An award-winning filmmaker blends horror and sci-fi

When it was time to apply to college, Luke Momo took one tip in particular to heart: Don’t major in film. A close, older friend suggested he pick one of the humanities—English, history, philosophy—and instead explore the ways a particular subject intersects with film.

Now, with an award-winning debut feature under his belt and a trove of ideas to pursue, Momo has been reflecting on his time at Fordham College at Lincoln Center, where he majored in philosophy, dove into filmmaking as a visual arts minor, and forged connections that proved invaluable when it came time to cast his movie, Capsules. 

A Princeton, New Jersey, native, Momo was drawn across the river to the University for its “intellectual rigor,” originally choosing to major in classics. He did veer from his friend’s advice a bit by minoring in visual arts with a concentration in film. But a philosophical ethics class he took with professor Janna van Grunsven, Ph.D., during his sophomore year made him reconsider. 

“After I took that class, I realized that [it was]what I’d want to do my major in [and explore]the intersection between philosophy and film,” he says. The professor “was able to share with me a higher level of some of the things I was interested in at that time—and I still am. She was very supportive in that way.”

Creating a Cinema Community on Campus

Outside of class, Momo founded Fordham’s Filmmaking Club in 2016, a kind of film study group for students interested in viewing and discussing movies, as well as pursuing projects together.

“We could help each other make our films and collaborate,” he says. “We’d have very memorable screenings of all kinds of different movies that you otherwise wouldn’t see, and you could watch them in a group and discuss them afterward.”

The club continues today, with students collaborating on film projects, sharing them, and hosting film festivals. “It seems to be fulfilling its original purpose and also growing—becoming more and encompassing more ideas and progressing,” Momo says.

He also completed two internships, one at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative—an artist-run nonprofit—and one at Le Cinéma Club, a curated streaming platform featuring one free film each week. 

“It was just really cool because week after week, we were researching, writing about, discovering, and highlighting works of film art,” he says, including a number of international films to which he wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed. 

From Campus Collaboration to Award-Winning Feature

Capsules, which Momo wrote with Davis Browne, FCLC ’19, features more than half a dozen Fordham graduates in starring and behind-the-scenes roles. 

The film blends sci-fi and horror, focusing on four chemistry students who experiment with mysterious substances and find themselves struggling with addiction in an unexpected way: They’ll die unless they take more.

“I just basically pursued an emotional feeling … the fear of letting one’s life slip away and a sadness over mistakes,” says Momo, who directed the film. The premise came after the pandemic, when “we had been through so many traumas personally, in our communities, and on a global level. All these things came together, and the idea for Capsules just sort of emerged.”

The film earned the Best Feature award at the 2022 Philip K. Dick Film Festival in New York City. Momo later sold the film to a distributor, and it’s available to watch on Tubi and Vudu.

Read more “20 in Their 20s” profiles.

Professor Stephen Grimm’s students are exploring that question and others in their Philosophy of Human Nature course this semester.

“What we’re really trying to figure out is whether AI could replicate human nature and whether in the future, [when]we’ll be living among AI—whether or not AI is going to be used to help us or harm us,” said Sarah Kidwai, a first-year student at Fordham College at Rose Hill who is majoring in chemistry.

Using Philosophical Skills to Unpack AI

The course includes some required texts, such as works by Plato and Aristotle, as well as other materials that are left up to the instructor each semester.

Grimm said that he thought students would enjoy the chance to dive into AI. He assigned them several current research articles, including “The curious case of uncurious creation” by Lindsay Brainard, an assistant professor at the University of Alabama, published in the journal Inquiry this fall. Brainard defined creativity as something that requires the maker to have both agency and curiosity, which, she wrote, are two things that current AI models do not have.

In early October, students worked in groups to put this definition to the test. They discussed tasks such as a bird building a nest or a student writing a research paper, and had to make an argument as to why they were or weren’t creative. They then compared their responses to Brainard’s definition of creativity and examined a larger question: Can AI be considered creative?

Grimm initially asked the class this question, and almost all said no, based on Brainard’s definition. But then he cited examples, such as a working paper out of the Wharton School of Business’ Mack Institute, which found that “ChatGPT can generate higher quality business innovation ideas than MBA students.”

“I didn’t think that AI could be creative, but now, I’m starting to think maybe,” Kidwai said. “On TV, there’d be an episode where robots take over [and]it sounds kind of crazy, but I feel like there is a potential for something like that.”

For Aidan Nanquil, who is a first-year student at Fordham College at Rose Hill majoring in philosophy, studying a current issue like AI in this discipline was a new experience.

“I really only studied ancient, medieval, modern [philosophy], so starting off a philosophy class with AI and the philosophy of artificial intelligence—I was so unprepared because there were so many different things to consider, so many different questions,” he said, adding that he liked that the class was different than other philosophy courses.

Examining Human Understanding

Grimm said that he hoped the students would learn how to approach challenging topics like AI in a philosophical way—”just trying to probe as deeply as possible about human understanding and human consciousness.”

Many of the students said that the course opened their eyes to how much AI could impact society.

Lauren McNamara, a first-year Fordham College at Rose Hill student majoring in biology, said she wondered how the job market would change as she prepares to enter the workforce.

“Is the job I’m going to go into going to be available when I get there, especially after all my training?” she said.

But while some said that they were scared of the consequences, Nanquil said that he enjoyed getting to dive into these big picture questions.

“A big part of why I love this class is because I want to figure out what makes us essentially human,” he said. “Philosophy, for me, is still important, because it’s about figuring out what makes us unique and sharing that humanity with each other.”

Their method for introducing machine learning in chemistry classes has been honored with the inaugural James C. McGroddy Award for Innovation in Education, named for a donor who funded the award’s cash prize. (See related story.)

The recipients are Elizabeth Thrall, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry; Yijun Zhao, Ph.D., assistant professor of computer and information science; and Joshua Schrier, Ph.D., the Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Chair in Chemistry. They will share the $10,000 prize, awarded in April.

Chemistry and Computation Come Together

The three awardees’ project shows how to reduce the barriers to learning about programming and computation by integrating them into chemistry lessons. The project came together during the COVID pandemic—since chemistry students were working from their computers, far from the labs on campus, it made sense to give them some computational projects, in addition to experiments they could conduct at home, Thrall said.

Because little had been published about teaching machine learning to chemistry students, she got together with Schrier and Zhao to design an activity. Zhao, director of the Master of Science in Data Science program at Fordham, involved a student in the program, Seung Eun Lee, GSAS ’22, who had studied chemistry as an undergraduate.

Their first classroom project—published in the Journal of Chemical Education in 2021—involves vibrational spectroscopy, used to identify the chemical properties of something by shining a light on it and recording which wavelengths it absorbs. Students built models that analyzed the resulting data and “learned” the features of different molecular structures, automating a process that they had learned in an earlier course.

For another project, the professors taught students about machine-learning tools for identifying possible hypotheses about collections of molecules. Machine learning lets the students winnow down the molecular data and, in Schrier’s words, “make that big haystack into a smaller haystack” that is easier for a scientist to manage. The professors designed the project with help from Fernando Martinez, GSAS ’23, and Thomas Egg, FCRH ’23, and Thrall presented it at an American Chemical Society meeting in the spring.

Thumbs-Up from Students

How did students react to the machine learning lessons? According to a survey following the first project, 63% enjoyed applying machine learning, and 74% wanted to learn more about it.

“I think that students recognize that these are useful skills … that are only going to become more important throughout their lives,” Thrall said. Schrier noted that students have helped develop additional machine learning exercises in chemistry over the past two years.

Machine Learning in Education and Medicine

Zhao noted the growing applications of machine learning and data science. She has applied them to other fields through collaborations with Fordham’s Graduate School of Education and the medical schools at New York University and Harvard, among other entities.

The McGroddy Award came as a surprise. “I don’t think that we expected to win,” Schrier said, “just because there’s so many other excellent pedagogical innovations throughout Fordham.”

Eva Badowska, Ph.D., dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at the time the award was granted, said the professors’ “path-breaking interdisciplinary work has transformed lab courses in chemistry.”

There were 20 nominations, and faculty members reviewing them “were humbled by the creativity, innovation, and generative energy of the faculty’s pedagogical work,” she said.

In addition to the McGroddy Award, the Office of the Dean of Faculty of Arts and Sciences is providing two $1,000 honorable mention prizes recognizing the pedagogy of Samir Haddad, Ph.D., and Stephen Holler, Ph.D., associate professors of philosophy and physics, respectively.

“It turned out to be the happiest accident of my graduate school career,” said Hahn, a doctoral student in philosophy at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. 

The conference was organized last fall by the Institute for Hungarian Research‘s Research Center for the History of Ideas and Fordham philosophy professor Gyula Klima, Ph.D., who serves as director of the center. The event took place in Budapest, Hungary, where Klima gathered with scholars from institutions worldwide to deconstruct the concept of the Eucharist—or, as the conference website calls it, “the most mind-boggling sacrament of the Christian faith.” 

“We were all united around a very specific thing—the metaphysics and theology of the Eucharist, which is the most niche thing you can think of,” said Hahn. “If you look at it from an ordinary American secular perspective, the Eucharist is extremely weird. You have food, which is supposed to be the body and blood of a Palestinian Jew who lived 2,000 years ago. He’s supposed to be here, physically, and have an effect on people who join together in his mystical body, or the Church. That is an extremely weird idea, but it’s also extremely interesting. And it’s something that was the life of a continent for centuries.” 

Beginning in the 14th century, some scholars started reinterpreting the possibility of this “supernatural change” that is said to take place during Roman Catholic Mass. However, this caused huge conceptual tensions within the theological and metaphysical system, said Klima. Essentially, there was a battle between the “old” and “new” ways of doing philosophy, logic, science, and theology, he said. 

“These ideas caused incremental changes—tiny, almost invisible conceptual changes—that eventually led to different belief systems and religious wars,” said Klima, adding that these clashes also paved the way for modern philosophy and science. 

Klima said their meeting in Budapest was so successful that he decided to establish an organization that would continue their dialogue every year. Toward the end of the conference, he founded the Society for the European History of Ideas (SEHI, pronounced “see-high”), an international network of scholars who study the European history of ideas—both within and outside Europe. 

“The essence of European thought is taking Greek forms of thinking and philosophical structures and combining them with Judeo-Christian content,” Hahn explained. 

Late Night Conversations About Life and Beyond

There are currently 43 members, including scholars from Harvard University, University of Notre Dame, the University of Oxford, University of California, Los Angeles, and many other academic institutions around the world, said Klima. Membership is open to faculty and graduate students from all academic institutions, as well as other scholars who are interested in their work. 

“We are interested in the spirit of the times and the ways people live, and how these change each other over time. We are focusing on Europe because of the role of European culture in starting modernity on a global scale,” said Klima, who also founded the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics in 2000. “European culture has had an enormous role on the world stage, especially in American culture. However, Europe also needs to be understood in tandem with other cultures and continents.” 

The Society for the European History of Ideas meets once a year to discuss each member’s individual research on a specific topic related to theology and metaphysics, as well as other fields like art, technology, and the sciences. They present their findings, exchange ideas, and compile a volume of their collective work on the annual theme. 

Hahn said that he loved the support and sincerity shared by the scholars at the first conference, especially their late night debates.  

“I stayed up late at night, having conversations with people I barely knew until the conference. We shared wine and cigarettes and talked about things like the classic question—if God exists, why is there evil in the world—and the politics within the countries where we live,” said Hahn, whose presentation focused on how Lutherans interpret the Eucharist. 

Studying ‘What It Means to Be Human’ 

The next meeting will be held this summer in Lisbon, Portugal, where the society will consider the classic chicken and egg question in relation to metaphysics and theology. What drives large-scale conceptual changes: changing metaphysical intuitions or the reinterpretation of theological principles?

Fordham student Matthew Glaser, GSAS ’24, said he hopes to participate in the next conference. His interest in philosophy stems from the same curiosity that many of his colleagues share. 

“I became interested in philosophy through a lot of conversations with high school friends around campfires, talking about politics, society, social issues, and these big-picture, abstract questions about how we should live and how to solve these problems. Through that, I found my way into philosophy and an interest in questions about human nature—about what it means to be human,” said Glaser, a Ph.D. student in philosophy who recently joined the society. 

He said he joined SEHI because it informs our understanding of who we are today. 

“One big part of American history is European history, especially the cultural and intellectual movements in Europe that led to the Reformation and the Enlightenment, and had a real big impact on our founding fathers and on the formation of the United States,” Glaser said. “If we want to understand our identity as Americans or people in Western culture today, I think it’s important for us to understand the history of our culture, particularly the intellectual history—to see where our modern ideas of freedom, individuality, democracy, and society come from, and on the flip side of that, to see how that’s changed over time.”

Fordham’s Stephen Grimm, Ph.D., professor of philosophy, was awarded the three-year, $300,000 grant in November 2021 to launch the program, titled “Visions of the Good in the Bronx,” that aims to work with students from the borough, particularly those who are underserved or might not have access to the same resources as their peers. Following the summer session, the students will also have access to a year-long mentoring program.

What Makes a Good Life?

The program aims to have the students contemplate what they think would make for a good life.

“We’re trying to think about the kind of lives we want to lead,” Grimm said. “We have this vision of what makes for a good life and what things are more important in that life and what things are less important.”

For some people, honor is the most important thing, Grimm explained, while others prioritize wealth or friendship.

“What we’re going to do in this seminar is look at what different philosophers, different traditions, different cultures have said about the good life.” Grimm said. “And what’s their vision of the good? So we’re going to look through ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, ancient Chinese philosophy, the Enlightenment, all the way up to 20th-century figures like Martin Luther King, Jr.”

The target group of high school juniors should be underserved and first-generation college students from the Bronx, Grimm said, for whom “the whole college application process could be quite intimidating.”

Helping Students Find Their Voice

Layla Mayorga, a first-year Ph.D. student in philosophy, who will serve as a graduate student mentor in the program, said she is especially interested in using this seminar to help first-generation and other underserved students find their voice.

“The skill that I would like to see them (gain) is not to be afraid to speak up for themselves, especially as first-gen (students),” she said. “Because I know as first-gen, a lot of us are just afraid to talk—afraid to talk to the teacher or proctor—and I feel like in college that would be an essential skill so they can actually get the answer rather than just leaving the class and just wondering.”

The program will run for three weeks and be structured so students spend most of those three weeks at Fordham, staying on campus during the week and heading home on the weekends.

Each day, the students will have seminar classes in the morning taught by Grimm and Vita Emery, Ph.D., a postdoctoral teaching fellow who received her Ph.D. at Fordham in 2021. In the afternoon, there will be teacher assistant sessions where Fordham undergraduate students—who will be overseen by Mayorga—will do work with the students that supplements the seminars. Students will be given time every day to complete their readings as well as time to get help with their writing skills. There will also be a few field trips during the program, he said.

Grimm said he, Emery, and Mayorga met with the instructors of a similar program at Columbia, called Freedom and Citizenship, to help establish this model.

Emery, who will be serving as the program coordinator, said that she was excited to help the students explore these bigger questions.

‘Doing Philosophy’ Without Realizing It

“I love teaching and I love having conversations with students,” she said. “I think people are doing philosophy a lot of the time and they don’t realize it. And so when you have those moments where students are like, ‘oh wait, I’ve been asking this question for years. I just hadn’t put it quite in these terms’—that’s a very exciting moment.”

The goal is for students to walk away from the program with philosophical skills that can help them in life as well as reading and writing skills that can help them in their next steps, Grimm said.

“I think just wrestling with these big questions about what constitutes a good life, and what we owe to each other as people, is inherently worth doing,” he said. “Teagle has a special concern for citizenship and thinks that wrestling with these classic (philosophy) texts—or as they call them transformative texts—is really important for a democracy.”

A Glimpse of College Life

There will also be some college prep resources to help make the college admissions process a bit less intimidating, including help with college essays. After the seminar is complete, the students will also receive letters of recommendation, which they can use for their college applications.

Mayorga said that she also hopes that this gives the high school students a chance to really “see what college life is like” instead of having a vague picture in their minds.

“A lot of them grow up with the idea that they will never actually attend college—I was one of them,” Mayorga said. “They don’t actually know what their life is going to be. … If we show them there’s opportunity, there’s actually a choice in your life—it will be very helpful. It will open their eyes.”

Applications are currently open until March 25 for high school juniors in the Bronx.

This more numbers-focused branch of the field, along with an interest in how resources, capital, and labor moved throughout the world economy, led Woodard to spend more time analyzing markets and investments.

“One of the ways that I found my way into finance was through curiosity about political philosophy and issues around global justice,” Woodard says. “One of the things that you talk about if you’re talking about John Rawls or Karl Marx or other political philosophers is questions of justice and distribution. And so I got more and more interested in learning macroeconomics and learning about how global markets worked.”

Woodard, who earned a master’s degree in theology from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland before enrolling at Fordham, believes that the breadth and plurality of Fordham’s philosophy department made this kind of shift in focus possible, noting that its emphasis on history and interdisciplinary thought made it unique among doctoral programs.

“I think they were one of the relatively few philosophy departments that still had their students take comprehensive exams covering the whole history of philosophy, from the ancients all the way through to the modern time,” Woodard recalls. “The requirement to be familiar with ancient philosophy and medieval philosophy, as well as modern and contemporary periods, meant that we were able to understand the common threads and through lines that have driven human inquiry throughout the ages,” a skill that plays out in his analysis of market trends and their context.

Building a Career, Finding Optimism

While pursuing his doctorate and with his growing interest in global markets, Woodard founded both Condor Options, a firm where he tested investment strategies on large data sets, as well as the publication Expiring Monthly, where he wrote about research into options and volatility trading strategies. This experience led him to post-Ph.D. jobs as a senior equity derivatives strategist at BGC Partners and a global investment strategist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. His current role, which he began in October 2019, is as head of the research investment committee at Bank of America.

“My task is to help investors think about where to allocate their investments toward different asset classes, like stocks or bonds,” Woodard explains. “And to do that, a big part of my job is to try to make sense of what’s happening in the global economy and in the global market.”

While 2020 has presented challenges, including economic volatility, in the U.S. and throughout the world, Woodard says that there is reason for optimism when it comes to financial markets.

“There are so many people who are eager to make a contribution,” he says. “And if you get help to the people who need it, if you get resources to the students who want to learn, and training to the workers who want to work, I’m incredibly optimistic about the potential of the United States as an economy and as a culture.

“One of our big themes in our department is on the shift from globalization to more local and regional forms of production,” he adds, “being more thoughtful about where we produce things and how we produce them and who produces them. And if those trends continue and you start to see this more thoughtful shift … they can have some really positive implications for markets and investments.”

Maintaining Connections and Offering Help

Woodard has stayed involved with Fordham as a member of the Dean’s Leadership Committee at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and he has come back to campus to speak to students about postgraduate career paths beyond academia. He has also stayed in touch with a number of his professors and friends made through the program, including Joseph Koterski, S.J., associate professor of philosophy and editor in chief of International Philosophical Quarterly.

“Whether it’s the priests on campus or the faculty, I think that there are some connections that were deep enough that I’ve been really fortunate to maintain,” Woodard says. “Current students will reach out from time to time, whether for advice or connections, and I’m always happy to help in that way when I can.”

“I can’t think in the face of you telling me who you think I am, with your loud self and your loud eyes and your loud guilt,” she says to Cabell, who is white. “I can’t hear myself think.” She then turns, comes down from the stage, and starts speaking directly to the audience.

It’s a charged moment in the play. And it’s all scripted. What starts out as a sitcom-like family drama becomes an exploration of race and the white gaze. Boateng played Keisha, the youngest member of the Fraser family, who calls out the white audience members for being complicit. “Do I have to keep talking to the white people?” she says, looking to the faces of color in the audience. “Do I have to tell them that I want them to make space for us?”

The monologue was written by Drury, but because Boateng was delivering the lines so frankly every night, she would have to field the audience’s reactions in the moment, from confusion to discomfort to outright anger. She recalls during one performance, when she asked those questions, a white audience member shot back, “Well, why would you want to keep talking to them?” When Boateng didn’t answer him, he said, “Oh, you’re going to keep talking over me. This is a monologue, it’s not a dialogue.” Boateng then went slightly off-script, she says. Without breaking character, she spoke a stern line to the man and continued with her speech.

Her grace under pressure got the attention of artists and critics. In his review for The New York Times, chief theater critic Ben Brantley called the play “dazzling and ruthless,” and wrote, “Ms. Boateng also winds up with the heaviest acting duties, and she executes them with unblinking, confrontational clarity.”

The play’s two-month run ended in August, and since then, Boateng has been keeping busy—shooting a recurring role on a Netflix television show in the city (she can’t say much about it until the show’s premiere in 2019) and finding more stage work.

“I’m the person who always gave myself challenges,” she says over coffee one November afternoon in the lobby cafe at the Signature Theatre, where she was in rehearsal for a revival of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage’s Fabulation, or the Re-Education of Undine. (The show runs at the Signature from November 19 to January 6.) Even when she was young, Boateng says, “I would throw myself into the things that scared me.”

It was her bold performance in Fairview that got the attention of Fabulation director, the Obie-winning Lileana Blain-Cruz. “It’s been wonderful working with her,” Blain-Cruz wrote in an email. “She has a joyous spirit and she radiates on stage. Fabulation requires the actors to take on several roles, and MaYaa has done that with specificity and nuance.”

“There’s Room for Us”

With her current projects, like with Fairview, she is pushing herself out of her comfort zone. Which is how she got herself into the arts in the first place.

Boateng grew up in Hyattsville, Maryland, where got her first exposure to performance through stepping. “I joined this Christian performance group with the initiative to give inner-city youth something positive to look forward to, to keep them out of trouble,” she explains. That taste of performance led Boateng to audition for a local performing arts middle school. She got in, and then for high school, she attended the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Boateng credits the arts for giving her direction and purpose. Growing up in an area where “crime and violence were prevalent,” the world of performance was “a safe home for me,” she explains. Even now, when Boateng goes home to Maryland, she is met with excitement and awe from family and friends. Being a working artist, “it’s unheard of where I’m from,” she says. She tries to go home as much as she can, to show those in her hometown who aren’t always represented in entertainment that “they can do that too. There’s room for us.”

“A Reminder That I Am on the Right Path”

At Fordham, besides majoring in theater, Boateng took classes in sociology and philosophy. She credits the school’s well-rounded core curriculum to making her a “multifaceted artist,” she says. “What I learned is that I can pull from all those experiences and use them for the stage. Being a full person makes you a better artist.” At the start of her senior year, Boateng was named the inaugural recipient of an endowed scholarship established by Fordham alumnus Denzel Washington, FCLC ’77, “a reminder,” she says, “that I am on the right path.”

After graduation, Boateng’s first professional gig was in Classical Theatre of Harlem’s July 2013 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which was educational because up to that point, she hadn’t done Shakespeare before. Obviously, she had a knack for it. In summer 2017, after earning an M.F.A. in acting at New York University, she played the Soothsayer in Julius Caesar at Shakespeare in the Park, a controversial production in which Caesar was dressed to resemble President Donald Trump.

The show was met by protesters, who occasionally rushed the stage. While it was a scary experience, Boateng says it made her realize she wasn’t going to be satisfied doing work solely within the traditional theatrical paradigm, where the fourth wall can be unyielding and “oppressive,” and audiences have to be quiet. Theatergoers may have been angry at her and her castmates during Julius Caesar and Fairview, but that just meant the work moved them.

“It was exciting to know that this is what theater can do,” she says. “I don’t think people should come to the theater just to watch and go home. If you’re shook a little bit, that’s good.”

“Use Your Experience for Ammunition, and for Empowerment”

The projects that attract Boateng are usually things that are unpredictable. “I want to do work that is exciting,” she says emphatically. “That is bold, that pushes the mold, that doesn’t allow folks to be comfortable, that is about revolution. That gives voice to marginalized folks and says, ‘We exist, we’re here, we’ve been here, and we have stories to tell.’”

And Boateng wants to tell her own story too. She is currently working on a solo show, which recently had a workshop presentation at Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, where she was a resident artist. In the show, she talks about her life in relation to that of singer, actor, and activist Eartha Kitt. She explains that Kitt’s given name was actually Eartha Mae, and the late Kitt considered Mae to be a separate persona.

The notion of masks and different selves fascinates Boateng, whose given name is Yaa, which means “born on Thursday.” As a child in school, she says she felt some shame about her name because her classmates would tease her about it. She wanted to have an American name instead, but her mother, a Ghanaian immigrant, encouraged her to “love the name I was given.”

“She said they can call you Yaa, or MaameYaa, or MaYaa for short, but you are not changing your name,” Boateng recalls. “She taught me the full meaning of my name: MaYaa Amoakowaa Boateng. Amoakowaa can be translated as ‘one who fights,’ and so my mother taught me that I am that little lady born on Thursday who is a fighter.”

Boateng’s solo show, she explains, is about “learning to embrace who I am and where I come from. It’s about coming to a place where you accept the fullness of who you are. And you use your experience for ammunition, and for empowerment.”

So far, part of her experience may have been to make audiences and herself uncomfortable, but through it, Boateng found something valuable: herself.

“When I go into predominantly white spaces, it’s not always that easy to have that voice and to have that command,” she admits. “But I now have courage in my voice as a person of color, saying my voice is important, and I have a lot to offer, I have a lot to say.”

—Diep Tran is the senior editor of American Theatre magazine.

For Guy Consolmagno, S.J., it has been both, perhaps in equal doses. In a talk on the Fordham campus on Feb. 26, Brother Consolmagno, the director of the Vatican Observatory, said that religion and science enjoy a long partnership in humans’ endeavor to understand the world in which they live.

“Studying science is an act of worship,” said Brother Consolmagno, a graduate of MIT, former Peace Corps volunteer, author, and research astronomer. “You have to have faith in the questions you are asking.”

Delivering the John C. and Jeanette D. Walton Lecture in Science, Philosophy, and Religion, Brother Consolmagno drew parallels between an unlikely pair: Galileo, a Renaissance man who created the telescope and changed science forever, and Pope Francis, whose concern for climate change’s effects on the world’s poor is aimed at reinvigorating the Catholic mission.

“Galileo Would Have Been On The Colbert Show”

Had he been born in the 20^th century rather than the 16^th, Galileo would have been world-renown, “a media star … just like Carl Sagan,” said Brother Consolmagno. “[He] would have been on The Colbert Show, the Tonight Show.” Although Galileo’s notoriety landed him in some trouble with the church in his day, said Brother Consolmagno, his important scientific discoveries set in motion a revolution on how scientists make assumptions about the universe. It moved science from the Golden Age of celebrating book knowledge of the past, to the scientific revolution of seeking knowledge for the future.

“Galileo was special because he had the telescope and was able to see and understand what he was seeing . . . the moon’s craters . . . the Orion Nebula,” said Brother Consolmagno. “And he was seeing things that were not in any book.”

“He understood why it mattered, and he knew it was important to tell the world.”

Laudato Si’: What Pope Francis Sees

Brother Consolmagno called the pope’s encyclical, Laudato Si’, an entreaty that doesn’t settle scientific questions but draws on today’s scientific research to conclude “the environment is reaching a breaking point that will cause a change in humanity that cannot be fixed by technology.” Francis says these ecological problems are symptoms of much deeper social justice issues, “symptoms that come out of personal sins” and our detachment from God.

“The pope is [offering]new assumptions, just as Galileo saw a new set of assumptions in how the universe works,” he said.

The pope’s call to action, said Brother Consolmagno, is for human beings to develop a new set of ethics, “a new idea of what is wrong” in the human relationship to nature and human ecology. Nature, like the human, is a creation of God; therefore it is mankind’s to care for like a sibling, not to own.

Nor are humans gods who can fix ecological degradation through technology, he said. Technology advances over time, but human ethics tend to waver: a technologically-advanced society may not necessarily solve the earth’s problems.

“Ask yourself who had better ethics: Nazi Germany? Or Socrates?”

By calling for a change in our humanity, the pope’s encyclical does much to demonstrate why science needs faith, said Brother Consolmagno.

“How do we know what change will be for the better? Ultimately, the Jesuit answer is, if it brings us—human beings who will never be God—closer to God.”

On a rainy Wednesday night this month, Moore, an associate professor of theology at Fordham, spoke about her friends to a few dozen recent Fordham graduates who filled the brick-walled backroom of a Midtown Manhattan pub for the Young Alumni Committee’s annual Faith on Tap event.

Moore called her lecture “Spiritual Resistance: Lessons from the 1940s,” and she used her years of research and writing on Catholic French Resistance figures to inspire attendees feeling appalled by the politics of today and hoping to be a force for good in the world.

While philosophers Jacques Maritain and Simone Weil and Jesuit priest Henri de Lubac aren’t widely read and discussed outside theology and philosophy classrooms these days, Moore said the three have a lot to offer modern Americans. “They sort of saw these storm clouds gathering [in Europe] with the ascendency of anti-Semitism, xenophobia in the 1930s, and were clearly able to name everything that was happening,” she said.

In today’s political moment, with its increase in public demonstrations of racism, xenophobia, and nationalism, Moore said that her research subjects became more real.

“They were like these dreamlike people, occupying my imagination, warning me of a sort of dreamlike, nightmare future,” she said. Now, they “seem much more kind of human and down to earth. … They really are men and women that can simply offer their direct instruction for us today.”

The ‘Nourishing Food of Greater Unity’

Even in years of great violence and political division, thinkers like de Lubac, Weil, and Maritain practiced a nonviolent “spiritual” resistance, Moore said. They organized, they protested, and they wrote—very carefully.

“They were extremely vigilant about language. They were always on the lookout for how easily language could be distorted in ways that would misinform, seduce, and weaken people’s ability to think critically and clearly,” Moore said. “They knew that language changes not only what we say and write, but how we feel, or how we interpret reality.”

Moore referenced Marie-Madeleine Davy, a French Catholic philosopher who would always classify other, marginalized groups as part of the same human race—“Some of us are Jews. … Some of us are Muslims,” she’d note, Moore said.

Henri de Lubac, who became a cardinal of the Catholic Church in 1983, called this use of the first-person plural “a way to distribute spiritual food.” Or, in Moore’s words, “the nourishing food of greater unity,” as opposed to “the junk food of language that divides us.”

But the French Resistance figures Moore discussed weren’t solely focused on other faiths. They felt a connection to Catholics around the world, despite racial or national boundaries. After all, “catholic means universal,” Moore said, and she told Fordham alumni they can apply that lesson, especially if they’re interested in volunteering or joining an advocacy group.

“I feel like sometimes it can be embarrassing—what are you going to do, just call a nonprofit and ask to volunteer?” Moore said. But she said that going to a Jesuit school and taking theology classes—even for those who aren’t Catholic or even religious—can provide a common ground and a common language for getting involved with a faith-based organization. “It gives you a little foot in the door,” she said.

‘No One Acts Alone’

Moore also noticed that her subjects wrote about friendship as much as they did spirituality.

“It was a more interpersonal, warmer way of engaging the political world,” she said. “We tend to think of the [French] Resistance or any of the heroes in history as kind of courageously facing the immensity of anti-Semitism or racism, facing the immensity alone. But that’s not true. They did all this work in the context of intimate friendships, even families. … No one acts alone.”

Moore closed the lecture by giving attendees a high grade.

“The other thing that [the French Resistance figures] did was have a civil society,” Moore said. “Even just coming out on a rainy night to talk about ideas—this is really important stuff.”

—Jeff Coltin, FCRH ’15

Watch Brenna Moore’s spring 2016 “Fordham Mini Lecture” on mysticism and spirituality in religion and politics.

“The existing universal which is human communion, in which my thought is born, is the medium through which I belong to the cognitional universal, to truth,” wrote Gallagher, who died at 94 on May 5, 2017.

Through his wisdom, students like Caroline Heavey, GSE’ 61, learned that questions were just as important as answers.

“He wasn’t teaching us from the ‘outside,”’ said Heavey. “He would develop ideas in you as a person. He made it all a part of the process of learning.”

His works on the theory of knowledge were well-regarded by many of his academic peers. Joseph Koterski S.J., associate professor of philosophy, and editor in chief of the International Philosophical Quarterly, refers to the Philosophy of Knowledge in many of his lectures today.

“His appreciation of the contributions of philosophers from vastly different schools of thought is a model of the openness that we need to cultivate in our search for truth,” he said.

Gallagher, who lived in Bayside, Queens for more than 40 years, began working at Fordham in 1955. He taught courses on Christian existentialism, human nature, and epistemology. Marie Knoblock, GSS ’63, GSE ’61, also a former student, described him as a “loyal Catholic layman” who not only connected personhood to God, but also helped students to see the relevance of philosophy in their lives.

“I could remember learning about the world and God and seeing things in a whole new positive light, and I began to see that this is where truth is,” she said. “Dr. Gallagher taught us that you can learn many things from your rational thinking ability, which is also God given.”

He was particularly interested in the works of Søren Aabye Kierkegaard, Plato, and the French Catholic philosopher Gabriel Marcel. Gallagher explored Marcel’s theories and thoughts in The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (Fordham University Press, 1962).

“A lot of the philosophers that he admired were not merely clever,” said Gallagher’s son Terence Gallagher. “Fundamentally, they had a religious outlook. He didn’t see philosophy and religion as opposing things.”

When he wasn’t teaching, Gallagher, who served in the United States Army Air Corps from 1943 to 1946, relished Irish and German folk music, old black and white movies, and the poems of William Wordsworth. Having studied German at the Goethe -Institut in the mid 60s, he translated German poetry for the literary periodical The Formalist.

Despite losing his wife in 2006 and battling dementia and personal injuries toward the end of life, Gallagher lived a life of gratitude, Terence said.

“He was never discontent, and he inculcated that attitude in our family,” he said. “He always got the most out of life.”

Gallagher is survived by his daughter Kathleen O’Malley; his son Terence Gallagher; his brother Raymond Gallagher; and grandchildren Thomas and Michael O’Malley.