibility because a lot of people thought it couldn’t be done. But the whole community came together and my job was to go all over the place to seek support for it.

The third thing I’m proud of is the relationships I developed with all of the young people that I came to know when I was dean of the law school. Anybody who wanted to come and needed help, my door was always open for them. There were students who came in and cried because they couldn’t find a job. There were others who came in because they couldn’t afford tuition at the law school, but thanks to the caring community that I was a part of we were able to respond and able to help. If I put all of those individual meetings and opportunities together, that would constitute the third thing that I’m proud of. I don’t feel comfortable with the word proud, I’m just glad that I had the opportunity to be there in times of need for other people.

JM: John, I acknowledge at the outset that it was going to be the most difficult question because pride doesn’t figure in the way in which you live your life. I’m going to say two things, if I could. I think that your letter to your grandchildren, which is at the end of the book, should be required reading for anyone’s grandchild. It’s filled with, I would say, balance and wisdom and great love. It’s kind of like the exclamation point at the end of the book and I want to thank you for that.

John, we’re going to have to stop because time has run out. I could go on with you for days, not just hours, I could go on for days with you. My last word to you is this: I know I speak for everyone, for all of us who know you, we are immensely grateful for your presence in our lives. We’re grateful for your wisdom, the constancy of your devotion and the fact that to know you is to be ennobled. And you have to know that.

JF: Father, if I could just bring it to a close. I appreciate greatly what you just said, but I’m a small part of a University that has enjoyed great presidents and you are truly a great president. And your predecessor, Father O’Hare, was a great president. Father Finlay was a great president. And when I was a student, I so admired Father McGinley. He used to walk around the campus saying his prayers, and when he was no longer the president he came to a lot of alumni gatherings and we always found each other and spoke.

I’m a small part of an institution that has truly giants and great priests who serve humanity far more than the kind of things that I’ve done. Their reach is so majestic. I thank you, Father, for your presidency of Fordham University at a very difficult time. I also thank you for your masses, your readings, and your reflections, which have been empowering for all of us who are trying to get meaning in the present moment. You’ve helped us and I thank you.

JM: John, thank you very much, you don’t know how much that means to me to hear you say that about Seamus, and about Larry, and about Joe. I am not worthy to be in the same sentence with any of them. But I want to go back and have the last word. John, you’re for us a source of enormous pride because you live with such integrity and you ennoble everyone that you meet. And with that, John, thank you very, very much.

JF: Thank you.

Pope Francis: In Your Eyes I See My Words

This spring saw the publication of the second volume in Fordham University Press’ collection of homilies, letters, and speeches by Jorge Mario Bergoglio, archbishop of Buenos Aires, in the years before he became Pope Francis. (The third and final volume is due in October.) In an introduction to this book, which covers 2005 to 2008, Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham, writes about the future pope’s focus on “ecological ethics” during this time, and his growing ability to “[enter]into the tragedies of his fellow citizens” and “speak truth to power,” particularly after 194 people were killed in a fire at a nightclub whose owner had ignored the fire safety code in the building’s construction.

For Marina A. Herrera, Ph.D., GSAS ’71, ’74, who translated the pope’s words into English, the book highlights the pope’s “boundless linguistic creativity” and gives readers an opportunity to see how “a mind destined to lead the Church in this turbulent time was shaped in the laboratory of a life lived among the people he served, traveling in public buses and shunning the trappings of hierarchical privilege.”

That Further Shore: A Memoir of Irish Roots and American Promise

In this memoir, John D. Feerick, FCRH ’58, LAW ’61, dean emeritus and Norris Professor of Law at Fordham Law School, reflects with characteristic humility and humor on his upbringing as the eldest child of Irish immigrant parents in the South Bronx, his landmark role in framing the U.S. Constitution’s 25th Amendment during the 1960s, his leadership as dean of Fordham Law for 18 years, and his commitment to a life lived in the service of others. The Prayer of St. Francis (“Lord, make me an instrument of your peace”) hung on a plaque on his Fordham office wall for many years, he writes, a reminder of “the importance of being a bridge builder” and “not letting the pressure of everyday life take away from our capacity to feel for one another.”

Related Story: On May 27, Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, served as guest host of the show Fordham Conversations to interview John Feerick for WFUV, the University’s public media station. 

Lady Liberty: An Illustrated History of America’s Most Storied Woman

In a series of brief essays—richly illustrated with 33 full-page reproductions of paintings by Antonio Masi—Joan Marans Dim recounts the epic struggle to create the Statue of Liberty and transport it from France to the U.S. during the 19th century. She also writes about the immigrant experience, and how “The New Colossus,” an 1883 sonnet by Emma Lazarus (“Give me your tired, your poor,/ your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”) helped transform the statue into a symbol of American freedom and economic prosperity for arriving immigrants—an ideal often at odds with U.S. immigration policy and Americans’ shifting attitudes toward immigrants through the years.

Below are some tips, ideas, and time-honored traditions from members of the Fordham community to help make the holiday fun, restorative, and as stress-free as possible.

Gratitude for Family—‘the Greatest Blessing’

Thanksgiving brings with it the chance to reflect on our blessings, and chief among them is family, said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham.

“I find myself singing ‘We Gather Together’ often in the course of the day,” said Father McShane, referring to the traditional Thanksgiving hymn. “Moreover, as the ordained member of my family, I lead grace at our Thanksgiving dinner. Prior to offering the prayer, I ask my family to spend a few moments in silent prayer reviewing all of the graces and blessings that they have experienced in the course of the year (and in the course of their lives), with special emphasis on the people God has brought into our lives. We dwell in that moment and savor the rich memories we all have of those who used to be with us around the Thanksgiving table. Then we pray in a formal way and toast our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters—the greatest blessing that God sent us.”

Friendsgiving Dinners

For those who find themselves without plans for a big Thanksgiving dinner, or for those who’d like to squeeze in an extra one and meet some new people in the process, Fordham student entrepreneurs have got you covered.

Gabelli School students Joseph Zoyhofski, Liam Scott, Alex TenBarge, and Emily Lehman founded a meal-sharing platform called the Provecho Project, after the Spanish phrase buen provecho which roughly translates to “enjoy your meal.”

The site works by allowing users to advertise a meal they’d like to make at home, and how much they plan to charge for it. Those interested can sign on, and the site charges a small processing fee on top of the price of the meal.

Last year, the group staged its first “Friendsgiving,” in which a provecho, or meal, was held every day for the week leading up to Thanksgiving. With a new website up and running, Zoyhofski said they’re excited to stage Friendsgiving again this year, from Nov. 21 to 27.

The meals have primarily attracted students, although they are open to all members of the Fordham community. To join a meal, visit their website.

A Holiday Classic: Julia Child’s Chocolate Mousse

When it comes to Thanksgiving dessert, most people expect a table full of pies. But one Fordham employee whips up something different each year: homemade chocolate mousse.

“My husband’s a real chocoholic, so I always have to have something chocolate for him for dessert,” said Patricia Wolff, a Fordham financial aid counselor. “I started making it 30 years ago, and it’s delicious.”

The recipe—originally created by acclaimed chef Julia Child—calls for a quarter cup of dark-brewed coffee. Wolff said she adds two shots of hot espresso, used to melt the chocolate.

Besides being delicious, the dessert is convenient.

“You make it the day before, so it just sits in the fridge,” Wolff said. “There’s always too much going on in the oven, so that’s another good reason to have this for Thanksgiving.”

Finding the Right Wine

For those looking for the perfect Thanksgiving wine, Gabriella Macari, GABELLI ’09, of Macari Vineyards in Mattituck on Long Island, reminds everyone that, “the first rule of wine pairings is that there are no rules.”

Still, she had a few pieces of advice for those looking for the perfect bottle.

“Traditional Thanksgiving pairings include wines that pair with turkey such as light-bodied reds; Pinot Noir, Cabernet Franc, and Gamay are great choices,” said Macari, a certified sommelier.

While many people continue to serve red with dessert, Macari recommends switching to a sparkling wine. Finding a wine with meaning can also make it taste that much sweeter.

“Holiday wines should be delicious and can be even better if they mean something to you,” Macari said. “For us, for example, opening an old vintage of one of our wines to share with friends and family is very meaningful and evokes strong emotion.”

Macari also encouraged people to shop local wines for the American holiday.

“American wines are now better than ever,” she said.

Prioritizing Wellness

When everyone’s done with dinner, dessert, and libations, the living room couch beckons. But some families are looking for more ways to stay active and burn a few of those extra calories.

“Consider a Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving morning,” Jeanne Molloy, wellness manager at Fordham, said. “These 5Ks have grown in popularity and can be walked in 45 to 60 minutes if you haven’t trained to run it. That morning outing will help boost your metabolism all day.”

A post-walk dinner with the dogs can also be a way to stretch the legs and make your pets happy, Molloy said.

Sarah Bickford, the administrator of fitness and recreation at the Ram Fit Center, said physical activity can have the added benefit of helping to ward off any holiday blues.

“The holidays can also be a stressful time for people,” she said. “Exercise or group activities can be a great way to help people relax, come together, and feel better.”

Handling Stress

For some, stress will be inevitable. Jeffrey Ng, Psy.D., director of counseling and psychological services (CPS) at Fordham, offered advice on coping with challenging situations.

One of the more common concerns reported by students is balancing family time, self-care, and schoolwork over the holidays—especially right before final exams and project deadlines, said Ng. He advised students to proactively plan their time and identify their needs before break arrives, and to try to be transparent with family and friends about what’s on their plate.

Another common issue is interacting with family members or friends who have differing social or political beliefs, said Ng.

“The college years are a time of heightened identity formation and change, and a student’s emerging beliefs and perspectives may be diverging from their family of origin’s values and perspectives,” said Ng. “While it can be meaningful and growthful to figure out how to navigate potential tensions with family members, it’s also okay to opt out of some interactions or conversations that may feel particularly activating or overwhelming.”

For those who might be alone on Thanksgiving, try to find local opportunities to engage in community service and connect with friends, Ng said. And, he added, be careful with social media usage—too much scrolling may exacerbate feelings of social comparison, FOMO, and loneliness.

“The mind gravitates toward negative experiences and events so we need to intentionally practice gratitude,” Ng said. “The more we practice gratitude outside the context of holidays like Thanksgiving, the more we’ll be able to do so under more challenging circumstances.”

Books that Conjure Gratitude

With plenty of holiday time off and the cold winter months looming, Thanksgiving represents a good time to start plotting wintertime reading. Fred Nachbaur, director of Fordham University Press, said he’s grateful for a couple of recent reads.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe (Knopf Doubleday, 2019) is a reminder of darker times in Northern Ireland.

To be honest, I didn’t really know much about the IRA and their covert operations or those of the British government,” said Nachbaur.

The book begins with the abduction of a widowed mother of 10 living in public housing and goes on to give a detailed history of the “Troubles” and the cast of characters involved.

“It reads like a crime story—totally compelling and mind-blowing; I learned a lot,” he said. “We often forget about the more tumultuous times that make you appreciate the relative peace we enjoy here.”

Closer to home, Nachbaur said he is very grateful for Susan Greenfield’s oral history, Sacred Shelter: Thirteen Journeys of Homelessness and Healing (Fordham University Press, 2019). He noted that all of the contributors helped put life into perspective.

Nachbaur feels thankful for one essay in particular, titled “Reflection: Hope,” written by a social worker who worked with a group of formerly incarcerated individuals.

“The author opens up about her difficulty with being adopted and experiencing a deep sense of loss and not fitting in,” he said. She found healing in working through the anger that group members shared stemming from adoption and feeling abandoned by their parents.

“My daughter is adopted and this piece really helped me better understand her challenges,” said Nachbaur. “I am very grateful to the author,” he said.

Giving Beyond the Season of Giving

Every year around the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays there’s an uptick in volunteering. But how can these seasonal volunteers carry the do-good spirit to the rest of the year?

Arto Woodley, Ed.D., executive director for the Center for Community Engaged Learning, said one way to connect with others is to connect with yourself first.

“First ask yourself, what is your passion in reference to engaging in communities, and why is it important to you?” said Woodley. Also, volunteers should consider whether they are looking for a one-time event or sustained involvement, he said.

And rather than reach out to organizations and ask when they need volunteers, Woodley suggests an “asset-based approach” that will help volunteers align their strengths with an organization’s strengths year-round. He suggests that “needs-based” volunteering will inevitably lead to “volunteer fatigue,” because there will always be a new need.

“This requires a paradigm shift from volunteering to engagement and building deeper relationships with organizations and community partners,” he said. “I definitely prefer the model where the organization and the volunteer build something constructive together.”

— Reporting by Taylor Ha, Kelly Kultys, Tom Stoelker, and Patrick Verel

‘In Your Eyes I See My Words’ by Pope Francis Jorge Mario Bergoglio

New York, N.Y., Sept. 17—When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected the 266th pope of the Roman Catholic Church in March 2013, stories of his humility were everywhere. News circulated about the fact that he returned to the boarding house where he had been staying to pay his bill personally, rather than send an assistant, and that he chose to live in a simple two-room apartment rather than in the luxurious papal accommodations in the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace. 

These actions gave the public a chance to learn something about the nature of the new pontiff.  But what can be learned from his words? Readers of English will soon find out as Pope Francis’s collection of homilies and speeches from Buenos Aires from 1999 to 2004 will be released on Sept. 24, 2019, by Fordham University Press. 

In Your Eyes I See My Words is the first of a three-volume translation of Pope Francis’s theological, pastoral, anthropological, and educational thoughts. It is the first time these homilies and speeches have been printed in English.

The book provides insights into the mind and theological unfolding of a beloved spiritual leader who has challenged politicians, culture-makers, the media moguls—even his own ordained and lay church ministers—to live a life of faithfulness marked by justice, equality, and concern for the needs of everyone.

“We must advance toward an idea of truth that is ever more inclusive, less restrictive; at least, if we are thinking about God’s truth and not some human truth, however solid it may appear to us. God’s truth is unending; it is an ocean of which we can barely see the shore. . . . The truth is a gift that is too big for us, and that is precisely why it makes us bigger, amplifies us, raises us up. ”—Pope Francis

“The homilies and public lectures in this volume introduce us to the serious but also lighthearted intellectual background of the first Jesuit pope and the first pope to bear the name of Francis of Assisi. This Franciscan-crossed Jesuit has much to teach us.”——Patrick J. Ryan, S.J.

About Fordham University Press

Fordham University Press not only represents and uphold the values and traditions of the University itself but also furthers those values and traditions through the dissemination of scholarly research and ideas. The Press publishes boundary-breaking print and digital books that bring recognition to itself, the University, and authors while balancing the need to publish in new formats and work collaboratively on and off campus. Its regional imprint, Empire State Editions, and location in New York City’s Lincoln Center neighborhood reinforce the university’s motto, New York is My Campus, Fordham is My School.

About Fordham University

Founded in 1841, Fordham is the Jesuit University of New York, offering exceptional education distinguished by the Jesuit tradition across nine schools. Fordham awards baccalaureate, graduate, and professional degrees to approximately 15,000 students from Fordham College at Rose Hill, Fordham College at Lincoln Center, the Gabelli School of Business (undergraduate and graduate), the School of Professional and Continuing Studies, the Graduate Schools of Arts and Sciences, Education, Religion and Religious Education, and Social Service, and the School of Law. The University has residential campuses in the Bronx and Manhattan, a campus in West Harrison, N.Y., the Louis Calder Center Biological Field Station in Armonk, N.Y., and the London Centre in the United Kingdom.

Contact:

Ayesha Akthar
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347-340-8584