Faith and Culture Lecture Series

Fr. Michael Paul Gallagher, S.J.

Father Gallagher is an author, professor, theologian, and intellectual interested in examinations of “faith and unbelief, culture and spirituality.” After studying literature at University College Dublin and Caen University, he entered the Jesuits at an early age.

As a student at Oxford in Renaissance literature, he focused on the poetry of George Herbert. His experience studying literature has provided a unique—but fruitful—background to the study of theology. From 1972 to 1990, he served as a lecturer in modern English and American literature at University College, Dublin. In 1979, he received his doctorate in theology at Queen’s University, Belfast—the first Roman Catholic to do so in theology. A few years later, he published his first book, Help my Unbelief (1983). Moving to Rome, he has worked on the Pontifical Council for Dialogue with Non-Believers and the Pontifical Council for Culture.

He then became a professor of fundamental theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, where from 2005-2008 he served as dean of the theology faculty. His courses include: “unbelief and culture, seminars on Newman, Bernard Lonergan, the relationship between theology and imagination, and the history of thinking on the act of faith.” Since September 2009, he has served as Rector of the Collegio Bellarmino in Rome, a Jesuit community for post-graduate students. His most recent book, Faith Maps: Ten Religious Explorers from Newman to Joseph Ratzinger was published this year.

Fr. John O'Malley, S.J.

Father O’Malley is a distinguished member of our faculty, serving as a University Professor in the Department of Theology. One of our world’s most well-known and widely respected church historians, Fr. O’Malley has held a number of prestigious fellowships, including those awarded by the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additionally, he has won life-time achievement awards from the Society for Italian Historical Studies, and the Renaissance Society of America.

He is past president of the American Catholic Historical Association, and of the Renaissance Society of America. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995, and to the American Philosophical Society in 1997. He is the author and editor of more than a dozen books. Among his most celebrated works are: Trent and all That; Four Cultures of the West; What Happened At Vatican II; and The First Jesuits—this one has been translated into ten languages.

After attending Loyola University, Fr. O’Malley received his doctorate in history from Harvard, and has taught and lectured at a number of institutions, including Harvard and Oxford. Before coming to Georgetown, he was Distinguished Professor of Church History at Weston Jesuit School of Theology.

James Wood

James Wood was born in Durham, England, in 1965, and attended Cambridge University. He worked on the books pages of The Guardian, in London, before moving to America in 1995. From 1995 until 2007, he was a Senior Editor at The New Republic. In 2007, he became a Staff Writer at The New Yorker, where he is a literary critic. He is also Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism at Harvard University. Wood is the author of two books of essays, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (1999), and The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and The Novel (2004); a novel, The Book Against God (2003); and a work of criticism, How Fiction Works (2008). He won a National Magazine Award in 2008 for his criticism in The New Yorker.

Richard Rodriguez

Richard Rodriguez has been hailed by The Washington Post as one of the most eloquent and probing public intellectuals in the country.” Because of three memoirs, because of his television essays for nearly twenty years on The NewsHour on PBS, and because of his essays in newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and Europe, he has become the most prominent Hispanic intellectual in America.

The son of Mexican immigrants—a self-described “ scholarship boy”—Rodriguez, in his first and most famous book, “Hunger of Memory,” wrote about the painful but necessary experience of assimilation and of his difficult Americanization in the classroom. He was criticized by some readers and celebrated by others for voicing skepticism about bilingual education and affirmative action. Rodriguez remains adamant in his opinion that class is a more important factor for one’s life in America than race or ethnicity.

His second book, “Days of Obligation, An Argument With My Mexican Father” was a loving but unsentimental assessment of cultural tensions between what he calls “Catholic Mexico” and “Protestant America” and the dilemma of being “Mexican American”. “Days of Obligation” was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Non-Fiction.

Over the years, he has written about a variety of subjects, from the death of America's newspapers to the meaning of burritos to body-building. Since September 11th, he has been focused on religious violence. While Rodriguez is openly gay—has written poignantly of the AIDS epidemic and the deaths of many friends—he remains Roman Catholic. (Indeed, he often describes himself as “Irish Catholic”—because of the influence of Irish nuns and priests on his upbringing). He also describes himself as “brown”—belonging to a mix of races. And he predicted the eventual “browning” of America in his most recent book, “Brown: The Last Discovery of America.”  Presently, he is writing two books—one concerned with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and the desert ecology that shaped them. The other is a book on beauty.  In 1993, he was awarded the National Endowment for the Humanities Medal. It is the highest award the federal government gives to recognize work done in the humanities.

Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson was born in 1947 in Sandpoint, Idaho. After attending high school in Sandpoint she went to Brown University, graduating in 1966; she then enrolled in the graduate program in English at the University of Washington, where she started writing her first novel, "Housekeeping" (1981), which tells the story of two girls growing up in rural Idaho in the mid-1900s and is regarded by many as an American classic; it received the PEN/Hemingway award for best first novel and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

After the publication of "Housekeeping," Robinson began writing essays and book reviews for Harper’s, Paris Review, and The New York Times Book Review. She also served as writer-in-residence and visiting professor at numerous colleges and universities, including the University of Kent in England, Amherst College, and the University of Massachusetts. Her second book, "Mother Country: Britain, The Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution" (1988), revealed the extensive environmental damage caused by the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield, in the north of England; the book evolved from an essay that she wrote for Harper's Review and was a finalist for the National Book Award. A decade later, Robinson published a collection of essays entitled "The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought."  "Gilead," her second novel, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in November 2004, is an intimate tale of fathers and sons and the spiritual battles they face. The work won universal acclaim from critics and the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her most-recent book, "Home," published in 2008 - a companion piece to Gilead - is an elegant variation on the parable of the prodigal son's return.

Ron Hansen

Ron Hansen was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and educated at Creighton University, the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, and at Stanford University, where he held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship. He has received fellowships from the Michigan Society of Fellows, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lyndhurst Foundation, and was presented with an Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Professor Hansen has taught fiction and screenwriting at such institutions as Stanford, Michigan, Cornell, Iowa, Arizona, and is now the Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University, where he earned an M.A. in Spirituality in 1995. He is the author of "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel" (1983), "Mariette in Ecstasy: A Novel" (1991), "Atticus: A Novel" (1996), "Hitler's Niece: A Novel" (1999), and the recently-published "Exiles" (2008) about the 1875 sinking of the ocean liner S/S Deutschland, whose victims included five Roman Catholic nuns.

Paul Elie

Paul Elie, a senior editor with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is the author of "The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage" (2003), a group portrait of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day. "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, a Christopher Award, the Beliefnet Book of the Year award, and the annual awards in Christianity and Literature and in the Literature of the South given by the Modern Language Association; the book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. Mr. Elie’s article “The Year of Two Popes,” about the death of John Paul II and the election of Benedict XVI, appeared in February 2006 in The Atlantic, which published an earlier article of his, “In Search of a Pope,” about the run-up to the conclave. The magazine published his article about the contested legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr in its 150th anniversary issue last November.

His writing has also appeared in Commonweal, The New Republic, and The New York Times, among other periodicals, and in several essay collections. "A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints," a collection he edited, was published in 1994. He is now writing a book about the music of J.S. Bach and the ways it has been transformed in our time through recording technology.