{"id":5086,"date":"2006-10-23T00:22:53","date_gmt":"2006-10-23T00:22:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/whither-notre-dame.html"},"modified":"2006-10-23T00:22:53","modified_gmt":"2006-10-23T00:22:53","slug":"whither-notre-dame","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/whither-notre-dame.html","title":{"rendered":"Whither Notre Dame…"},"content":{"rendered":"

The perpetual question. The latest: alarm at the declining proportio of RC faculty:<\/a><\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

"We compiled 700 to 750 names in departments for that college," said the Rev. Robert Sullivan, a history professor who leads the office.<\/p>\n

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."<\/p>\n

Some Catholic scholars are suggested by current Notre Dame faculty, while others are identified through academic publications and other public documents, he said.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That is a vital concern and a worry. But try not to engage in knee-jerk ND bashing – there’s a lot <\/em>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:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
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On Oct. 24 (Tuesday), Michael Foley, assistant professor of patristics at Baylor University, will lecture on \u201cKristin Lavransdatter,\u201d by Undset.  His lecture, \u201cSigrid Undset: Greatest Catholic Novelist of the Twentieth Century?\u201d 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<\/p>\n

during World War II.  \u201cKristen Lavransdatter\u201d is a novelistic trilogy set in 14th<\/sup>-century Norwaywhich follows the life of its heroine through childhood, marriage, and old age.  <\/p>\n

On Oct. 30 (Monday) Ralph Wood, the University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor, will lecture on \u201cA Canticle for Leibowitz,\u201d by Miller.  His lecture, \u201cThe Call of the Desert in the Age of Ashes,\u201d 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.  \u201cA Canticle for Leibowitz\u201d is set in a future, quasi-monastic civilization several centuries after a global nuclear war.<\/p>\n

On Nov. 7 (Tuesday) Ralph McInerny, Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at Notre Dame, will lecture on \u201cThe Diary of a Country Priest,\u201d by Bernanos.  McInerny\u2019s lecture, \u201cBernanos and the Noonday Devil,\u201d 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.  \u201cThe Diary of a Country Priest\u201d is a shrewd depiction of the quiet suffering and paradoxical triumph of the dying young pastor of an unremarkable parish in rural France<\/p>\n

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 \u201cLord of the World,\u201d by Benson.  Solomon\u2019s lecture, \u201cRobert Hugh Benson: Anticipating the Apocalypse,\u201d will concern the most famous work of a prolific writer of the early 20th<\/sup> century who converted to Catholicism in 1903 and became an ardent apologist for his faith.  \u201cLord of the World,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Also this fall at ND:<\/p>\n

A film series on "Saintly Cinema" during which, among other films, the German film about Carthusians, "Into the Great Silence" will be shown.<\/a><\/p>\n

A conference from 11\/30-12\/2 – Modernity: Yearning for the Infinte<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But as always…more work to be done. Always.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5086","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5086"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5086\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5086"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5086"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5086"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}