That was the message of “Conscience Matters: Tensions between Religious Rights and Civil Rights,” a panel discussion hosted on April 19 by Fordham’s Center for Ethics Education.

The panel, which was held at the Lincoln Center campus, featured Linda Greenhouse, the Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law and Knight Distinguished Journalist-in-Residence at Yale Law School, and Nancy Berlinger, Ph.D., a research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute.

Greenhouse and Berlinger tackled the thorny issue of conscience-based refusals from the perspective of the law and the medical establishment, respectfully. Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court for The New York Times for three decades, spoke at length about one case that the high court ruled on in 2014, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and another, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which was argued in December and is still pending.

A Threat to Civic Society

Greenhouse was unsparing in her criticism of the courts’ willingness to grant exceptions based on “deeply held religious beliefs,” saying they undermine civic society and are granted with little consideration for the adverse effects they may have on others.

Sometimes the court grants exceptions even when it’s not clear that a person’s rationale is based on sound theology, she said. In the 2015 case Holt v. Hobbs, for instance, the court ruled unanimously that a prison’s rules against beards violated the rights of a prisoner who said it comported with his Muslim faith. Greenhouse noted that nowhere in the Quran does it explicitly stipulate men maintain facial hair.

The Hobby Lobby case, in which the court ruled in favor of a private business that defied a government rule that employers must provide birth control under the health plans they offer, is even more egregious, she said. The Hobby Lobby CEO tied his decision to his Christian faith, but he’d abided by the government rule previously. Greenhouse dryly noted that the owner also had no problem with the violation of Christian strictures when his employees used their salaries to purchase birth control themselves.

In a way, the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, in which a baker says his Christian faith prevents him from baking a wedding cake for a gay couple, is even more ludicrous, she said. That’s because the case has hinged on whether his First Amendment rights will be infringed upon if he’s forced to bake a cake for them. She noted that cake is a poor vehicle for arguments about freedom of expression.

“Once it gets to the party, it’s just a cake. It’s not like he signed the cake. It’s not like a Van Gogh with the signature on it,” she said. “He doesn’t have to associate with or attend the [wedding]  party.”

Step Away, Don’t Step Between

Berlinger said that when it comes to medical treatment, there are actually very few cases in which medical personnel refuse to provide care. There may be instances when patients who are Jehovah’s Witnesses object to blood transfusions, and Orthodox Jews may dispute a doctor’s judgement of brain death.

But a bigger threat, she said, are structural issues, such as medical residents who simply opt not to get training for controversial procedures like abortion, and those who stall when faced with patients who inquire about physician-assisted suicide.

She said a conscience clause that the Hastings Center advocates says that even health professionals who feel more than the usual sense of “moral distress” that comes with working in the medical field must fulfill their duty of care. There’s no option to abandon a patient if their needs conflict with doctor’s conscience.

“You also cannot interfere with your patients’ access to care by others,” she said. “Sometimes the way this is explained is, ‘You can step away, but you can’t step between.”

She quoted British ethicist Alan Cribb, Ph.D., professor of bioethics and education at King’s College London, as having summarized it perfectly:

“We may exercise conscience objection to involvement in certain activities, but surely we cannot float entirely above the network of obligations in which we have emerged ourselves.”

At a seminar held at Fordham that focused on ministering in a secular and post-secular world, participants said religious leaders working with students are facing a new set of challenges.

When MoTiv, a team of chaplains from the Netherlands, began to engage engineer students from the University of Delft in discussions about their calling in a course on personal leadership, they discovered that spirituality was important to the aspiring engineers’ identities.

“The most beautiful things happened in those three [to]four hours,” said Günther Sturms, a MoTiv coach and university Roman Catholic chaplain, who spoke on Feb. 10 at the Lincoln Center campus. “The students started to share their inner stories. They told us ‘We’ve never done this with our lecturers. We’ve never had these kinds of conversations about why we are really here.’”

The MoTiv team said they had to strip away their own ideologies in order to create a safe and sacred space in which students could talk openly about their existential perspective, and could feel nurtured.

“Our predecessor found out that religion—as it was presented at the campus—had become obsolete, so we couldn’t do anything our predecessor did before,” said Hans van Drongelen, a spiritual counselor and MoTiv trainer.

Along with the MoTiv team, Rabbi Irwin Kula, an eighth-generation rabbi and co-president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL), shared how today’s campus ministers can steward religious heritage creatively to reach religiously unaffiliated people.

“One of the big problems that we have is the language problem,” said Kula, author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life (Hachette Books, 2007). “We literally don’t have a language that we can [speak], between legacy religions and the different types of secularism that we have.”

The MoTiv team said they’ve developed some practices that stem from a deep desire to understand student-engineers’ departures from established religion, juxtaposed with their apparent need to be guided by faith or inner motivations as they navigate the unknowns in their vocation.

“Maybe we need to become more curious,” said MoTiv coach Bart de Klerk. “This might be a trigger to redefine who we could be not only as [individuals], but as a community.”

Kula helps run CLAL’s Rabbis Without Borders, an innovative program training rabbis to minister outside of synagogue settings. He said that leaders who have a conservative predisposition lean toward wanting to conserve their religious tradition or else find new meaning in it. Those who he described as progressive are those typically interested in creating something new.

Both sides should be inquisitive if they want to change the religious landscape, he said.

“We need everyone in the drama,” he said. “Wherever you position yourself, if you want to grow, you better spend a lot of time on the side that you disagree with most.”

 Thomas Beaudoin, Ph.D., associate professor in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education, organized the roundtable discussion in an effort to share contemporary perspectives on the issue. He said the participants’ perspectives “give us each something for our own work today.”

“I was watching their passion for critiquing hookup culture once they figured out they weren’t alone, about how before they pretended it was awesome, but how it’s actually kind of awful,” Freitas told to a gathering of Fordham alumni, students, and faculty in Tognino Hall on Sept. 8. “They felt like they had been abandoned by the Catholic tradition to wallow in college without anything useful or practical to [guide]them. They wanted guidance.”

Curious to know if other students felt the same way, Freitas began crisscrossing the country visiting four types of colleges—Catholic, evangelical Christian, private, and public—to study students’ attitudes about sex and faith. She shared her findings in her book Sex & the Soul: Juggling Sexuality, Spirituality, Romance, and Religion on America’s College Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2008).

As part of Freitas’ study, more than 2,500 college students at seven campuses participated in an online survey, and she conducted one-on-one interviews with more than 100 students. She found that while students were interested in spirituality, and 80 percent of them identified as “spiritual, or religious to some degree, “even at a non-religious affiliated college, they often felt uncomfortable speaking about it outside the classroom setting.

It was much the same way with dating; students were interested in finding romance, but were hesitant to act upon their desires or even talk about it with friends and peers. “Students would say, ‘I want romance but I can’t admit that.’ Or ‘My parents did that, but that doesn’t really happen in my generation anymore.’ It was an anxiety around a wish for dating, but also this anxiety around [dating],” said Freitas, now a research associate in the Center for the Study of Religion and Society at the University of Notre Dame.

Freitas said 78 percent of the students she surveyed saw romance as “virtually asexual.” “Students very rarely—I can’t tell you how very rarely—talked about sex and love together,” she said. For these students, sex was a casual act, and they thought their peers thought the same thing: 45 percent of students at Catholic colleges and 36 percent at nonreligious private and public schools said their peers are “too casual” about sex; an additional group, 35 percent at Catholic colleges and 42 percent at nonreligious private and public schools, reported that their peers are “simply casual” about sex.

“It’s become a hookup culture,” Freitas said, noting that a hookup, according to students, meets three criteria: It involves some form of sexual intimacy, anything from kissing to sex; it’s a brief experience; and it’s free of emotional attachment. Freitas found that students often described hookups as “efficient,” feel they are too busy in college to develop and maintain relationships, and so they consider hookups “efficient.”

Nevertheless, 41 percent of those students who reported personal experiences with hooking up said they were “profoundly upset about this behavior,” and used words such as “awkward, dirty, miserable, empty, alone, disgusted, ashamed” to describe those occurrences. An additional 23 percent expressed ambivalence about hooking up, saying, “‘Hooking up is whatever; it makes me feel whatever,’” leading Freitas to term that group the “whateverists.” The remaining 36 percent labeled it as “fine.”

Students are not against hooking up, said Freitas, but “they’re unhappy with the culture” that breeds ambivalence and indifference “[Students] today are learning to steel themselves against connection, learning to shut down in order to be sexually intimate,” she said. “They are getting better at hookup culture, but I’m not sure we should be happy about that.”

Freitas raised concern about the relationship of hookup culture to sexual assault. If students are hooking up, “to have ‘efficient’ sexual intimacy, and to not get attached,” communication between the two individuals involved can be limited or even disregarded, “[making]the idea of consent very complicated,” she said.

“What does consent look like in a culture where when we are sexually intimate we are also discouraged from communicating?”

And yet, Freitas said, students who are propagating the hookup culture “want love and they want meaningful sex.” said Freitas.

Many hope to find that connection through spirituality, which they consider “much more forgiving, much more open, much more inclusive than religion.”

She heard over and over from students at Catholic colleges that “sex and religion don’t mix” and “religious teaching on sex are outdated.” In the face of peer pressure and mainstream American cultural attitudes about sex, she said students are struggling to reconcile their sexuality with their faith.

Freitas suggested that Catholic colleges, with their “extraordinarily rich history in spirituality and practices” be more creative and open in offering retreats, spiritual direction, social justice programming, and other resources to encourage students to examine the relationship between sexuality and spirituality—particularly within the campus community.

“When you start asking those questions in your own community, you have to contend with hookup culture, you have to contend with sexual assault,” said Freitas. “The tradition obliges you.”

– Rachel Buttner

Christians, Jews and Muslims answer that question in distinct ways, but on Nov. 14, Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, said that one thing they all share is an unwavering belief that whatever lies beyond, God is stronger than all of it.

Father Ryan delivered the annual fall McGinley lecture, “Life After Death, Hopes and Fears for Jews, Christians and Muslims,” to a standing-room-only audience at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, a day after delivering it at the Lincoln Center campus.

In keeping with his goal of facilitating a trialogue among the three Abrahamic religions, Father Ryan was joined by respondents Claudia Setzer, Ph.D., professor of religious studies at Manhattan College, and Hussein Rashid, Ph.D., adjunct assistant professor of religion at Hofstra University.

Father Ryan used his talk to give a rapid tour of the ways in which leaders from the three faiths approached the issue of bodily resurrection, weaving into it a personal story about a murdered student whose burial he oversaw while teaching in Ghana in 1979.
In the Jewish tradition, for instance, he cited passages from the books of Maccabees.

“These works reflect a strong hope for life after death, precisely in the form of resurrection of the body, nowhere more dramatically than in the account of the martyrdom of seven Jewish brothers and their mother who refuse to eat pork at the command of Antiochus,” he said.
When the second son defies Antiochus, before he dies he speaks of an afterlife: “‘You dismiss us from this present life, but the King of the universe will raise us up to an everlasting renewal of life, because we have died for his laws.’”

Christian attitudes toward life after death can likewise be seen in the retelling in the Gospels of a conundrum presented to Jesus by the Sadducees. If a woman married, one by one, seven brothers, and each of them died, which one would she be wedded to in the afterlife?
Jesus rebuts the Sadducees’ notion that life after death is just another version of life before death.

“[Jesus] argues that even in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, the resurrection of the dead is implicit in God’s words spoken to Moses in the burning bush: ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob,’” Father Ryan said.

“Following principles not untypical of Jewish exegetes in the early centuries of the Common Era, … Jesus interpreted the divine proclamation to Moses of God’s present relationship, I am, to the dead patriarchs as an assertion of a continuing relationship, even beyond the physical death of the patriarchs.”

Whereas the Gospels of the New Testament can point to the resurrection of Jesus as a foretaste of what lies in store for all who keep the Christian faith, Father Ryan noted that the Qur’an proffers no clear example of a past resurrection to Muslims.

“But [it]does adduce arguments in favor of the hope for resurrection, noting the parallelism between God’s creating everything in the beginning and God’s revivifying the dead at the end,” he said.

“They also say, ‘When we are reduced to bones and dust, will we really be raised up as a new creation?’ Say: ‘Even if you are stone or iron or some created thing even greater in your minds.’ Then they will say, ‘Who will bring us back?’ Say: ‘The One who made you the first time.’”

Harkening back to the grief that he felt in the presence of the corpse of his student in Ghana, Father Ryan praised Judaism, Christianity, and Islam’s perspectives.

“There is something much more satisfying, intellectually and spiritually, about life after death conceived as the resurrection of the body than of life after death as the pale survival of a soul in the manner of the shades in the Greek underworld. Jews, Christians and Muslims have all looked forward to resurrection as a bodily event, albeit a transformed bodily event, the fruition or flowering of the spiritual-corporeal whole that is you or me,” he said.

“None of us is hoping for the resuscitation of our aging carcasses, so that we can grow older and older, more and more feeble, in some preternatural Florida. Resurrection of the body promises much more and much better than bodily prolongation. In that resurrected future I hope to meet not only the risen Jesus, but my family and friends as well, including my student whom I buried more than three decades ago.”

A recently published book that is already being called a “new paradigm for thinking about [Jacques] Derrida” was celebrated at Fordham on March 22, as leading philosophers and theologians gathered to discuss the publication’s impact on the contemporary philosopher’s scholarship.

“Of Miracles and Machines: A Symposium on Derrida and Religion,” featured the book’s author, Michael Naas, Ph.D., professor of philosophy at DePaul University, and scholars from around the country and abroad, including:

•    Penelope Deutscher, Ph.D., professor of philosophy at Northwestern University;
•    Sarah Hammerschlag, Ph.D., assistant professor of religion at Williams College; and
•    Martin Hägglund, Ph.D., a junior fellow in the Harvard University Society of Fellows.

Naas’s Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (Fordham University Press, 2012) is a comprehensive reading of “Faith and Knowledge,” Derrida’s seminal essay published in 1996. Nass’ book expounds the essay that many in the field consider impenetrable.

“It’s not exaggerating to say that ‘Faith and Knowledge’ is Derrida’s most important essay on religion,” said Samir Haddad, Ph.D., assistant professor of philosophy. “But it’s incredibly difficult, and no one in the discipline actually provides a reading of the essay.”

All three commentators each responded to Naas’s book. Deutscher, who specializes in French philosophy and the philosophy of gender, agreed with Naas regarding Derrida’s speculations on sexual violence. According to Derrida, strategic sexual violence often takes place in the name of certain principles—including religious ones.

Deutscher added, however, that female fertility could also play a role in systematic sexual violence, especially in ethnic and religious wars.

For example, “rape camps” in the Bosnian war forced women to have offspring from fathers of different nationalities or ethnicities. This meant that the new generation—the offspring of these rapes—could “change national or ethnic futures.”

Therefore, Deutscher said, we should also talk about the role of reproduction when we talk about sexual violence.

Naas said it was a “unique pleasure and a rare opportunity” to discuss his work with his colleagues in a public symposium.

“It’s a genuine honor to have one’s work read with this degree of attention and sophistication by three accomplished scholars in the areas of contemporary philosophy and theology,” he said.

The symposium was sponsored by Fordham’s Department of Philosophy, Department of Theology, the Deans of the Arts and Sciences Council, and Fordham University Press.

In 16th-century Spain, Jesuit priests of Jewish descent played a central role in forming the education, spirituality and philosophy that are integral to the Society of Jesus.

Their story—one of respect and comity that was marred by the rise of “purity-of-blood” laws—was discussed on Oct. 27 at the 18th annual Nostra Aetate Dialogue.

The event, which fosters discussion between Catholicism and Judaism, featured Robert Aleksander Maryks, Ph.D. (GSAS ’05), associate professor of history at the City University of New York; and Thomas Cohen, Ph.D., associate professor of history at Catholic University of America.

Claudio M. Burgaleta, S.J., associate professor of Latin studies in the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education at Fordham, moderated the discussion.

Maryks, who earned his doctorate in early modern European history at Fordham, detailed how new Christians—called Conversos—were an important part of the membership of the young Christian church. But “purity-of-blood,” a concept that cast skepticism on new converts to Christianity and their descendents, eventually intruded.

Maryks explained three different sources of anti-Jewish bias:

• the economic (usury),
• the psychological (intelligence and arrogance), and
• the physical (body features and ungratefulness).

A mixture of prejudices based on these features, which the Conversos allegedly inherited by blood, pervades the entire anti-Converso literature. It manifested itself in 1449 with the first purity-of-blood law, passed by the mayor of the city of Toledo in Castile, Pero de Sarmiento, he said.

“Contrary to a rather significant number of Spanish civil and ecclesiastical authorities, the Basque founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola, and his two Spanish successors … took pleasure in admitting men of Jewish ancestry into the order,” he said.

It was the death in 1572 of the Society’s superior general, Francisco de Borja, which provided an opening for Converso-phobes, who considered the converts “worms that infested the apple,” to push through an ancestry law.

The decree proclaimed that Jewish (and, by extension, Muslim) ancestry, no matter how distant, to be an insurmountable impediment for admission to the order.

“That contrasted Loyola’s anti-discriminatory spirit as expressed in the Jesuit Constitutions and contradicted the practice of the first three generalates,” Maryks said. “The lineage-hunting season began.”

“The measure, which was voted for by all but two delegates, was so unexpectedly harsh that it scandalized the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo and Inquisitor General, Gaspar de Quiroga, who affirmed that the Society dishonored itself by promulgating such a law.”

The law stood until 1946, when the Jesuit delegates met in Rome for the General Congregation 29.

“It considered the impediment of ancestry unconstitutional, even though it did not condemn the racial discrimination practiced by the Society in the previous centuries,” Maryks said. “What led to this shift in the Jesuit policy was not only the Shoah, but also a change in the approach to the concept of purity of blood that took place among some Jesuits during the time of Nazi and Italian Fascism.”

Cohen, in his remarks, noted that that the initial schisms were as much about nationalism as religion.

“They would say, ‘Well, we’re not anti-Semitic, but people around us in Spain and Portugal are extremely anti-Semitic, and therefore we ought to accommodate that anti-Semitism and not admit a lot of new Christians,’” Cohen said.

He agreed that de Borja’s death sparked a crisis in the nascent order.

“One of the things I find so interesting is that there is a strain of anti-Semitism that Robert Maryks has talked about, but there’s also a strong strain of philosemitism and inclusiveness that runs throughout the history of the Society,” he said.

Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam” will feature centuries-old sacred texts and ancient manuscripts when it opens on Friday, Oct. 22, in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall/Wachenheim Gallery at the library’s main branch at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue.

“The exhibit fits in well with what I try to do in my McGinley Lectures—establish a ‘trialogue’ between these three forms of monotheistic faith,” Father Ryan said.

“From the rich holdings of the New York Public Library, we have selected several dozen books, manuscripts and objects that demonstrate the great similarities—as well as the considerable differences—that distinguish the faith traditions of Jews, Christians and Muslims,” Father Ryan said. “I have been particularly fascinated by some of the Coptic, Ethiopic and West African pieces on display, as well as the Arabic and Persian prayer books.”

The materials on display in the Gottesman Exhibition Hall will range from the fifth century of the Common Era to the present, and include:

• the Hebrew Bible written by Joseph of Xanten (on the Rhine north of Cologne) in 1294;
• the Harkness Gospels, written in Landévennec, Brittany, around the year 900;
• the Qur’an completed by Husayn ibn Hasan in Turkey or Persia in 1333;
• as well as fifth-century amulets discovered in Jewish tombs, 18th-century depictions of Mecca and Medina, a first edition (1611) of the King James Bible, 17th-century Armenian Gospels and a 13th-century Samaritan Pentateuch.

In the Wachenheim Gallery—specially converted into a scriptorium—visitors may explore various physical aspects of the art of the book in its many incarnations.

Father Ryan was invited to participate as a guest curator by alumnus H. George Fletcher (FCRH ’62), who worked for many years with Traditio, an international journal dedicated to the study of ancient and medieval history, thought, and religion.

“He is a man with a superb eye for beautiful books and manuscripts,” he said of Fletcher, who has also worked with Fordham University Press.

“The finished exhibit, which will run until Feb. 27, is radiant with color and light. If nothing else, it demonstrates most vividly the beauty that people of faith have found and shared with others over many centuries,” Father Ryan added.

“Three Faiths: Judaism, Christianity, Islam” is cosponsored by Stavros Niarchos Foundation and The Coexist Foundation.

Jesuits in Conversation introduces the Jesuits working at Fordham to the larger University community and the public. The interviews include Jesuit priests at Fordham, Jesuit visiting scholars, and young Jesuits-in-training (called scholastics).

“This series is a wonderful introduction to the Fordham Jesuit community, and to the Society of Jesus in general,” said Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. “It may be especially valuable to those who have not had first-hand experience with the Society, and to those who want to understand how a Jesuit education is transmitted at Fordham. I commend Father Ryan, Father Lombardi and Father Koterski for bringing this project to life.”

Patrick Ryan, S.J., the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham (formerly the vice present for University mission and ministry), conducted the interviews. Joseph Koterski, S.J., and Nicholas Lombardi, S.J., coordinated the production with Matt Schottenfeld of Fordham’s television studio in the Walsh Family Library. Tim Valentine, S.J., wrote the original theme music.

The series is the product of two years of work by the Fordham Jesuit community. A new episode will be posted on the community’s Web page each week (barring holidays) and broadcast on Fordham’s cable station, Channel 10.

Reciting that small yet potent word in three languages, Fordham’s new Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society negotiated the similar understandings of faith among Jews, Christians and Muslims, and vowed to strengthen interreligious dialogue at Fordham University.

Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., Fordham’s former vice president for mission and ministry and a scholar of comparative religion and Islamic studies, was installed on Nov. 18 as the second McGinley Professor by Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham. After the installation, Father Ryan delivered his inaugural lecture aimed at opening Fordham’s gates to more frequent and fervent interreligious exchange.

Father Ryan set the tone with “Amen: Faith and the Possibility of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Trialogue,” drawing upon the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur’an to examine the bilateral relationship between God and his people.

“Here in America I have learned from Jews, and during [my]many years in Africa I learned from Muslims,” said Father Ryan, a New York native who spent 26 years in Africa in faculty and administrative positions. “I have come to realize over the years that we use many of the same religious categories.”

Father Ryan examined similarities and differences among the three religions. Christians, he said, more often find expression through creeds or “organized statements” of faith than do Jews and Muslims, who are less centered on theology. But all three religions share a notion of the “bilateral, reciprocal nature of faith,” that consists of a bond between God and his people. This relationship, which he called the “ultimate context of faith,” appears in the Hebrew Bible as covenant, in the New Testament as new covenant and in the Qur’an as mithaq or ahd.

Differences do exist, however. In the Hebrew Bible, the Jewish people keep faith with a faithful and loving God, while in the New Testament the New Covenant with God is established through the fidelity of Jesus Christ.

The Qur’an, Father Ryan said, refers to a “primordial covenant,” where people bear witness to an all-powerful God before their birth. The word “Amin” does not appear in the Qur’an, Father Ryan said, but is uttered in communion at the end of the Surat al-Fatiha, the most frequently recited Muslim prayer, as a mutual pledge of faith between God and humanity.

“Is it too optimistic of me to suggest that what unites not only Jews, Christians and Muslims but all of humanity seeking the meaning of existence is that all of us, obscurely but somehow realistically, have entered into existence or continue to enter into existence responding to the Lordship of God with an enthusiastic, indeed a joyful, ‘Yes, we have born witness’?” said Father Ryan.

“Can we . . . acknowledge our common heritage of covenant with and fidelity to God, and God’s covenant with and fidelity to us, despite our radical differences?”

Father Ryan said he would devote his tenure as McGinley Chair to discovering common ground among the three religious traditions.

At the beginning of his lecture, Father Ryan paid homage to his predecessor, the late Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., who held the McGinley Chair for two decades, and to Father Ryan’s mentor at Harvard, Canadian theologian Wilfred Cantwell Smith.  It was Father Avery Dulles, Father Ryan said, who encouraged him in the 1960s to attend Harvard to study under Smith—an eminent theologian within the Calvinist tradition.

Two of Smith’s former students—one Jewish and one Muslim—offered responses to Father Ryan’s lecture.

Rabbi Daniel Polish, Ph.D., spiritual leader of Congregation of Shir Chadash in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., stressed the Jewish model of faith as “partnership” between God and humans. He also said global changes in the last few decades signal that “theology can no longer be done in isolation.”

Amir Hussain, Ph.D., professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, called faith “the appropriate category of comparison in all three of our religions.” He closed with a quote from the writer Salman Rushdie, to express his own hopes: “For God’s sake, open the universe a little more!”

The McGinley Chair, named for Fordham’s 28th president, was established in 1985 to encourage scholarship on the intersection of religion with the legal, political and cultural forces in American society.

Father McShane said Father Ryan’s appointment ushers in “a new phase in the history of the McGinley Chair.

“These dialogues and conversations are not happening anywhere else,” Father McShane said. “If not New York, where? If not Fordham, who?”

One day in 2002, Cardinal Dulles asked her to find an envelope in his files on which he’d written a reference. He jotted down the note while attending a talk in Washington, D.C. on a very warm day sometime in the 1960s. He wanted the reference for a lecture he was writing.

“The cardinal did his own filing because he felt that if he put something away, he’d know where it was,” recalled Sister Anne Marie, “and he remembered having put the envelope in his jacket, which he carried because of the heat.”

So she went to the files, of which there were many, with the clues at hand: Washington D.C. Warm weather. 1960s.

“I pulled a file from the ’60s, and Woodstock College (where the cardinal had taught). I went through each of the years, the spring months; and believe it or not, in the year 1967 there was an envelope, torn in half—on the back of which was a citation.

“It was true; his memory never failed him until he closed his eyes for the last time.”

Sister Anne Marie served as Cardinal Dulles’ research associate and executive assistant during his 20-year tenure as Fordham’s McGinley Chair. She helped the cardinal prepare speeches, organize his teachings and writings, keep up with correspondence and maintain his busy schedule of appearances.

Today, Sister Anne Marie is helping the staff of Fordham’s William D. Walsh Family Library curate a show on the late cardinal’s life and work. “The Papers and Memorabilia of Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J.,” runs through Dec. 23 in the library’s exhibition hall on the main floor.

It features more than 100 items of memorabilia from the cardinal’s personal archives, which he bequeathed to the library in 2003.

Included in the archival collection are books, research materials, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, memorabilia, awards, decorations, honorary degree citations, the cardinal’s vestments and other materials.

University Archivist Patrice Kane estimates that there are a few thousand items in the Dulles archive.

Library Director James McCabe, Ph.D., said the collection is the library’s most valuable holding.

“If this archive were to be auctioned by Christies or Sotheby’s, it would surely be of interest to important research libraries like Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Stanford and others,” McCabe said.

“The show will reveal the dimension of his scholarship as the leading theologian of the 20th century in the United States, and some personal and family history. The Dulles family is an important family in the history of our country,” he said.

In her second-floor office at Faber Hall, Sister Anne Marie has spent a portion of her summer sorting out papers and artifacts for inclusion in the show. It is not unusual for a small bit of correspondence, or a boxed honorarium, to trigger a memory about the lanky beloved theologian who wore so many hats: soft-spoken professor in the Fordham community; fellow Jesuit; leading American theologian; and member of the Vatican elite.

One item on display is a small, tattered letter written in eager child script. The sentences run a bit crooked, but its content shows the signs of a thoughtful wordsmith. It is Cardinal Dulles’ first letter to Santa Claus, written when he was a young boy and most likely saved by his mother, Janet Avery Dulles. The content is politely tactical: “Dear Santa Claus, I send much love to you and I wish you to give me many Christmas presents, as you do always.”

Conspicuously, the entire upper case alphabet is printed artfully across the bottom of the letter below the signature.

“It made me curious why a child would print the alphabet on the bottom of a letter to Santa Claus, so one day I asked him,” recalled Sister Anne Marie. “He looked at me as if he was shocked that I hadn’t recognized his rationale. ‘Because,’ he said, ‘I wanted Santa Claus to know that I was a good boy and was doing my lessons!'”

A certain politeness and good finish existed within the Dulles family; thus the cardinal’s childhood included one year at an exclusive school in Switzerland and, eventually, an Ivy League education.

A sense of refinement is evident even throughout the family’s correspondence, said Sister Anne-Marie, especially within a telegram announcing Avery Dulles’ birth, sent from his grandfather to his father. “Your Son arrived at 7 this morning. Everything fine. Janet says come if convenient.”

“There’s that level of refinement from his upbringing,” Sister Anne-Marie said, “and there was a strong sense of decorum.” She recalled that, prior to becoming a cardinal, Father Dulles would typically wear an open sport shirt and Dockers, chinos or some brand of sports slacks during the summer.

“But he would always instruct me to be sure to tell him when the students were returning,” she recalled. “Then he’d put on a jacket and a tie every day. It would be 100 degrees in August, but he’d say, ‘I can’t disrespect the students.'”

With the office of cardinal, however, came a degree of pomp—at least with regard to dress. Pope John Paul II made Father Dulles a cardinal in February 2001; he is the only U.S.-born theologian appointed to the College of Cardinals who was not first a bishop.

Sister Anne Marie recalled a dinner not long afterward, held at New York’s Waldorf Astoria, to raise funds for Catholic universities. A number of Jesuits and nuns sat at a table sponsored by Fordham as Cardinal Dulles walked in dressed in a full-length scarlet watered silk cape or ferraiolo—a cardinal’s covering for special non-liturgical occasions.

“We all did a collective gasp,” recalled Sister Anne Marie, “because he was so tall, and that cape on him was astoundingly beautiful.”

The ferraiolo is on exhibit, draped over the cardinal’s scarlet-tripped cassock.

Among other things on display a French croix de guerre World War II cross of war, which naval Lt. Avery Dulles received for heroism; Cardinal Dulles’ white brocade mitre hat; his red silk biretta—which famously fell from his head as he embraced the Pope during his elevation—a typed letter to his parents explaining his conversion to Catholicism; his sterling silver birth cup from Tiffany’s; several photos from various decades of his life; and a display of original announcements of his 39 McGinley lectures.

Some 70 volumes of the cardinal’s books are also on display in several translations. Henry Bertels, S.J., the University’s cataloguer of rare books, singled out a signed copy of the cardinal’s first commercially published title, A Testimonial to Grace (Sheed & Ward, 1946), inscribed to his mother.

“It gives you a personal insight into the relationship that Cardinal Dulles had with his family,” said Father Bertels.

Sister Anne Marie hopes that the exhibit, which was staged with help from Bronxville Jewelers in Bronxville, N.Y. and All Dress Forms in Sumter, S.C., shows the many sides of a man that the Fordham community was privileged to claim, and yet whose scholarly and theological legacy is far-reaching.

But it was his close personal relationships that came home to her strikingly on the day of his burial when his niece, Ellen Dulles-Coehlo, sprinkled a handful of dust onto his just-lowered coffin and spoke to him.

“[Ellen] told him how much he’d meant to her father (his late brother John), to herself, and to the rest of her family,” recalled Sister Anne-Marie. “At that moment, I realized that the love Cardinal Dulles had for God, his family, his friends and colleagues, his Jesuit community, his students, and his country are an important part of his legacy as well.

“We will not see his like again.”