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Conferences and Lectures sponsored by the Theology Department and its Faculty
Why Major or Minor in Theology or Religious Studies?
Theological thinking seeks not only an understanding of the nature of religion. It also seeks an understanding of the relationship of religion to a contemporary world where social, political, and economic structures are often unjust; where secular faiths arise; and where scientific and technological advances pose new problems for human self-understanding.
Karl Rahner
“In the ultimate depths of his being man knows nothing more surely than that his knowledge, that is, what is called knowledge in everyday parlance, is only a small island in a vast sea that has not been travelled. It is a floating island, and it might be more familiar to us than the sea, but ultimately it is borne by the sea and only because it is can we be borne by it. Hence the existentiell question for the knower is this: Which does he love more, the small island of his so-called knowledge or the sea of infinite mystery?”
Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial
Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial
Michelle M. Nickerson, Department of History, Loyola University Chicago
Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Coffey Hall - McCormick Lounge
4:00 - 5:30 pm
In Spiritual Criminals, Michelle M. Nickerson shares a complex portrait of the Camden 28, a passionate group of grassroots religious progressives who resisted both their church and their government as they crusaded against the Vietnam War. Founded by priests, nuns, and devout lay Catholics, members of this coalition accepted the risks of felony convictions as the cost of challenging the nation’s military-industrial complex and exposing the illegal counterintelligence operations of the FBI. By peeling away the layers of political history, theological traditions, and the Camden 28’s personal stories, Nickerson reveals an often-unseen spiritual side of the anti-war movement. At the same time, she probes the fractures within the group, detailing important conflicts over ideology, race, sex, and gender that resonate in the church and on the political Left today.
Michelle Nickerson is a Professor of History at Loyola University Chicago. She teaches courses on the history of women and gender, U.S. politics, social movements, cities and suburbs, and American religion. In 2012 she published Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton University Press), which documents the grassroots activism of conservative women in Cold War Los Angeles and explores the impact of that activism on the emerging American right. She also co-authored a volume of essays called Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Place, Space, and Region (University of Pennsylvania Press).