Theology Department Faculty

Research Interests

For the past decade my research interest has focused on the Catholic experience in the United States since World War II. Catholics and American Culture sought to provide a non-“master narrative” approach to understanding how Catholics left their secure ghetto after 1945 to enter the verdant pastures of middle class affluence, with somewhat mixed results. And precisely because of those mixed results, I utilized Reinhold Niebuhr’s rich category of “theological irony" to tell my tale. Anti-Catholicism in America mined David Tracy’s protean distinction between “analogical” and “dialectical” pre-conceptual languages to explain how and why Catholics and other Americans actually do see the world differently, a difference that has contributed significantly to “prejudice” against Catholics in the U.S. And I use that term in neutral sense (and not in its more usual pejorative) sense: prejudice comes from two Latin words that mean “prejudgment.”  I thus attempted an ideologically neutral approach to anti-Catholic “prejudice.” My latest book, The American Catholic Revolution (Oxford 2010) examines what happened after Vatican II when historical consciousness (i.e., the awareness that everything in history changes) was let loose in the American Catholic community. The book starts with Vatican II, and examines the reception of Humanae Vitae, the "Catonsville Nine" anti-Vietnam War protest, the reform of women's religious orders, and Avery Dulles' classic work, Models of the Church.