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Bernard McGinn spends most of his time with books. He rises at 7am, “not terribly early,” he says, works through the morning, and ends his scholarly research with a run to the library around 5pm. Before bed, he prefers reading books unrelated to his scholarship on mysticism. He enjoys reading novels or books on history. He has just finished reading a novel by the Irish writer Sebastian Barry and a historical account of railroad construction in the Florida Keys.
As the world’s leading expert on mysticism—and those extraordinary souls on the fringes of society who have shared through their writings what it means to surrender oneself to the Divine—it should come as no surprise that his most cherished possession is his library. He is proud to own 70 antique books published before 1800, all of them related to his scholarship in some way. The oldest book in his collection is the 3rd printing of Peter Lombard’s Sentences in Latin dating from before 1477.
To those students who would wish to emulate his trajectory to scholarly stardom, he offers this advice. “To be an expert at something, you need commitment, hard work, and a bit of luck.” He admits that he was lucky that his interest in mysticism became popular subject matter at the university during the course of his career. There are times when someone could be interested in something but no one else cares about it. Or fifteen years later they care.
“To be an expert at something, you need
commitment, hard work, and a bit of luck.”
But he emphasizes how important it is to work hard. “You have to have a fire in your belly,” he says. “There’s no substitute for hard work no matter how clever or brilliant you are.”
His partner in his scholarly pursuits is his wife of 46 years, Pat.
“Pat and I have tried to learn to live and work as a team,” he says. “Pat has her own career as a Psychotherapist and has also been very active in Counselor Professional organizations, both on the state and the national level. But she also has a background in theology and philosophy and so has a great interest in the things that interest me.”
The McGinns are indeed a power couple. One often sees them walking across campus together, and Pat sits near the front at almost all his lectures and conferences. They relish helping one other achieve intellectual excellence. “For many years, she has edited almost everything I write,” says McGinn. “We even did a book together back in 2003, Early Christian Mystics: The Divine Vision of the Spiritual Masters, and are currently working on another joint volume to be called Mystical Conversations.”
They are as united in their intellectual interests as they are in their faith. They start and end their day with a wonderful ritual—praying the Divine Office together.
McGinn has now been at the University of Chicago for almost fifty years. He is a legend, the kind of person serious students get starry-eyed about. He seems to belong to another era as he came to the U of C just after Vatican II, when the Divinity School was looking to recruit Catholic scholars to its faculty.
For McGinn, these years have been an adventure. He admires the remarkable genius of the faculty members he is surrounded by, and he has loved engaging with each year’s cadre of bright, engaging students.
Of Lumen Christi, McGinn says that Thomas Levergood “blames me for getting it started.” He clarifies by sharing that in the 1990s, when Fr. Willard Jabusch—the Chaplain of the Calvert House Catholic Chaplaincy at the U of C—talked about having a Catholic Studies department on campus, McGinn opposed the idea. “I thought it would be good to have a center that offered lectures and courses and tapped into a whole range of people, not just the faculty at Chicago.”
It was Thomas Levergood and Paul J. Griffiths—now Warren Professor of Catholic Theology at Duke Divinty School—who started the Institute in 1997, and did “all the hard work,” says McGinn.
Today, practically twenty years later, the Institute has achieved what McGinn never thought would be possible. Not only does it offer lectures and events on campus, but it also gives courses at Berkeley, in Boston, and New York City—and now even in Europe. “It is beyond what I envisioned,” he admits.
This spring, McGinn is thrilled to be presenting yet another lecture for Lumen Christi. The topic—“The Soul of Early Irish Monasticism”—is one especially dear to him. After all, he is three-quarters Irish, and one-quarter Scots. He and Pat travel to Ireland as often as they can, and for the lecture, he will be presenting a slide show of 80 photographs which he took himself as he traversed the country and visited its ancient centers of Irish monastic culture.
One way people show what they love is how much time they give to it. If that is true, then McGinn has two loves—his beloved wife Pat and other-worldly mystical types, especially those that hail from where his ancestors did, the Emerald Isle.
“The violence I had seen has left me feeling hollowed out,
unable to guild all the agony with some beautiful meaning.”
– Phil Klay
Across centuries and civilizations, human beings have found themselves struggling to come to terms with the grim and horrific realities of war.
Perhaps nothing is as heartbreaking as holding a dying child in your hands—one that has been ripped apart by shrapnel or one whose final moments are marked by a labored agonizing breathing.
Iraqi War Veteran Phil Klay, who has a young child of his own, confessed that he understands people who are atheists in the foxhole. “Some of them are atheists because of what they experienced in foxholes,” he said at a breakfast event on “Religious Faith and Modern War” (Oct 21) held in downtown Chicago.
A public affairs officer in the Anbar Province of Iraq, Klay didn’t have to kill; he never experienced the trauma of having a human life on his conscience. Nonetheless, what he heard and saw through others—especially the deaths of innocent children—convinced him that “none of us walks away without blood on our hands.”
If the tragedies in the Middle East seem too remote for us, there is a tragedy closer to home that we perhaps overlook. Whether we live in New York or Fallujah, Chicago or Baghdad, “we are regularly failing to protect our most vulnerable, our poor, our desperate,” said Klay.
Klay spoke openly and candidly about his struggles with faith.
Faith in God does not make it any easier to understand suffering, to accept pain as a transformative and transcendent experience.
On the contrary, suffering makes one question God—question what sort of God he must be to allow all the anguish.
Nonetheless he quoted Vietnam War Veteran Karl Marlantes who described the combat experience as inescapably spiritual: “Mystical or religious experiences have four common components: constant awareness of one’s own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people’s lives above one’s own, and being part of a larger religious community such as the Sangha, Ummah, or Church. All four of these exist in combat. The big difference is that the mystic sees heaven and the warrior sees hell.”
Indeed, Klay witnessed hell.
“The violence I had seen has left me feeling hollowed out, unable to guild all the agony with some beautiful meaning,” confessed Klay.
Later that afternoon, Klay engaged in an informal conversation with Scott Moringiello, Assistant Professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University. Before students at the University of Chicago, the two discussed how literature helps us reflect on themes of brutality, faith, fear, and morality .
For Klay, literature has been a vehicle to express what has haunted him. After being discharged, he went to Hunter College and received an MFA. He then went on to write a collection of short stories titled Redeployment for which he was awarded the National Book Award for fiction in 2014. A review in The New York Times described it as “the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.”
The conversation with Moringiello on literature was particularly meaningful given that it took place at the Divinity School where war veteran Joshua Casteel had been a graduate student prior to his diagnosis and eventual death from stage IV lung cancer in 2012.
Casteel, like Klay, was a veteran of the Iraq War. His time as an interrogator at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison led him to seek early discharge as a conscientious objector.
When he returned home, Casteel similarly turned to literature to express the moral quandaries he experienced during war. Having earned an MFA at the University of Iowa, he then started advanced studies at the University of Chicago in theology, philosophy, and religion and literature. Casteel was a graduate associate of the Lumen Christi Institute and was assisting in the process of editing Cardinal George’s final book when he learned of his diagnosis.
The witness of both Klay and Casteel challenges us not to accept religious platitudes when it comes to exploring the darkest corners of the human soul.
“We English majors were fortunate in the timing of our intellectual coming of age as Catholic.” – Kenneth L. Woodward
In his writing—as well as in person—long-time religion writer Kenneth L. Woodward is notable for his irreverence, his gruff boldness, his refusal to be pigeon-holed as one thing or another. “For a long time,” he says, “I wrote conservative op-ed pieces for The New York Times, liberal ones for the Wall Street Journal. But given the poisonous polarization in our politics these days and—lets face it—also in the Catholic Church, it’s very hard now for a writer to work both sides of the ideological street.”
Most readers know Woodward from the more than 1000 articles, essays and reviews he wrote for Newsweek, where he was Religion Editor for 38 years, as well as from pieces he has published in journals as diverse in outlook as Commonweal and First Things, The Nation and The Weekly Standard. His more scholarly essays can be found in reference works like The Encyclopedia of Protestantism and the Encyclopedia of the History of Ideas. His new book, Getting Religion: Faith, Culture and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama, joins three previous ones: The Book of Miracles: The Meaning of the Miracle Stories in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam; Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why, and Grandparents, Grandchildren: The Vital Connection, written with child psychiatrist Arthur Kornhaber.
Woodward is from the “Middle West”—which, as he writes in his new book, “is what movie mythmakers have imagined the entire nation to be like when Americans are on their best behavior.” Before moving to New York he had lived in six of the eleven “heartland” states and studied at universities in three of them. At one point he planned to be an academic, but all he really wanted to do is write.
A 1957 graduate of Notre Dame, Woodward never intended to be a journalist. Like a lot of English majors in the Fifties, he says, “I aspired to be a poet, a novelist, or a critic—in that descending order.” As an undergraduate, he was heavily influenced by Frank O’Malley, a much beloved professor of English, and by a number of poets who brought a practitioner’s keen sensibility to bear on the study of literature. “We English majors were fortunate in the timing of our intellectual coming of age as Catholics,” he realizes now. “The Forties and Fifties witnessed a renaissance in Catholic letters: there were Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh in England, Francois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos in France, to name a few, and at home the early work of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, J.F. Powers and others.”
Under the rubric of “Modern Catholic Writers,” O’Malley had his students read a wide range of authors from James Joyce and Franz Kafka to Dostoevsky, Rimbaud and Rilke—all of whom, he argued, were Catholic in the sense that that they addressed the deepest mysteries of human existence in an authentically religious way. This was a richer, more embedded way of coming to understand what Catholicism means than by studying theology, Woodward argues. “In any case, we had no real theology courses at Notre Dame in the Fifties. What passed for theology were basically study of the moral virtues and advanced high school apologetics.” Today, he observes, the situation is the opposite: “students can take sophisticated courses in Scripture and theology at many Catholics universities but few of them offer sustained immersion in the tradition of Catholic art, thought and literature.”
As Woodward tells it, there was in his undergraduate days an identifiable and quite compelling Catholic intellectual tradition that was recognized outside strictly Catholic precincts. “Modern Thomism was a strong and recognized philosophical tradition, thanks in large part to Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson,” he says. “Not only at Notre Dame, but also at the University of Chicago, Yale, and Princeton, you found a reception for Catholic aesthetics.” In 1956, for example, 15,000 students turned out to hear a lecture by Anglo-Catholic poet T.S. Eliot held in the University of Minnesota’s basketball gymnasium. In short, Catholic university students felt they were swimming with, not against, many of the era’s swiftest intellectual currents.
So how exactly did it happen that Woodward became a journalist? Well, right after their wedding, he and his wife did what all aspiring writers do and set sail for Europe. “We spent my wife’s savings bumming around Western Europe,” he says. “We left a twosome and returned a threesome.” Having started a family, Woodward realized he had to make a living. He knew he could write. One of the first pieces he wrote was published in Commonweal. “If you can write for Commonweal, I figured, you could write for anyone.” In 1964 he was hired off a liberal weekly newspaper in Omaha to be Newsweek’s Religion Editor. Oddly enough, the Religion Editor at TIME, his competitor, was also a Notre Dame graduate (five years earlier) who had studied under Frank O’Malley.
Well before he and his wife moved to Chicago in 2012, Woodward had been tipped by former Chicagoans in New York to check out Lumen Christi. He was especially impressed by the fact that it had been created by Catholic faculty at the University of Chicago like David Tracy and Bernard McGinn whose work he knew and long admired.
Woodward thinks it is still possible to have small Catholic colleges imbued with an Incarnational perspective in the liberal arts and sciences—indeed, Notre Dame in his day had only about 5,000 students. But most Catholic universities, he believes, “now are virtually indistinguishable from their secular counterparts. When a Catholic university houses a center or offers a major in Catholic studies, you can conclude that most of the faculty are not Catholic—nor most of the students either—and that the university culture is not particularly interested in the church’s intellectual tradition. “Hence the need and particular salience of places like Lumen Christi,” says Woodward. “May its tribe increase.”
You can hear Kenneth Woodward discuss his new book with Martin Marty on September 27.
Conference Encourages Catholics to Cultivate and Care for the Created World
“Our relationship with the environment can never be isolated from our relationship with others and with God. Otherwise, it would be nothing more than romantic individualism dressed up in ecological garb.” – Pope Francis, Laudato si’
It may come as a surprise—especially given Pope Francis’ current reputation as a pontiff concerned about the environment—that Pope Benedict XVI was considered in both religious and secular circles to be the original “Green Pope.” In boosting efforts to make Vatican City more environmentally efficient, he even purchased a forest to offset the Vatican’s carbon imprint.
Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski (Archdiocese of Miami) reminded the audience of Benedict in order to put Pope Francis’ contribution in perspective in his keynote address in the symposium, “Caring for our Common Home: Economics, Environment, & Catholic Social Thought” (May 19).
Pope Francis’ concerns belong to a tradition of Catholic Social Thought that reaches back to the dawn of the Industrial Age with Pope Leo XIII’s groundbreaking encyclical Rerum novarum (1891). Since then, the Church has repeatedly called for a more just society in which people can strive for holiness in peace and harmony.
In terms of ecology, a concern for the earth and man’s stewardship of it has roots even deeper than modernity. In the Book of Genesis, man was placed in a garden that he was supposed to tend and cultivate. He was “charged with this duty of cultivation for all time,” said Wenski.
How does Pope Francis’ message in his second encyclical Laudato si’ fit into the larger dialogue the Church has on this topic?
The key to understanding Laudato si’ is the term “integral ecology,” explained Wenski. Francis expressed what this means most vividly in the following passage from his encyclical: “If the present ecological crisis is one small sign of the ethical, cultural and spiritual crisis of modernity, we cannot presume to heal our relationship with nature and the environment without healing all fundamental human relationships…Our relationship with the environment can never be isolated from our relationship with others and with God. Otherwise, it would be nothing more than romantic individualism dressed up in ecological garb.”
That, argued Wenski, is where we have to start in our discussions on the environment. In a guest appearance he had on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” he told the comedian, “we gotta get our relationship with God right, our relationship with our fellow man right, if we’re gonna hope to get our relationship with Mother Earth right.”
In other words, “our lack of concern about the degradation of the environment is ultimately a symptom of our sickness of soul,” said Wenski. We can’t repair one relationship in isolation. They are all interconnected.
The disharmony in our souls seeps into everything we do and touch. Because we don’t care about God or one another, neither do we care for the world in which we live. The damage resulting from this rupture resounds through nature. Our negligent souls contribute to pollution, toxic waste, and climate change.
Furthermore, Wenski said that Francis brings to our attention a more serious form of pollution. “Our throwaway culture is not just about McDonald’s wrappers along the side of the highway. It is extended to human beings as well. In Laudato si’—as part of this integral ecology—he zeroes in on how we throw away life in the womb, how we neglect the disabled and show little respect for the lives and the contributions of the elderly. This is a moral pollution as bad as the pollution of rivers and lakes.”
Not only do we casually discard human life in its most vulnerable stages, we treat it as a commodity when it is healthy and strong. Describing human trafficking as a “juggernaut of filth and slavery,” Wenski echoed Francis’ claim that it is fueled by a “pollution of the heart.”
Francis also worries that our ecological challenges weigh heavily on those who can least afford it – the poor. But in assisting the poor and coming to their aid, one culture cannot disregard and disrespect the traditions of another. “The disappearance of a culture can be just as serious, or even more serious, than the disappearance of a species of plant or animal,” Wenski said, quoting Francis.
Given all these challenges that ultimately originate from a crisis in relationship, Pope Francis believes the most important place to start is with dialogue. “Pope Francis uses the word dialogue very frequently,” observed Wenski. It is not a trite word. He takes it very seriously. He wants us to engage with one another, “to be led to an encounter at the heart where significant concepts can be discussed and where real change can occur.”
Wenski praised the Institute for its initiative in organizing the conference. “I think [Pope Francis] would be proud of the dialogue we are having today and the spirit the Lumen Christi Institute brings to these forums on Economics and Catholic Social Thought.” He noted that the Institute provides a rare forum for the discussion of ideas that otherwise get hijacked by right or left. “In our highly politicized reality, our space for these conversations is harder to come by.”
