The perpetual question. The latest: alarm at the declining proportio of RC faculty:
The percentage of faculty members who describe themselves as Catholic has dropped to 54 percent from 64 percent two decades ago, so the university is taking steps including the creation of an office to identify possible future Catholic faculty hires. The office in the College of Arts & Letters has started compiling a database of Catholic academics elsewhere who specialize in liberal arts disciplines.
"We compiled 700 to 750 names in departments for that college," said the Rev. Robert Sullivan, a history professor who leads the office.
While Notre Dame would continue to welcome professors of all religions, Sullivan said, the goal is "to make sure the pattern is halted and reversed."
Some Catholic scholars are suggested by current Notre Dame faculty, while others are identified through academic publications and other public documents, he said.
Among Notre Dame’s colleges, the law school has among the largest representations of Catholic faculty. Research science disciplines probably have the lowest percentage of Catholic professors, Sullivan said.
That is a vital concern and a worry. But try not to engage in knee-jerk ND bashing – there’s a lot that’s good going on there. Slow and steady wins the race. A small example: a forthcoming lecture series on 4 "forgotten" (relatively speaking) Catholic writers, sponsored by the Center for Ethics and Culture, which is one of the, well, centers of vibrant Catholic intellectual life at ND:
On Oct. 24 (Tuesday), Michael Foley, assistant professor of patristics at Baylor University, will lecture on “Kristin Lavransdatter,” by Undset. His lecture, “Sigrid Undset: Greatest Catholic Novelist of the Twentieth Century?” will concern the most critically acclaimed work of Undset, a Norwegian who in 1928 won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the third woman ever to have done so. Because of her prominence as a critic of Adolph Hitler and National Socialism, her books were banned in Nazi Germany and she became a refugee when Germany invaded Norway
during World War II. “Kristen Lavransdatter” is a novelistic trilogy set in 14th-century Norwaywhich follows the life of its heroine through childhood, marriage, and old age.
On Oct. 30 (Monday) Ralph Wood, the University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor, will lecture on “A Canticle for Leibowitz,” by Miller. His lecture, “The Call of the Desert in the Age of Ashes,” will concern the apocalyptic science fiction novel written by a tormented and brilliant writer who survived a harrowing World War II career as a tail gunner and suffered an excruciating depression which ended with his suicide in 1996. “A Canticle for Leibowitz” is set in a future, quasi-monastic civilization several centuries after a global nuclear war.
On Nov. 7 (Tuesday) Ralph McInerny, Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at Notre Dame, will lecture on “The Diary of a Country Priest,” by Bernanos. McInerny’s lecture, “Bernanos and the Noonday Devil,” will consider the life and work of the controversial French novelist whose complicated and occasionally contradictory political views seemed always to defer to his passionate devotion to the Catholic Church. “The Diary of a Country Priest” is a shrewd depiction of the quiet suffering and paradoxical triumph of the dying young pastor of an unremarkable parish in rural France
On Nov. 14 (Tuesday) David Solomon, W.P. and H.B. White Director of the Notre DameCenter for Ethics and Culture and associate professor of philosophy, will lecture on “Lord of the World,” by Benson. Solomon’s lecture, “Robert Hugh Benson: Anticipating the Apocalypse,” will concern the most famous work of a prolific writer of the early 20th century who converted to Catholicism in 1903 and became an ardent apologist for his faith. “Lord of the World,” published in 1907, imagines a future world of the early 21st century, in which a widely accepted ethic of secular humanism has yielded an apparently peaceful, but actually terrifying, society.
Also this fall at ND:
A conference from 11/30-12/2 – Modernity: Yearning for the Infinte.
But as always…more work to be done. Always.
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