The Portal to Jesuit Studies

The inaugural Faber Symposium–designed to nurture a new generation of Jesuit writers on the scholarly examination of the original charism of the Society of Jesus–takes place this month in Chicago, Illinois.

What will be an annual event, the Faber Symposium is organized and hosted by Barton Geger, SJ, the new editor of Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits. The symposium features presentations of current works (dissertations, theses, and articles for publication) and feedback provided by gathered experts.

Papers presented will include:

• Bill Woody, SJ: “The Jesuit Ministry of Reconciliation”

• Peter Nguyen, SJ: “Cor Jesu and Pope Francis’s Vision of a Merciful Church”

• Pedro Cameira, SJ: “Psychology of the Spiritual Exercises”

• Quan Tran, SJ: “Cultural Differences and the Spiritual Exercises”

• Joe Laramie, SJ: “Liturgical Themes in the Spiritual Exercises”

• Mark Mossa, SJ: “The Beginnings of Jesuit Ressourcement? Pius XI, Ledochowski, de Guibert and the Jesuit Quadricentenary”

• Barton Geger, SJ: “Bending the Knee to Baal: St. Ignatius on Jesuit Vocation Promotion.”

For free, searchable access to past issues of Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, please visit the Jesuit Online Library.

• Update: The Faber Symposium II will occur in June 2017. A call for papers may be found here.

Princeton University Press has published a new history of American Jesuits by John McGreevy, dean of the College of Arts and Letters and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global, according to the publisher, argues that Jesuits following their order’s restoration in 1814 “were at the vanguard of the Catholic Church’s expansion around the world.” It was especially in the United States of the nineteenth century, however, that “foreign-born Jesuits built universities and schools, aided Catholic immigrants, and served as missionaries.” McGreevy “traces this nineteenth-century resurgence, showing how Jesuits nurtured a Catholic modernity through a disciplined counterculture of parishes, schools, and associations.”

In 2015, McGreevy delivered the inaugural Lecture on Jesuit Studies, and the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College awarded him the George E. Ganss, S.J., Award in recognition of his significant scholarly contributions to the field of Jesuit Studies. The video of McGreevy’s lecture is available online.

• Update: Thinking Faith has reviewed American Jesuits and the World (November 2016).

The first volume based the International Symposia on Jesuit Studies has been published as part of Brill’s Jesuit Studies book series.

Exploring Jesuit Distinctiveness: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Ways of Proceeding within the Society of Jesus offers an introductory essay and 12 chapters. According to the publisher, “The volume theme is the distinctiveness of Jesuits and their ministries that was discussed at the first International Symposium on Jesuit Studies held at Boston College’s Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies in June 2015. It explores the quidditas Jesuitica, or the specifically Jesuit way(s) of proceeding in which Jesuits and their colleagues operated from historical, geographical, social, and cultural perspectives. The collection poses a question whether there was an essential core of distinctive elements that characterized the way in which Jesuits lived their religious vocation and conducted their various works and how these ways of proceeding were lived out in the various epochs and cultures in which Jesuits worked over four and a half centuries; what changed and adapted itself to different times and situations, and what remained constant, transcending time and place, infusing the apostolic works and lives of Jesuits with the charism at the source of the Society of Jesus’s foundation and development.”

Due to support by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, the entire volume is available in Open Access. Its 12 research essays include:

• Francesco Benci and the Origins of Jesuit Neo-Latin Epic, by Paul Gwynne;

• Exploring the Distinctiveness of Neo-Latin Jesuit Didactic Poetry in Naples: The Case of Nicolò Partenio Giannettasio, by Claudia Schindler;

• Civic Education on Stage: Civic Values and Virtues in the Jesuit Schools of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, by Jolanta Rzegocka;

• “Ask the Jesuits to Send Verses from Rome”: The Society’s Networks and the European Dissemination of Devotional Music, by Daniele V. Filippi;

• Priestly Violence, Martyrdom, and Jesuits: The Case of Diego de Alfaro, S.J. (Paraguay 1639), by Andrew Redden;

• Colonial Theodicy and the Jesuit Ascetic Ideal in José de Acosta’s Works on Spanish America, by Bryan Green;

• Purple Silk and Black Cotton: Francisco Cabral, S.J., and the Negotiation of Jesuit Attire in Japan (1570–73), by Linda Zampol D’Ortia;

• Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Vida del P. Ignacio de Loyola (1583) and Literary Culture in Early Modern Spain, by Rady Roldán-Figueroa;

• The Distinctiveness of the Society of Jesus’s Mission in Pedro de Ribadeneyra S.J.’s Historia ecclesiástica del schisma del Reyno de Inglaterra (1588), by Spencer J. Weinreich;

• Discerning Skills: Psychological Insight at the Core of Jesuit Identity, by Cristiano Casalini;

• Distinctive Contours of Jesuit Enlightenment in France, by Jeffrey D. Burson;

• One Century of Science: The Jesuit Journal Brotéria (1902–2002), by Francisco Malta Romeiras and Henrique Leitão.