51С�Ƴ�

Spring 2025

Thoreau's Religious Quest

Thursday, January 30, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall��

Henry David Thoreau was a harsh critic of the "respectable" Christianity of his day, but he was also a mystic with a deep reverence for the sacredness of life. Richard Higgins '74, the author of Thoreau's God, explores Thoreau's innate religiosity and his search for communion with a divine mystery that was at once immanent in the natural world and yet transcendent.��

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The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Past and Present

Thursday, February 6, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

Come to a deeper understanding of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians through an appreciation of its long history, its origins in the remaking of the world order after WWI, the national and religious beliefs of the different parties, and how a century of war and attempts at peacemaking impact the current situation.
Alexander Kaye is the Director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, where he holds the Karl, Harry, and Helen Stoll Chair in Israel Studies and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies.
Part of the Kraft-Hiatt Program for Jewish-Christian Understanding.��

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Luncheon Presentation / Educated by Anxiety: Toward Building a Culture of Care

Monday, February 10, 2025
12:00 p.m., Hogan Suite A
RSVP required:

How can we guide our students through their "education by anxiety" toward leading lives of care—both providing it and, when needed, receiving it? Join us for a discussion about Cura Psychologia, an interdisciplinary research project, and a future edited volume, with collaborators Professors Mark Freeman, Peter Fritz, and Frances Maughan-Brown.

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Immigrant Churches in Aotearoa New Zealand: Sites of Challenge and Hope

Monday, February 10, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

Aotearoa New Zealand has seen several distinct waves of Catholics arrive on its shores beginning with Bishop Pompallier's arrival from France in 1838. Drawing on her ethnographic research, Robyn Andrews, Social Anthropologist and Research Fellow at Massey University, discusses the tensions, challenges, and hopes around incorporating the most recently arrived migrant groups, Catholics from the Philippines and South India.

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The Daode jing (The Scripture of the Way and its Virtue): Its Curious Route to Becoming a Classic of World Religions

Thursday, February 13, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

The Daode jing, the main sacred book of Daoism, has attracted the attention of many East Asian scholars from the 3rd century BCE onward. James Robson, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, discusses the diverse afterlives of the Daode jing, including the many radically different interpretations of its enigmatic content.��
Co-sponsored with the Department of Religious Studies.��

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Catholicism in India: Blending in and Staying Apart, 1500-Present

Tuesday, February 18, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

What happens when the world’s oldest multicultural organization—the Catholic Church—interacts with one of the most religiously and linguistically diverse regions of the world? It results in a tug-of-war between blending in and staying apart. Using images and anecdotes from a five-hundred-year history, Chandra Mallampalli, Historian of Modern South Asia at Harvard University’s Mittal Institute, describes the Church’s dual tendency to adapt to its Indian surroundings while retaining a sense of distinctiveness and mission. ��
A Deitchman Family Lecture on Religion and Modernity.

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Courageous Hope in Precarious Times

Thursday, February 20, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

Bryan Massingale is the James and Nancy Buckman Professor of Theological and Social Ethics at Fordham University and a Senior Fellow in its Center for Ethics Education. An award-winning scholar, teacher, Catholic priest, and activist, he is a leader in Catholic theology.
A Deitchman Family Lecture on Religion and Modernity.

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Two Truths in One Heart; Two Peoples in One Land

Tuesday, February 25, 2025
7:00 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

This event is open only to 51С�Ƴ� faculty, staff, and students.
Roots, a nonprofit organization and unique collaboration of local Palestinians and Israelis, aims to nurture understanding, non-violence, and personal transformation while building a grassroots model for coexistence. Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, an Orthodox rabbi and cofounder of Roots, and Noor A’wad, a Palestinian refugee and speaker, will share their personal, interconnected stories and present the groundbreaking and challenging grassroots work of their initiative.
Part of the Kraft-Hiatt Program for Jewish-Christian Understanding.��

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Following Christ in the Anthropocene: Spiritual Poverty, Solidarity, and Protest

Wednesday, March 12, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

Daniel Castillo, Associate Professor of Theology at Loyola University Maryland, will examine several dimensions of the eco-social emergency that characterizes our present-day global context. Then, drawing insight from liberation theology and Scripture, the lecture will consider how persons and communities of faith might begin to envision the task of discipleship.
A Deitchman Family Lecture on Religion and Modernity.

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Why Science and Religion Need Each Other: Teilhard de Chardin’s Deep Catholicity

Monday, March 17, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

Science and religion remain at odds today, despite the insistence of Saint John Paul II and Pope Francis to reconcile these areas toward an integrated worldview. Ilia Delio, Franciscan sister and Josephine C. Connelly Endowed Chair in Theology at Villanova University, explores the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and scientist who developed a cosmic vision of Catholicity, and reflects on whether or not his vision can provide hope in light of the technological challenges of the twenty-first century.
A Deitchman Family Lecture on Religion and Modernity.

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How the Irish Helped the Jews Become American

Monday, March 24, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

From the end of the nineteenth century into the early twentieth, Irish Americans opened doors for Jewish immigrants and other newcomers to the United States. Hasia Diner, Professor Emerita at New York University and Director of the Goldstein-Goren Center for American Jewish History, considers how and where this allyship played itself out and what each group, the Jews and the Irish, had to gain from it.
Part of the Kraft-Hiatt Program for Jewish-Christian Understanding.��

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Historiography and the Archives: Deaf History as Archival Practice

Friday, March 28, 2025
4:30 p.m., Seelos Theatre, Kimball Hall

R.A.R. Edwards '90, Professor of History at Rochester Institute of Technology, discusses historiography using the Deaf Catholic Archives as a model to demonstrate the opportunities and advantages, as well as the challenges and obstacles, that researchers encounter when using archival collections.
Co-sponsored with the Archives & Distinctive Collections department.

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Conference / Signs of Hope: The Claggett Statement and Deaf Theology Today

Friday, March 28, 2025 and Saturday, March 29, 2025
Seelos Theatre, Kimball Hall

Penned in 1984 by an ecumenical group of ten deaf and hearing women and men from North America, the Claggett statement was an early expression of Deaf Liberation theology produced at a time of cultural awakening and creativity among Deaf people. This symposium spotlights this important statement on its 40th anniversary, by bringing together scholars and practitioners from the United States and beyond to examine the past, present, and future of the Claggett Statement for Deaf Christians across the world.
This symposium is co-organized by Audrey Seah (College of the 51С�Ƴ�) and Kirk VanGilder (Gallaudet University) with the support of Deaf Studies and Sign Languages, Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, and the Deaf Catholic Archives, Archives and Distinctive Collections at College of the 51С�Ƴ�. Attendance is free and open to the public. Registration opens on January 15, 2025.
View the full schedule here >>

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A Passion for Celebration: The Inspired Legacy of Elie Wiesel

Monday, March 31, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

Known for his eloquence as a survivor of the Holocaust, his accomplishments as a literary master, his advocacy of Jewish causes and study, and his unstinting activism as a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Elie Wiesel also made "celebration" a key term in his personal lexicon of life and work. Alan Rosen, Kraft-Hiatt Scholar in Residence, will aim to show how Wiesel’s passion for celebration, cultivated over decades, served as a driving force behind his vocation and message.
Part of the Kraft-Hiatt Program for Jewish-Christian Understanding.��

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Thomas More Lecture: War, Homecoming, Heroism, Truth

Tuesday, April 1, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

Translation Workshop:��
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
11:00 a.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

Emily Wilson, Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, discusses what we might learn from the Homeric poems about ethics and empathy, moral and poetic challenges of studying, & engaging with and translating the distant past.
A Thomas More Lecture on the Humanities.��

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The Military-Industrial Complex, Liberal Capitalism, and the American Way of War

Thursday, April 3rd, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

Historically, the United States has preferred to fight its wars by substituting technology and money for manpower. Kate Epstein, Associate Professor of History at Rutgers-Camden, will explore the implications of the US “way of war” for the nation’s commitment to liberal capitalism—that is, to norms of representative government, due process, and democratic accountability, on the one hand, and to free markets and private property rights, on the other.
Co-sponsored with Peace and Conflict Studies.

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Race to the Future? Resisting & Reimagining the New Jim Code

Tuesday, April 8th, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

Ruha Benjamin, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, presents the concept of the “New Jim Code” to explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity into technology. She will also consider how race itself is a tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice and discuss how technology can be used toward liberatory ends. In doing so, Ruha challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we manufacture ourselves.
Co-sponsored with Critical Race and Ethnic Studies.

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The Fall of the Second American Republic

Thursday, April 10, 2025
4:30 p.m., Rehm Library, Smith Hall

In the late nineteenth century, a formal overseas American empire rose while the long unwinding of the "Second American Republic" began. Manisha Sinha, James L. and Shirley A. Draper Chair in American History at the University of Connecticut, argues that the fall of Reconstruction paved the way for the West’s conquest and a formal and informal American empire in the Caribbean and the Pacific.��
Co-sponsored with the Department of History.

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