Pursuing info about DePaul while doing my Catholic hiring at Notre Dame story, I got this from Nicholas G. Hahn III, President of the DePaul Conservative Alliance and a Chicago Daily Observer contributor:
Thanks to the spiritual revival I helped usher in, DePaul just hired two very prominent Catholic scholars for the Catholic Studies program.
What’s more, he has “heard rumors” that “more money has been allocated for yet another Catholic Studies hire search.”
Sounds good, even if “Catholic Studies” at a Catholic institution seems on its face redundant, at least in the humanities.
On the other hand, such a program can offer a meaty alternative for the Catholicism-interested, and the two hires seem up to that challenge.
One of them, Peter Casarella, headed a Center for Medieval and Byzantine Studies at Catholic U. and has written about
medieval Christian Neo-Platonism, contemporary theological aesthetics. St. Bonaventure’s Trinitarian theology of creation, the idea of emergence in contemporary physics and the Hispanic/Latino presence in the U.S. Catholic Church.
Is that meaty enough for you?
The other new man, Farrell O’Gorman, is a Flannery O’Connor specialist with a “critically recognized” novel to his credit, “Awaiting Orders” (Idylls Press, 2006).
The America Mag reviewer said O’G “is trying to explore how a Christian message of hope and redemption can attain credibility,” which is a far cry from fiction readers are used to these days.
For what it’s worth, his doctorate is from N. Carolina-Chapel Hill, Casarella’s is from Yale. O’Gorman comes from the Mississippi State U. English department.
Blithe Spirit 