Accompany Youth at “The Economy of Francesco” Conference

Assisi, Italy

This faculty grant provided funding for travel to “The Economy of Francesco” conference, an international meeting between young scholars and activists in the field of economics for which Ilaria Schnyder von Wartensee had been invited to serve as a Senior Member. The conference, convened by Pope Francis, aimed at studying and creating an economy “that brings life not death, one that is inclusive and not exclusive, humane and not dehumanizing, one that cares for the environment and does not despoil it” (“Letter by Pope Francis for the Event ‘Economy of Francesco’ in Assisi,” Pope Francis, 2019).

Alexander Kulik: Lectures and Research on Judeo-Slavica

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant co-sponsored a visit from Alexander Kulik, Professor and Chair of the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with the Russian and East European Studies Program and the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame. Kulik is a leading Israeli scholar of Judeo-Slavica whose expertise ranges from the Byzantine and Medieval periods to the origins of East European Jewry and cultural archaeology of Slavic-Jewish interaction.

An Architectural Study of Cultural and Religious Convergence in Andalucía

Seville and Cordoba, Spain

This undergraduate winter break project studied the lasting Moorish influence in southern Spain, particularly through the ornamentation belonging to the architectural style of Mujédar. The project sought to better understand the unique nature of the Andalucía region and contribute to the ongoing conversation regarding migrants and acceptance between different cultures and religions.

Faculty Advisor: Olivier Morel

Anglican Influence on the East Syriac Rites of Preparing the Eucharistic Gifts

London, England

This graduate student project explores a liturgical rite in the Church of the East—the preparation of the Eucharistic bread and wine in the East Syriac tradition. The project investigated the unique intercultural and interdenominational interactions between the Church of England and the Church of the East, as the first printed edition of this liturgical service was produced by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Mission in 1890. The project sought to better understand how English missionaries used these manuscripts to produce their printed text of the preparatory Eucharistic rites for the benefit of Assyrian Christians and what effect these European missionaries had on Middle Eastern Christians, and vice versa.

Faculty Advisor: Maxwell Johnson

A Parishioner’s Plea: The Search for New Confessors in Late Medieval Burgundy

Vatican City

This graduate student project researched fifteenth-century letters from nine medieval Burgundian dioceses’ parishioners to the Apostolic Penitentiary requesting a confessor other than their parish priest. These pleas, called supplications, provide insight into the attributes medieval commoners sought in a personal confessor and how they identified these characteristics, but also preview the dissatisfaction and tensions that would lead to the Reformation. The project’s research informed a chapter in a later dissertation as well as a scholarly article.

Faculty Advisor: John Van Engen

A Re-articulation of the Doctrine of Purgatory

Vienna, Austria; St. Andrews, Scotland

This graduate student project examined the modern theological articulation of the concept of Purgatory in Catholicism, or more accurately, the lack of modern theological articulation. The project involved an interview with Gisbert Greshake, an important theologian who carried a two-decade long dialogue with Joseph Ratzinger on the nature of Purgatory, and attendance at the University of St. Andrews titled Sin, Sacrifice, and Salvation in Jewish and Christian Antiquity. The research from this project informed a dissertation which sought to begin the systematic rearticulation of Purgatory theology by relating the concept in a contemporary idiom.

Faculty Advisor: Francesca Murphy

Art, Desire, & God: Phenomenological Perspectives

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant provided funding for a colloquium entitled “Art, Desire, & God: Phenomenological Perspectives.” The colloquium was an interdisciplinary event exploring the interrelations among art and the aesthetic experience, the multi-dimensionality of desire, and the nature of the divine in connection with the political dimensions of negotiations between religion and secular culture. The colloquium drew graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and junior faculty from across the world.

A Theory of Justice at 50

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant sponsored an international conference marking the anniversary and assessing the state of John Rawls’s A Theory on Justice. This book's conclusions have been transformative in philosophy, law, economics, religious ethics, and other related disciplines. The conference attracted many intellectual luminaries, specifically in the realm of political philosophy.

Bengal Bouts

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant sponsored Notre Dame’s Bengal Bouts.

Catholic Education in Europe: The Values and Objectives Necessary to Sustain its Mission

London, England; Glasgow, Scotland; Dublin, Ireland

This undergraduate winter break project compared the role of Catholic primary and secondary schools in Ireland, England, and Scotland. The project explored issues facing Catholic schools in the U.K. and Ireland and how they promote their values in an increasingly secular population.

Faculty Advisor: Fr. Timothy Scully

Catholic Immigrant Integration Initiative Conference: Building Communities of Belonging and Hope

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant aided in funding the 2020 Catholic Immigrant Integration Initiative (CIII) Conference, an annual convening of a diverse network of Catholic institutions devoted to advancing the integration, empowerment, and well-being of immigrants. The conference’s theme, “Building Communities of Belonging and Hope,” sought to address what the measure of “successful” immigrant integration should be, what explains cross-country successes and failures, and how the Catholic church can most effectively partner with agents in this process. This conference represented a significant step toward making Notre Dame an important center for the comparative study of migration and reflection on how the Catholic Church can become an agent of social solidarity.

Catholic Influence in Intergenerational Relationships and Elderly Care across Cultures in Denmark and Italy

Copenhagen and Aalborg, Denmark; Milan and Torino, Italy

This undergraduate spring break project observed the intergenerational relationships existing in two European countries, Denmark and Italy, to better understand their elderly care systems. The countries were chosen for their exceptional reputation in elderly care, in the case of Denmark, and their Catholic influence, in the case of Italy, to explore how a Catholic identity and perspective might provide impetus behind compassionate care.

Faculty Advisors: Lenny DeLorenzo, Todd Whitmore

Christian Hebraism and Imagined Minorities from Medieval to Modern

Jerusalem, Israel

In post-unification Germany, efforts to reconcile with the Holocaust have prompted intense interest in Judaism by non-Jewish Germans, especially in the academic and religious circles that were traditional bastions of Antisemitism in the nineteenth century and pre-war Germany. This graduate student project examines modern German philosemitism as part of a much older tradition that dates back to medieval Christian Hebraism, exploring the waxing and waning of this tradition over time. The project tracks the absorption of Jewish culture and religious texts into a Christian literary culture that does not include Jews.

Church Lands and Irish Identities Between Plantation and Confiscation

Dublin, Ireland

This graduate student project conducted exploratory dissertation research on the roles of debates over church lands in shaping Irish identity and politics in the 1640s. The project analyzed the Carte Papers, a major extant collection of manuscripts from seventeenth-century Ireland containing the correspondences of the Duke of Ormond. More specifically, the project focused on volumes 14-22, which contain Ormond’s negotiations with the Confederate Catholic organizations over control of church lands and other religious concessions, investigating the ways in which Confederate Catholic leaders constructed their arguments for the returns of church lands.

Faculty Advisor: Rory Rapple

Comment écrire l’histoire de Lourdes? Or, How to Write the History of Lourdes?

Paris and Lourdes, France

This faculty grant provided funding for travel to Paris and Lourdes for archival research and consultations with scholars of religious history. This research project explored how scholars dealt with accounts of Marian apparitions and miraculous healings and how these scholars should address evidence about these events. The output of the project was an essay likely to be published in the “Annales du Midi,” a major journal devoted to the history of southern France.

Democratizing Forgiveness: Reconciling Citizens in Revolutionary France

France

This faculty grant provided funding for archival research on religious confession and the state as well as government-sponsored cults in the wake of the French Revolution. This research supported Katie Jarvis’s book project Democratizing Forgiveness: Reconciling Citizens in Revolutionary France, which reveals how internal reconciliation within France required transforming the understanding and practice of forgiveness itself. The book argues that revolutionary methods for continuous resolution were just as important as the dramatic ruptures in establishing the enduring fabric of French and political social relations.

Early Anti-Palamism in Late Byzantine Art: Theodore Metochites Chora Church

Istanbul, Turkey

This graduate student project examined the images employed by Theodore Metochites in the Chora Church in Istanbul, Turkey, reading the thoughtful placement and manipulation of images, color, and space in the church. Investigating this visual theological treatise, the project sought to reveal how Metochites was an astute theologian and innovator in art and architecture rather than a theologically illiterate and arch-conservative as theological historians often remember him. The project analyzed archaeological and archival resources to produce an object analysis and research paper on the subject.

Faculty Advisor: Robin Jensen

Economic Courses at John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland

Lublin, Poland

This faculty grant provided funding for travel and expenses related to working with Bartek Jozwik. This collaboration aimed at developing economic courses at John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, beginning with a two-week program with English-speaking students.

Europe’s Influence on the Italian Catholic Church

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant provided funding for research on the influences from wider Europe on the Catholic churches in northern Italy.

Excellence in Education: Catholic School Interns' Presentation and Slovakia Trip

Bardejov and Kosice, Slovakia

This faculty grant sponsored 12-15 London program students who served as Catholic school interns in Bardejov and Kosice, Slovakia during a weekend excursion. This experience was an opportunity for these students to critically engage with different cultures while serving the common good through Catholic education at a primary school for Roma children. The students also presented at and participated in an international conference for educators on “Excellence in Education.”

Excellence in Education: LUP Catholic School Interns' Slovakia Trip

Bardejov and Kosice, Slovakia

This faculty grant sponsored 12-15 fall semester London program students who served as Catholic primary school interns in Bardejov and Kosice, Slovakia for a weekend as part of their co-curricular course “Catholic Education and the Common Good.” The students spent half a day on a cultural visit, meeting with Fr. Radoslav Lojan, faculty head of Theology for the Catholic University of Ruzomberok, gaining cultural knowledge of the surrounding area. The students also presented on their experiences at and participated in an international conference for educators on “Excellence in Education.”

Father Messineo and the American Configuration of Church-State Relations

Rome, Italy

This graduate student project explored how the “American experiment in ordered liberty” spoke to the post-world war agenda of not only European conservatives in general, but especially to that of Pope Pius XII. Building on previous research on American Catholic patriotic discourse in World War II, this project argued that despite most historians portraying the American Church as a progressive force within global Catholicism, the evidence uncovered suggests that throughout the 1940s, the US Church was profoundly “Roman” at heart.

Faculty Advisor: John T. McGreevy

Freetown Christiania: Studying the Effect of Unfettered Creativity on Urban Design

Copenhagen, Denmark

Freetown Christiania is an anarchic commune created in 1971 that has withstood conflicts with the Danish government, eras of dangerous activity, and now an influx of tourism. This undergraduate spring break project explored the relation between urban planning and social interaction by studying Christiania. The project also sought to fill a scholarly gap in information on Christiania and other similar anarchic communes and legitimize these places as areas of architectural and urban planning study.

Faculty Advisor: Lucien Steil

Gothic Architecture Summer Study Trip

United Kingdom

This faculty grant provided funding for 4-8 students to travel to the United Kingdom, focusing on the study of Gothic architecture (both medieval and modern) and its historical relationship to the British Catholic identity.

Holy See’s COVID-19 Commission Junior Coordinator

United States; Italy

This faculty grant co-sponsored a new Fratelli Tutti Fellowship with the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and the Catholic Peacebuilding Network. The fellowship enabled Melinda Davis (ND ’19) to work as a Junior Coordinator for the Holy See’s COVID-19 Commission. The commission is a working group responsible for research on the pandemic and envisioning a post-pandemic world supported by experts in health, economic, ecology, and security.

Institutional Italian Catholicism: Modern Cities and Rural Towns

Milan and Rome, Italy

This undergraduate winter break project examined the state of religiosity in modern Italian society by observing Italian infrastructure. The project investigated the state of systems surrounding churches throughout Italy, which are under government jurisdiction, to determine whether they were in good condition. The project focused both on churches in small towns and large cities, to circumvent the issue of tourism, which might bias results on larger churches which receive many international visitors.

Faculty Advisor: Patrick Vivirito

Intersections: A Research Cluster on Cross-Cultural and Inter-Religious Encounter in European Contexts

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant provided funding for a research cluster that explores the ambiguities of migration and cross-cultural exchange in culture and daily life during multiple periods of religious, political, and cultural upheaval, particularly in the European context. This research cluster sought to answer what it means to welcome—or reject—the “stranger,” whether these strangers are enemies or friends, and whether they are our “neighbor” or a threat to our way of life.

Ireland’s Huguenots: A Study of the Assimilation of French Huguenot Refugees into Irish Society in the Late 17th Century

London, England; Dublin, Ireland

This undergraduate summer break project explores the emigration of French Huguenots to Ireland, focusing on the complex relationship between a people fleeing religious persecution from Catholics to an island where Catholics were the persecuted. The project conducted archival research in London and Dublin, including Huguenot sermons and military records, to study the lives of French Huguenots and their participation in the Jacobite War in Ireland.

Faculty Advisor: Rory Rapple

Is Giorra Cabhair Dé Ná An Doras: God’s Help Is Nearer Than the Door

Dublin, Ireland

This undergraduate spring break project explored how the laity of Ireland has responded to the secularization of their country after a long standing association between the Catholic Church and Irish society. The project interviewed Professor Siobhan Garrigan, an expert in how theology has the ability to build bridges of communication across boundaries, and Sister Geraldine Smyth, a theological consultant to the World Council of Churches, both from Trinity College Dublin. The project compiled the information gathered in a final essay on the subject.

Faculty Advisor: Kenneth Oakes

Islam in Rural Areas of Europe and the U.S.

Southern United States; United Kingdom

This faculty grant aided in funding a research project on the misrepresentation of Islamic law and misinformation about the Islamic faith in the United States and Europe, particularly the United Kingdom. The project juxtaposed the practice of sharia law in Muslim populations to non-Muslim perceptions regarding sharia law. The project aimed to contribute to the conversation about the place of sharia law in secular society, especially with rising anti-Islamic rhetoric and far-right parties in many European countries.

Julian of Norwich: Historical Context, Theology and Language

Norwich, England

This undergraduate fall break project explored the setting, Julian of Norwich's anchoress cell, where she lived and wrote her text, Revelations of Divine Love. The project sought to understand the magnitude of Julian of Norwhich's influence on society and how she is memorialized in present-day Norwich.

Faculty Advisor: Denis Robichaud

Julien Gracq and the Surrealist Movement: Emergence from the Loire Valley

Paris, France

Julien Gracq was a French twentieth-century author whose writing is characterized by its intelligent and artistic abstraction balanced with the elegance and fluidity of style often ascribed to surrealist authors. This undergraduate spring break project explored how Gracq developed his surrealist-inspired style after leaving Paris, the center of surrealism, and returning to Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, a historically traditional Catholic region.

Faculty Advisor: Odette Menyard

Lindsay Ceballos: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Religious Identity

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant provided funding for a visit from Lindsay Ceballos (Lafayette College) in the course “Russia Between East and West.” Ceballos also gave a public lecture on her current research, which examines how Fyodor Dostoevsky’s religious identity was received first as exclusive and nationalistic, and later as universalist during the Modernist period. Ceballos’s research combines political, historical, religious, and literary perspectives, which was of interest for a wide variety of faculty and served as a model of interdisciplinary thinking for students.

Lutheran University Culture and Controversy in the Age of Orthodoxy

Wittenberg, Wolfenbüttel, and Rostock, Germany

This project examined intellectual culture as it developed within Lutheran universities from roughly 1570 to 1620. The project focused on the works associated with the many learned controversies within Lutheranism at the time, such as the disagreements over the Formula of Concord in the 1580s and the Hofmannstreit of the late 1590s. The project conducted archival research on three different important universities of the era and prepared materials for a dissertation on the subject.

Faculty Advisor: Brad Gregory

Mary Did You Know: An Exploration of the Gaps That Exist between the Hermeneutical and Theological Reverence of Mary in the Roman Catholic Church and the Simultaneous Silencing of Female Voices within Church Leadership

Vatican City; Rome, Italy; Dublin, Ireland

This undergraduate fall break project compared the deep veneration of Mary in the Catholic Church with the silencing of female Catholic religious, specifically the nuns in Northern Ireland and the sisters in Rome who write for Women Church World, and survivors of sexual violence on Catholic campuses in the United States. The project sought to answer how religious institutions either inadvertently or explicitly silence the voices of survivors through forced forgiveness, exclusive policies, and victim-blaming rhetoric and practices. The project also considered how female religious leaders are reshaping the narrative and interpretation of religious text and how this feminist hermeneutical work may set the Catholic Church up to be more inclusive of female voices in the future.

Faculty Advisor: George Lopez

Meaning at Mealtime in Renaissance Florentine Dining Culture

Rome and Florence, Italy; London, England

This undergraduate spring break project examined the interdisciplinary discussion concerning the historical, cultural, and theological aspects of dining by researching the dining culture and rituals of early-Middle Renaissance Florence. The project focused on the “non-sensorial” nature of meals, studying the physical objects, namely cutlery and dining ware, that fostered authentic depth in a typical Renaissance Florentine meal.

Faculty Advisor: Francesca Bordogna

Micro-experiences of Care

Rome, Italy

This faculty grant sponsored a workshop entitled “Micro-experiences of Care” led by Clemens Sedmak and Ilaria Schnyder von Wartensee as part of their larger research project with the Humanitarian Corridor (est. 2017). The project builds upon the understanding of the role of religion in international affairs, including themes of migration, integration, community building, and identity, and explores whether the migration model of a Humanitarian Corridor leads to successful integration. The workshop is an important feedback tool in the spirit of intellectual integrity, acting as a forum of exchange and informing stakeholders about the research’s methodology and progress.

Migration and Religion: Opinions of the First Mosque in Athens

Athens, Greece

This undergraduate winter break project investigated social implications of the construction of the first mosque in Athens, Greece since the Ottoman Empire’s occupation of the city in 1833. The project focused on whether Muslim migrants are encouraged by the construction of a public mosque in Athens as a sign of acceptance and support of their religion, and how conservative Greeks are responding to the construction.

Faculty Advisor: Rev. Robert Dowd, C.S.C.

Mikel Dufrenne, Intercultural Dynamics, and the Church

Caen, France

This graduate student project takes a renewed approach to intercultural dynamics and identity in Europe to clarify how the Church can positively interact with secular society broadly speaking and with the various socio-cultural milieus in which it operates without losing its identity. The project conducted short-term exploratory research at the archive of twentieth-century French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne (1910-1995) to gain access to unpublished materials he wrote on the subject.

“My Flesh Trembleth”: The Chaos of Scottish Piety within the Early British Empire

Glasgow and Edinburgh, Scotland

This graduate student project explored the intellectual creativity of Scottish faithful in forming their own strategies for identity and placement during the age of empire and the Enlightenment. Emphasizing the role of religious philosophy within this process of understanding, this project argued that the ways in which men and women interacted with the empire registered the intellectual, religious, and social tumult incurred from the 1707 Act of Union and Enlightenment ideas. The project evaluated how the existence of cross-national networks affected local and personal interpretations at a time when intellectual and religious instability prevailed as a result of peoples, ideas, and nations clashing because of this new British entity.

Faculty Advisor: Mark Noll

Peculiar Positions of Power: Lay Women as “Good Americans and Good Catholics,” 1867-1907

Vatican City

This graduate student project examined the life and career of Ella B. Edes (1832-1916), an American lay woman who worked in Rome as a journalist for many Catholic publications and acted as a translator, money manager, and reporter for the Propaganda Fide, the Holy See’s congregation for overseas “mission territories.” In contrast to earlier historians who viewed Edes primarily as an “agent” of bishops trying to advance their causes at the Vatican, this project investigated the broad scope of Edes’s life and work in Rome and the meaning of her “peculiar position” as a person of influence whose official recognition and advancement at the Vatican was severely limited by her gender.

Faculty Advisor: Kathleen Cummings

Philosophy in the Abrahamic Traditions: Intellect, Experience, and More

Pisa and Lucca, Italy

This faculty grant provided funding for a conference organized in part by Therese Cory, entitled “Philosophy in the Abrahamic Traditions: Intellect, Experience, and More.” The conference, held in Pisa, Italy, was an international meeting of the Aquinas and “the Arabs” International Working Group (AAIWG). It was held from May 22, 2019 to May 25, 2019.

Popery, Politics, and Prayer (EMBIC IV)

London, England

This faculty grant supported the fourth meeting of the Early Modern British and Irish Catholicism (EMBIC) Conference. The 2020 conference’s theme was “Popery, Politics, and Prayer,” exploring aspects and formation of the relationship between political and ecclesiastical institutions, as well as political and religious attitudes and ideas that established the historical foundations of the questions surrounding religion’s place in the secular state.

Power and Patronage: An Examination of Female Lay Religious Houses in Late Medieval Bavaria

Munich, Freising, and Landshut, Germany

This graduate student project investigated the formation and dissolution of patronage relationships between various members of the Wittelsbach family, the dynastic rulers of Bavaria, and communities of laywomen living a religious life in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Informing a later dissertation proposal, the project sought to illuminate the ways that patronage relationships both affected and were affected by changing views of acceptable religious practice as German territories entered into the crisis of the Reformation. The project hoped to answer questions about the role of secular leaders in shaping these religious trends, underscoring the complex and often contradictory nature of the relationship between secular and religious authority in the later medieval period, and compare these issues to modern religious questions.

Faculty Advisor: Daniel Hobbins

Preserving Italian Unreinforced Masonry Churches

Trento, Vicenza, and Perugia, Italy

This undergraduate summer break project analyzed the seismic vulnerability of unreinforced masonry buildings. The project collected data on the structural integrity of over seventy-five medieval Catholic churches and prepared protection and intervention plans for these church parishes to promote public safety and preserve important components of Italian culture and heritage.

Faculty Advisor: Kevin Walsh

Purity and Pollution in Christian, Muslim and Jewish Societies from Late Antiquity to the High Middle Ages

Jerusalem, Israel

This faculty grant provided the final funding for a symposium at Notre Dame’s Tantur Gateway during Spring Break, bringing together medievalists (both Europeanists and Islamicists) from Notre Dame and the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies. Collaboration at this symposium offered the opportunity for Notre Dame to participate in cutting edge research informing the study of Medieval Latin Christendom with comparative insights from the Byzantine and Islamic worlds.

Reconciliation through Faith: An Examination of the Practice of Scriptural Reasoning as a Conduit for Peacebuilding

London, Cambridge, and Oxford, England

This undergraduate fall break project exploited the way that religion might be used as a conduit for peacebuilding, particularly through the process of scriptural reasoning. The project engaged with experts in the field, including in the Society for Scriptural Reasoning, and studied past and current intrastate conflicts from a female religious perspective.

Faculty Advisor: George Lopez

Recovering Eros: A Case Study of God in the Passionate Love of “Call Me By Your Name” With Help from Origen, Julian of Norwich, and Pope Benedict

Rome, Italy; London and Cambridgeshire, England

This theological project explored the concept of eros by placing modern perspectives on romance in conversation with theological tradition. The undergraduate summer break project employed Luca Guadagnino’s film "Call Me by Your Name" as a case study, analyzing the film through the lens of three theological works on the concept of eros.

Faculty Advisor: John Cavadini

Religious Appeals and Right-Wing Populist Parties in Central Europe

Warsaw, Poland; Bavaria and Saxony, Germany; Carinthia and Burgenland, Austria; Croatia; Czech Republic; Hungary; Slovakia; Slovenia; Switzerland; Boston, Massachusetts

When considering right-wing populism in contemporary Europe, many scholars focus on xenophobia and economic factors while ignoring religious appeals, despite the strange contradiction of rising religious messaging in politics and falling public religiosity. This graduate student project explores the use of religious appeals by right-wing populist parties in Central Europe as a strategic response to electoral competition and as the supply to a demand by an electorate. The project sought to answer what values lead individuals to be attracted by religious appeals and what explains variations in the use and content of religious appeals.

Faculty Advisor: Andy Gould

Research and Documentation of Precedents for a Monastic Brewery

Brussels, Belgium

This undergraduate fall break project recorded and observed Trappist monastery breweries in Belgium. Specifically, the challenges of combining the religious privacy of a monastic cloister with the production and public involvement necessitated by a brewery and a taproom.

Faculty Advisor: Alan DeFrees

Silvan Maximilian Hohl: Habemus Feminas

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant sponsored a screening of the film Habemus Feminas at Notre Dame’s Browning Cinema and a discussion with filmmaker Silvan Maximilian Hohl from Switzerland. The film captures a 2016 pilgrimage of women from St. Gallen, Switzerland to Rome that demonstrated “the Catholic Church in solidarity with women” and submitted a petition to Pope Francis.

Soldiers of God in a Secular World

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant provided funding for a workshop on a manuscript of Sarah Shortall’s book Soldiers of God in a Secular World: The Politics of Catholic Theology in Twentieth-Century France. The workshop provided an opportunity for top experts and scholars in the field to comment on the manuscript before its submission to Harvard University Press. The workshop also served as a networking opportunity with some of the most respected scholars on European history in the country.

Strengthening Relationships with the City of Leeds

Leeds, England

This faculty grant provided funding for various projects in Leeds, England. These projects included an inter-faith choral pedagogy for children in Leeds, a BBC broadcast, and fostering Notre Dame’s relationship with the city and its nationally-recognized children’s program in music.

Sustainability and Heritage Survey of Historic Structures in Ireland: Research Experience for Students

Ireland; Italy

This faculty grant supported a student research experience studying historic Catholic churches and structures in Ireland and Italy. The project aimed at familiarizing students with the general variables, process, and outcomes of infrastructure asset management and community impacts. The research focused on providing students with hands-on experience integrating engineering in a cultural, historical, and sustainable context.

The Beauty of Imperfection: An Architectural Analysis of Lincoln Cathedral

Lincoln, England

This undergraduate spring break project analyzed the Lincoln Cathedral, an influential example of Gothic architecture, through a series of sketches, watercolor renderings, and diagrams. The project aimed to understand the structure within its urban context, as well as detail its design and functions. The project emphasized the collaboration between irregular elements of design, placing the Gothic form in contrast to Classical works.

Faculty Advisor: John Stamper

The Decline of Catholicism in Ireland: Understanding the Causes of the Dramatic Decline of Religious Devotion in Ireland Between Papal Visits from 1979-2018

Dublin and Galway, Ireland

This undergraduate fall break project investigated how Ireland, a country which fiercely guarded its Catholic faith under British oppression for centuries, secularized so rapidly in the past forty years. The project explored Ireland’s experiences with The Troubles and their accession to the EU and these events’ contributions to the decline of Catholicism in Ireland. The project relied on interviews with scholars, clergy, and laity, as well as archival research to follow the process of decline.

Faculty Advisor: Paul Ocobock

The Science of Soviet Atheism: Religion, Politics, and the Communist Experiment

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant supported funding for a visit from Victoria Smolkin, a scholar of communism, the Cold War, and atheism and religion in the Soviet Union and Russia. Smolkin gave a talk about her book A Sacred Space is Never Empty: A History of Soviet Atheism, in which Smolkin considers Soviet atheism and its importance for understanding religious life, the Soviet experiment, and Russian politics.

The Virgin Mary in Visual Art: From Europe to the Americas

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant aided in funding a two-day conference on the image of the Virgin Mary in visual art. The conference was held at the Snite Museum and featured guest speakers and gallery talk by art historians from Europe and the United States. The conference was built upon an undergraduate course taught by Prof. Robin Jensen, “The Virgin Mary in Christian Visual Art, Texts, and Traditions,” and it examined the early history, religious diversity, and global extension of Marian iconography.

Translating Ferdinand Christian Baur

Notre Dame, Indiana

This faculty grant aided in funding translation services for nine previously untranslated selections within a project to create a “reader” of Ferdinand Christian Baur’s works aimed at introducing his broad theological work to the Anglophone world. Baur was one of the most influential figures in nineteenth century Christian theology, with an extensive list of published writings covering a wide range of topics such as New Testament studies, church history, philosophy of religion, and the history of religion.

Václav Havel and the Power of Philosophy

Prague, Czech Republic

This undergraduate winter break project engaged with the life and works of Václav Havel in the city that inspired him, Prague, to better understand his philosophy and its place in the public sphere. The project explored how Havel’s ideas about political life have been fulfilled, or left unfulfilled, in Prague, and included an immersion in the Catholic community of the city.

Faculty Advisor: Rachel Tomas Morgan

Vices and Virtues in Dante's Florence

Florence, Italy

This graduate student project examined how the religious culture of thirteenth century Florence influenced Dante, questioning how Dante absorbed this culture, and how it contributed to his intellectual formation and works. The project sought to gain a deeper understanding of the cultural environment in which Dante lived and wrote before his exile and offered a reconstruction of this religious environment in a later dissertation on the subject.

Why the Church?

Madrid, Granada, and Toledo, Spain

This fall-break comparative project explored the strengths and weaknesses of the Catholic church in rural and urban Spanish communities with the role of the church in the United States. By analyzing statistics on mass attendance and parish size, as well as age demographics and religious identification the project shed light on the general trend amongst young people to leave the church both in Spain and the United States.

Faculty Advisor: Daniel Philpott