The Portal to Jesuit Studies

On October 2, 2018, the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies welcomed Paul Grendler, eminent historian and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, to deliver the 2018 Feore Family Lecture on Jesuit Studies. Grendler’s lecture was titled “A Historian’s Journey to Jesuit Education.”

The event also celebrated Grendler’s scholarly contributions, with the Institute presenting him with the George E. Ganss, S.J., Award in Jesuit Studies. Previous lecturers and award recipients include: John O’Malley, S.J.; John Padberg, S.J.; and John McGreevy.

A native of Iowa, Professor Grendler received his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published ten books and 150 articles.  The Roman Inquisition and the Venetian Press 1540-1605 (1977) received the Marraro Prize of the American Catholic Historical Association.  Schooling in Renaissance Italy (1989) received the Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association.  The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (2002) also won the Marraro Prize.

Grendler was editor-in-chief of The Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (6 volumes, 1999), which won the Dartmouth Medal of the American Library Association and the Roland H. Bainton Prize.  He was also editor-in-chief of Renaissance: An Encyclopedia for Students (4 volumes, 2004). He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Villa I Tatti (The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies), the Woodrow Wilson International Center, the National Humanities Center, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and other organizations.

Grendler has been president of the Renaissance Society of America, which awarded him its lifetime achievement award in 2017, the Society for Italian Historical Studies, which awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999, and the American Catholic Historical Association.  He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2002.  In 2014 he received the Galileo Galilei International Prize presented annually to a non-Italian who has made major contributions to Italian scholarship.

More information about Grendler and the lecture series is available at the Institute’s website.

On September 24, Fordham University hosted “Dulles at 100,” a symposium celebrating the life and legacy of Avery Dulles. The event marked the centenary of the birth of the American Jesuit, theologian, and cardinal. Dulles spent the last two decades of his life at Fordham. He died in 2008.

A program for the symposium appears below. The event was sponsored by the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, the Department of Theology, the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, the Fordham Jesuit Community, America Media, and the offices of the president and provost at Fordham.

More details are available online.

12 – 1:30 p.m. | Opening Keynote Address

Welcome: Patrick Hornbeck, Chair, Department of Theology, Fordham University

Address: “Models and Other Maneuvers: The Fluency of Interpretation in Avery Dulles’ Thought,” by Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., Distinguished Professor Emerita of Theology

1:45 – 3:15 p.m. | Panel: Dulles as an American Theologian

Patrick Carey, Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology, Marquette University

Mary Catherine Hilkert, O.P., Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame

Joseph Lienhard, S.J., Professor of Theology, Fordham University

Moderator: Anne-Marie Kirmse, O.P., Research Associate, McGinley Chair in Religion and Society, Fordham University

3:30 – 5 p.m. | Panel: Dulles as a Global Theologian

Agnes Brazal, Associate Professor of Theology, De la Salle University of Manila, Philippines

Michael Canaris, Assistant Professor, Institute of Pastoral Studies, Loyola University Chicago

Yvon Elenga, S.J., Jesuit Institute of Theology, Abidjan, Ivory Coast

Moderator: Michael McCarthy, S.J., Vice President for Mission Integration and Planning, Fordham University

6 – 7:30 p.m. | Closing Keynote Address

Welcome: David Gibson, Director, Center on Religion and Culture, Fordham University

Introduction: Matt Malone, S.J., President & Editor-in-Chief, America Media

Address: “Imaging the Church in the Age of Migration: The Legacy of Avery Dulles for Asian Christianity,” by Peter Phan, Ellacuria Chair of Catholic Social Thought, Georgetown University

Respondent: Father Joseph Komonchak, Professor Emeritus of Theology and Religious Studies, Catholic University of America

Moderator: Christine Hinze, Professor of Theology and Director, Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, Fordham University

The newest edition of Cambridge University Press’s Camden Series of annotated primary source documents features “the continental travels of the Irish landowner Henry Piers and his conversion to the Catholic faith in Rome, during the heightened political and confession tensions of the 1590s.” The volume is edited and introduced by Brian Mac Cuarta, SJ, the director of the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu.

Of particular interest in this document are the recollections that Piers has of his encounters with Jesuits in Rome and Spain. For example, as Mac Cuarta notes on the blog of the Royal Historical Society, Piers stayed at Rome’s English College, where, “under Jesuit guidance, he deepened his knowledge of the Catholic faith, and followed the seminary courses in philosophy.”

The volume of “Piers’s account,” Mac Cuarta continues, “adds vivid detail to our understanding of the febrile world of the Elizabethan Catholic exiles in late sixteenth-century Rome, where spies mingled with seminarians, and an appearance before the Inquisition was normal for many northern Europeans.”

Piers’s travels continued into Spain, “where he visited English Jesuit colleges in Valladolid and Seville,” hinting at connections he made through the Jesuit Robert Persons.

More information about Henry Piers’s Continental Travels, 1595–1598–including Mac Cuarta’s helpful introduction and bibliography–is available at the Cambridge University Press website.