scholarly journals “So What?”: A Conversation with John W. O’Malley

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-133
Author(s):  
Emanuele Colombo
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Church History ◽  
Harvard University ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
American Philosophical Society ◽  
Vatican I ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Catholic

John W. O’Malley, a member of the Society of Jesus, is currently a university professor in the Theology Department of Georgetown University, Washington, DC. He holds a PhD in history from Harvard University. His specialty is the religious culture of early modern Europe. O’Malley has written and edited a number of books, eight of which have won best-book awards. The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), perhaps his best-known work, received both the Jacques Barzun Prize for Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society and the Philip Schaff Prize from the American Society for Church History. It has been translated into twelve languages and its publication opened a new era in the study of the Society. Since then, the Jesuits have attracted greater attention from scholars of all disciplines on an international basis. O’Malley has continued to write about early Jesuits and the subsequent history of the Jesuits: his main essays on Jesuit history are now collected in the first volume of Brill’s Jesuit Studies series, Saints or Devils Incarnate?: Studies in Jesuit History (Leiden, 2013). In the last few years, O’Malley published with Harvard University Press a trilogy on the three last councils in the history of the Catholic Church: What Happened at Vatican ii (2008), Trent: What Happened at the Council (2012), and Vatican I: The Council and the Making of the Ultramontane Church (2018). A comparative view of the three councils is offered now in his most recent book, When Bishops Meet: An Essay Comparing Trent, Vatican I, and Vatican ii (2019). O’Malley has lectured widely around the world to both professional and general audiences. He is past president of the Renaissance Society of America and the American Catholic Historical Association. He holds the Johannes Quasten Medal from The Catholic University of America for distinguished service in religious studies. In 1995, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; in 1997, to the American Philosophical Society; and in 2001, to the Accademia Ambrosiana, Milan. He holds lifetime achievement awards from the Society for Italian Historical Studies, the Renaissance Society of America, and the American Catholic Historical Association. At the origin of the following interview there are three conversations Emanuele Colombo had with O’Malley in Chicago, in 2017 and 2018, as a follow-up of a lecture he gave on his life, “My Life of Learning,” now published in The Catholic Historical Review. 1

Anti-Catholicism in the United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark S. Massa
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
North American ◽  
The United States ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Boundary Maintenance ◽  
Different Types ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Catholic

Historian John Higham once referred to anti-Catholicism as “by far the oldest, and the most powerful of anti-foreign traditions” in North American intellectual and cultural history. But Higham’s famous observation actually elided three different types of anti-Catholic nativism that have enjoyed a long and quite vibrant life in North America: a cultural distrust of Catholics, based on an understanding of North American public culture rooted in a profoundly British and Protestant ordering of human society; an intellectual distrust of Catholics, based on a set of epistemological and philosophical ideas first elucidated in the English (Lockean) and Scottish (“Common Sense Realist”) Enlightenments and the British Whig tradition of political thought; and a nativist distrust of Catholics as deviant members of American society, a perception central to the Protestant mainstream’s duty of “boundary maintenance” (to utilize Emile Durkheim’s reading of how “outsiders” help “insiders” maintain social control). An examination of the long history of anti-Catholicism in the United States can be divided into three parts: first, an overview of the types of anti-Catholic animus utilizing the typology adumbrated above; second, a narrative history of the most important anti-Catholic events in U.S. culture (e.g., Harvard’s Dudleian Lectures, the Suffolk Resolves, the burning of the Charlestown convent, Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures); and finally, a discussion of American Catholic efforts to address the animus.

American Catholics and “The Use and Abuse of Reading,” 1865–1873

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-64
Author(s):  
Erin Bartram
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Order ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Individual Liberty ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Individual ◽  
American Catholic

ABSTRACTIn the wake of the Civil War, Father Isaac Hecker launched several publishing ventures to advance his dream of a Catholic America, but he and his partners soon found themselves embroiled in a debate with other American Catholics, notably his friend and fellow convert Orestes Brownson, over the “use and abuse of reading.” Although the debate was certainly part of a contemporary conversation about the compatibility of Catholicism and American culture, this essay argues that it was equally rooted in a moment of American anxiety over a shifting social order, a moment when antebellum faith in the individual was being tested by the rights claims of women and Americans of color. Tacitly accepting and internalizing historical claims of intrinsic and through-going Catholic “difference,” claims offered both by American Protestants and American Catholics like Brownson, scholars often presume that debates within American Catholicism reflect “Catholic” concerns first and foremost, qualifying their utility as sources of “American” cultural history. By examining American Catholic discussions of reading, individual liberty, social order, and gender in the 1860s and 1870s, this essay argues that Brownson's arguments against the compatibility of American and Catholic life were in fact far more representative of ascendant ideas in American culture than Hecker's hopeful visions of a Catholic American future made manifest through the power of reading. In doing so, it demonstrates the ways that American Catholicism can be a valuable and complex site for studying the broader history of religion and culture in the United States.

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