The McFarland Center promotes new scholarship in the field of Global Catholicism by sponsoring faculty research across disciplines. This research will help people, in particular 51С»Æ³µ students, understand the distinctiveness and variety of Catholic practice around the world.
Global Catholicism Grant Recipients
Theologizing the Just Peace Movement: Catholicism, War, and Peacebuilding
Spring and Summer 2025
Grant Recipients: Matthew Eggemeier and Peter Fritz, Religious Studies
This new co-authored book project, provisionally titled Theologizing the Just Peace Movement: Catholicism, War, and Peacebuilding, will offer a Catholic systematic theology of just peace, developed out of Catholic practices of nonviolence and resistance to American militarism abroad and racialized state violence domestically. The "Just Peace" framework we will explore accounts for a variety of social practices geared toward resolving social conflicts without recourse to violence except in extreme cases of last resort. This book will use systematic theology to help understand and practice Just Peace by discovering coherent yet implicit theologies of peace in the work of global Catholic organizations dedicated to fostering justice as a way toward building lasting peace.
Diffused Religiosity among Catholics in the Sinosphere: Investigating Polymer Clay Miniatures of Food in Singapore’s Columbariums
Spring 2026
Grant Recipient: Audrey Seah, Religious Studies
In a Singapore state-run columbarium where people of different religions are put to rest, it is common to find dollhouse-sized polymer clay miniatures of local foods attached to the niche plaque or the base of a columbarium niche of Catholics with Chinese ancestry. Using Chinese ancestral rites as a starting points and drawing upon the concept of diffused religion, this project aims to investigate the prevalence of these polymer clay miniatures and associated spiritualities of death and the afterlife by observing practices at Catholic cemeteries and columbariums over the Lunar New Year season. In line with the goals of the McFarland Center Global Catholicism grant, potential findings may challenge the binary of liturgy and popular religiosity and diffused religion and institutional Catholicism, and facilitate the identification of expressions of indigenized Catholicism in the Sinosphere.