Logos Journal
For Those Who Follow
The Future of Catholic Studies is Bright
How to Put the “catholic” in Catholic Studies
By NANCY SANNERUD & KAREN LAIRD
By DR. ERIKA KIDD
Alessandro Marchetti ‘12 , who served as MC of the celebration on Sept. 23, reminded us why it is important to give to Catholic Studies: “The academic formation of our students in their pursuit of truth across disciplines is what drives this program. From there, human formation, Catholic community, and dynamic change flows.” One hundred percent of your gift directly impacts the next generation of Catholic Studies students by providing essential scholarship funding and making this transformative formation possible. Thank you for supporting the transformative exploration of the impact of the Incarnation on human thought and culture.
In 2022, our Advisory Board approved a strategic plan that includes ambitious but thoughtful goals: to increase enrollment and to expand our development efforts to secure our place as the premier Catholic Studies program in the country and transform future Catholic leaders through our undergraduate, Latino, and graduate programs . A major first step toward reaching these goals was to celebrate our 30th anniversary. And celebrate we did! We hope you enjoyed this issue of Lumen filled with the joy and gratitude that surrounded our first-ever Alumni Event and our anniversary Mass, dinner and program in September. Thanks to many of you, you helped us raise $1.28M to mark our 30-year milestone, surpassing our event goal by $300K! And thanks to many of you, we are on our way to raising $5M over the next five years. We invite you to come along with us as we strive to reach this goal: + By making a first-time gift + By increasing your annual gift + By making a monthly recurring gift + By including Catholic Studies in your estate plans
I n Catholic Studies, we are interested in everything. So my colleague, John Boyle, likes to say. This remark surprised me when I first heard it during my campus job interview nearly 10 years ago. I was not entirely sure what Catholic Studies was. American Studies is about American stuff. Gender Studies is about gender stuff. Wasn’t Catholic Studies supposed to be about Catholic stuff? I liked Catholic stuff. Did I really need “everything”? As I began to get to know the department, I was not surprised to find my students liked Catholic stuff too. Many come wanting to read encyclicals, Newman, and Teresa of Avila, and spend downtime praying the rosary and going to adoration. They are not disappointed. St. Thomas Catholic Studies is a haven of wonderful Catholic stuff, both in and out of the classroom. Yet our course syllabi quickly confront our students with the fact that in Catholic Studies, we are interested in everything.
We simply cannot understand “the Catholic tradition” without developing a sense of its broad engagement with human thought and culture. Catholic tradition is embedded within the broader sweep of human thought and culture: it transforms culture, resists culture, or restores a culture. However we describe the forms of engagement, we cannot understand our Catholic tradition without a thoroughgoing piety for the roots of that tradition and for the channels through which it comes to us. Reading Augustine’s Confessions is great. Reading that text after having read the Aeneid (plus some Plotinus, Cicero, Seneca, Anselm, Dante, Aquinas, and Jean-Luc Marion) is a wonder—I think it is no exaggeration to say it is a different book. What we bring to the text shapes what we find there. In Catholic Studies, we are interested in everything because our engagement with everything is what makes truth sing.
Sincerely,
THE LOGOS 2023 SUPPLEMENT: CATHOLIC STUDIES IN FOCUS
This excerpt from Dr. Erika Kidd is from a collection of essays about the field of Catholic Studies published as a digital supplement to our journal Logos : A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. Some of the 14 essays are based on papers presented at the Catholic Studies Consortium conference, others were
Nancy Sannerud 651.962.5705
Karen Laird 650.962.5716
Gifts online:
Gifts by mail: Catholic Studies at the University of St. Thomas Mail 55-S 2115 Summit Avenue St. Paul, MN 55105
submitted in answer to a call for papers, and all give a snapshot of the variety of Catholic Studies at different universities across the country. You can read them all—including Dr. Kidd’s full essay—on Project Muse, EBSCO, or use this QR code to access them through Philosophy Documentation Center.
Page 22 stthomas.edu/catholicstudies
Lumen Winter 2024 Page 23
Powered by FlippingBook