projects that address student interests in whatever graduate school or career path they choose to pursue in the future, as well as study-abroad options in traditional places for Catholic history, such as Rome and Ireland, or in a largely Catholic non-European country, such as Belize, Brazil, Uganda or the Seychelles.
Innovations in Education
Eventually, Catholic Studies at Hofstra could include a graduate component, with a Master of Arts degree in the Religion Department, as well summer seminars and conferences to which graduate students in religion programs across the country are invited.
The Hartman Model of Catholic Studies at Hofstra University
Lecture Series in Catholic Studies The Hartman model will also engage the community on and off the Hofstra campus. To that end, Hofstra University will hold its first annual Hofstra Religion Department Lecture Series in Catholic Studies: Catholicism and Literature this spring (2007). Catholicism and Literature will feature artists whose work touches upon some aspect of Catholic faith or culture: • Peter Manseau, author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, (New York: Free Press, 2005, the author’s story of growing up as the son of a former nun and a censured priest. Feb. 28, 2007. • Mary Gordon, the award-winning novelist, essayist, and critic whose works include The Short Stories of Mary Gordon, Final Payments, The Company of Men, Women and Angels, April 18. In addition, the Department of Religion has coordinated a two-day visit to Hofstra by noted New Testament Scholar Bart Ehrman Feb. 15-16. He is the author, most recently, of Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, and Misquoting Jesus: The Story of Who Changed the Bible and Why. For more information on Hoftra Universtiy's Catholic Studies program and Department of Religion and to watch a video of Dr. Byrne's installation speech, please go to:
www.hofstra.edu/catholicstudies
v Find Out More at hofstra.edu
Dr. Julie E. Byrne, the Monsignor Thomas J. Hartman Chair in Catholic Studies at Hofstra University, is the author of the critically acclaimed O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs. (Columbia University Press, 2003), which examines the ways religion, class, gender and athletic identities intersected in the basketball program at Immaculata College, an all-female Catholic college outside Philadelphia.
O God of Players identified Dr. Bryne as a scholar at the forefront of a movement to view religious traditions “from the bottom up.” Through heavy reliance on ethnographic studies and archival data, this approach is presenting a new portrait of Catholicism in America, one that is based on what the people in the pews are actually saying and doing. Dr. Byrne earned a B.A. at Duke University with concentrations in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Religion (1990). Continuing at Duke, she earned an M.A. in Religion in 1996, and a Ph.D. in 2001, where she focused primarily on American religion with special concentrations in Catholicism, African American Religion, cultural studies and critical theory. Dr. Byrne taught at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth Texas from 2000-2004. She returned to Duke University in 2004 and came to Hofstra in September 2006. Dr. Byrne has been a recipient of the Charlotte Newcombe dissertation award, was selected to be a participant in the Lilly Young Scholars in American Religion seminar, and was a winner of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion research award.
Innovations in Education
Just a year after it established a Department of Religion in the fall of 2005, Hofstra University celebrated the installation of Dr. Julie Byrne as its new Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman Endowed Chair for Catholic Studies. This was the second of three planned endowed chairs in the department, the first being for Sikh Studies, and the third for Jewish Studies. Dr. Byrne used the occasion to introduce “The Hartman Model” of Catholic Studies at Hofstra University, a means of integrating the study of religion into the context of the larger university and of the world through teaching, research, study-abroad programs, seminars, conferences, speaker series and other ongoing programming. And she argued that Hofstra was ideally situated at this point in time to put its distinctive mark on Catholic studies.
History of Catholic Studies
From the 90s into the new millennium, as Catholic scholars increasingly taught and published in nonCatholic venues – and as non-Catholic scholars began to take an interest in Catholicism – the study of Catholicism was mainstreamed in the liberal arts academy.
Department of Religion at Hofstra University
“This religion department is uniquely situated to have a platform for public education about religion in, of course, one of the most important centers of influence in the country and the world.”
The study of Catholicism at American Universities dates back to 1958 when Harvard seated its first Charles Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies. The field expanded as Catholic universities underwent a secularization and Catholics in the United States increasingly attended non-Catholic colleges.
v Find Out More at hofstra.edu
Throughout the late 80s and 90s, American higher education as well as society in general roiled with the so-called “culture wars,” which are perhaps most simply seen as the latest of many historical moments when American society struggled to come to terms with increasing diversity, according to Dr. Byrne.
“Hofstra University can have a hand in shaping Catholic Studies, present and future,” said Dr. Byrne, in part because Hofstra’s new Department of Religion is committed to the study of religion in a liberal arts context. “This religion department is uniquely situated to have a platform for public education about religion in, of course, one of the most important centers of influence in the country and the world.”
Innovations in Education
Catholic Studies at Hofstra University Hofstra’s Department of Religion offers students the opportunity to explore the central role religion plays in social, political and economic events, as well as in the lives of individuals and communities. Courses examine the history of religions, the rituals that mark important life events, the human beliefs that underlie those rituals and the sacred texts and stories that shape the way so many people experience each other and the world. In a world where religion plays so central a role in social, political, and economic events, as well as in the lives of communities and individuals, students need to reflect upon and understand religious traditions, according to Dr. Warren Frisina, the department’s chair. At Hofstra, the study of religion cultivates in students the intellectual resources to navigate a world partly shaped by religious experiences, communities, and institutions. Religion courses: • Provide the tools students need to think critically and constructively about religious issues, questions and values. • Train students to recognize the many different roles religion plays in public life, especially the ways it shapes social, political and economic discourses. • Enable students to experience and understand the ways religions interact with and shape one another. • Orient students to the many different forms of human religious expression from antiquity to modernity. In all of these ways, the study of religion prepares students for future careers in fields such as diplomacy, business, politics and law. While a few Hofstra students may chose to enter the ministry, the vast majority will take their knowledge and skills into secular careers that require people who have an acute ability to recognize and appreciate dissimilar points of view. “With the establishment of a Department of Religion last fall, the endowment of chairs in Sikh, Catholic and Jewish studies and a growing expertise in Islamic studies, Hofstra is quickly becoming known as a center for secular religion studies,” said Hofstra President Stuart Rabinowitz.
v Find Out More at hofstra.edu
Fall 2005 – Money raised at a 2004 testimonial gala in honor of Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman funds the establishment of an endowed chair in Catholic studies in the Department of Religion at Hofstra. June 2006 – Dr. Julie Byrne named to hold the Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies. October 2006 – Dr. Byrne installed as the Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies. December 2006 – Hofstra Religion Department Lecture Series in Catholic Studies: Catholicism and Literature unveiled as part of the new Catholic Studies program. Peter Manseau, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, and Mary Gordon, award-winning novelist, essayist, and critic whose most recent works include The Stories of Mary Gordon and the novel Pearl, are scheduled to speak at Hofstra on Feb. 28 and April 18, respectively.
The Hartman Model of Catholic Studies The Catholic chair, the second in the Department of Religion at Hofstra, was funded through money raised at a 2004 testimonial gala in honor of Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman, better known to Long Islanders as “Father Tom” or one-half of “The God Squad,” for which he has teamed up with Rabbi Marc Gellman to host a local television show, write children’s books and newspaper columns, and make numerous appearances on Long Island and in New York City. The model of Catholic studies that bears Father Tom’s name will be characterized by several components, according to Dr. Byrne: “First, Catholic studies continuing its short history squarely as part of the liberal arts tradition; that is, the tradition of situating all subject matter in the wide-cast fields of inquiry and subjecting it to critical appreciation and inquiry, toward the end of forming minds that habitually both honor and question received truth, and aim, finally, at arriving at real wisdom.
Innovations in Education
“Second, Catholic studies integrated into the study of the United States and the study of the whole world: so that not only the church and its people, but also their interactions with cultures in which they find themselves, as well as those cultures’ interactions upon them, find room for discussion. “Third, Catholic studies integrated with the study of other religions, even to the point of questioning the boundaries between them. My own current research in the historiography of Catholicism, for example, investigates how the label ‘Catholic’ has been used in American religious communities, not only by Roman Catholics, but by non-Roman Catholics in communion with Rome, Eastern Orthodox churches, certain Anglicans and Episcopalians, and Old Catholic, traditionalist, and independent Catholics, as well Protestants from the Unitarian-Universalists to Congregationalists to Lutherans to contemporary emerging church evangelicals. “Fourth, Catholic studies as a useful vantage point from which to understand U.S. and global phenomena more broadly. There is no single institution so long-lasting, complex, and multilayered to have touched on almost every aspect of Western and often non-Western life for the last two millennia, including the late ancient world, medieval Europe, the dawn of modernity, the transatlantic slave trade, immigration, colonialism, the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, the Age of Aquarius, and the age of the Internet.”
Hofstra University’s Contribution to Catholic Studies For all of those reasons, Catholic Studies at Hofstra will be designed for all students, Catholic and non-Catholic, and for the publics beyond Hofstra, both Catholic and non-Catholic. According to Dr. Byrne, Catholic Studies can be distinctive at Hofstra because Hofstra is a distinctive place in at least four ways. • Hofstra is a university whose overall institutional identity is newly recommitted to and refocused around liberal arts education.
v Find Out More at hofstra.edu
• Hofstra’s new Department of Religion is committed to the study of religion in a liberal arts context and is developing precisely at a moment in the academy when, in a post-9/11 world, the need for the broad religious literacy of all Americans, regardless of faith affiliation or no faith affiliation, is being increasingly recognized and called for. There is also a need for that religious literacy to extend beyond the boundaries of the United States, to understand Sikhism, Islam, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, and other faiths in all their transnational and diasporic contexts. • Hofstra’s religion department is interdisciplinary, with textualists and sociologists and historians and philosophers among us, and all of us working, teaching, and researching with other disciplines and colleagues across the arts and sciences. “In such a department and in such a university, the context for studying Catholicism is rich—the context for the best of what ‘Catholic Studies’ means is there—that is, studying Catholicism as the historic, international, multifaceted, complex phenomenon that over two millennia it has come to be.” Dr. Byrne said. • Hofstra’s religion department draws from and touches New7 York City. While there are not many religion departments in the universities of New York, there are many religions in New York, Catholicism prominent among them. Dr. Byrne will develop a cycle of courses on Catholic thought, practice, and history that will be offered at regular intervals. This cycle would form the basis of an eventual concentration in Catholic Studies for undergraduates that could involve capstone research
Catholic Studies at Hofstra will be designed for all students, Catholic and non-Catholic, and for the publics beyond Hofstra, both Catholic and non-Catholic.
Innovations in Education
Catholic Studies at Hofstra University Hofstra’s Department of Religion offers students the opportunity to explore the central role religion plays in social, political and economic events, as well as in the lives of individuals and communities. Courses examine the history of religions, the rituals that mark important life events, the human beliefs that underlie those rituals and the sacred texts and stories that shape the way so many people experience each other and the world. In a world where religion plays so central a role in social, political, and economic events, as well as in the lives of communities and individuals, students need to reflect upon and understand religious traditions, according to Dr. Warren Frisina, the department’s chair. At Hofstra, the study of religion cultivates in students the intellectual resources to navigate a world partly shaped by religious experiences, communities, and institutions. Religion courses: • Provide the tools students need to think critically and constructively about religious issues, questions and values. • Train students to recognize the many different roles religion plays in public life, especially the ways it shapes social, political and economic discourses. • Enable students to experience and understand the ways religions interact with and shape one another. • Orient students to the many different forms of human religious expression from antiquity to modernity. In all of these ways, the study of religion prepares students for future careers in fields such as diplomacy, business, politics and law. While a few Hofstra students may chose to enter the ministry, the vast majority will take their knowledge and skills into secular careers that require people who have an acute ability to recognize and appreciate dissimilar points of view. “With the establishment of a Department of Religion last fall, the endowment of chairs in Sikh, Catholic and Jewish studies and a growing expertise in Islamic studies, Hofstra is quickly becoming known as a center for secular religion studies,” said Hofstra President Stuart Rabinowitz.
v Find Out More at hofstra.edu
Fall 2005 – Money raised at a 2004 testimonial gala in honor of Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman funds the establishment of an endowed chair in Catholic studies in the Department of Religion at Hofstra. June 2006 – Dr. Julie Byrne named to hold the Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies. October 2006 – Dr. Byrne installed as the Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman Endowed Chair in Catholic Studies. December 2006 – Hofstra Religion Department Lecture Series in Catholic Studies: Catholicism and Literature unveiled as part of the new Catholic Studies program. Peter Manseau, author of the critically acclaimed memoir Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, and Mary Gordon, award-winning novelist, essayist, and critic whose most recent works include The Stories of Mary Gordon and the novel Pearl, are scheduled to speak at Hofstra on Feb. 28 and April 18, respectively.
The Hartman Model of Catholic Studies The Catholic chair, the second in the Department of Religion at Hofstra, was funded through money raised at a 2004 testimonial gala in honor of Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman, better known to Long Islanders as “Father Tom” or one-half of “The God Squad,” for which he has teamed up with Rabbi Marc Gellman to host a local television show, write children’s books and newspaper columns, and make numerous appearances on Long Island and in New York City. The model of Catholic studies that bears Father Tom’s name will be characterized by several components, according to Dr. Byrne: “First, Catholic studies continuing its short history squarely as part of the liberal arts tradition; that is, the tradition of situating all subject matter in the wide-cast fields of inquiry and subjecting it to critical appreciation and inquiry, toward the end of forming minds that habitually both honor and question received truth, and aim, finally, at arriving at real wisdom.
Innovations in Education
“Second, Catholic studies integrated into the study of the United States and the study of the whole world: so that not only the church and its people, but also their interactions with cultures in which they find themselves, as well as those cultures’ interactions upon them, find room for discussion. “Third, Catholic studies integrated with the study of other religions, even to the point of questioning the boundaries between them. My own current research in the historiography of Catholicism, for example, investigates how the label ‘Catholic’ has been used in American religious communities, not only by Roman Catholics, but by non-Roman Catholics in communion with Rome, Eastern Orthodox churches, certain Anglicans and Episcopalians, and Old Catholic, traditionalist, and independent Catholics, as well Protestants from the Unitarian-Universalists to Congregationalists to Lutherans to contemporary emerging church evangelicals. “Fourth, Catholic studies as a useful vantage point from which to understand U.S. and global phenomena more broadly. There is no single institution so long-lasting, complex, and multilayered to have touched on almost every aspect of Western and often non-Western life for the last two millennia, including the late ancient world, medieval Europe, the dawn of modernity, the transatlantic slave trade, immigration, colonialism, the industrial revolution, the scientific revolution, the Age of Aquarius, and the age of the Internet.”
Hofstra University’s Contribution to Catholic Studies For all of those reasons, Catholic Studies at Hofstra will be designed for all students, Catholic and non-Catholic, and for the publics beyond Hofstra, both Catholic and non-Catholic. According to Dr. Byrne, Catholic Studies can be distinctive at Hofstra because Hofstra is a distinctive place in at least four ways. • Hofstra is a university whose overall institutional identity is newly recommitted to and refocused around liberal arts education.
v Find Out More at hofstra.edu
• Hofstra’s new Department of Religion is committed to the study of religion in a liberal arts context and is developing precisely at a moment in the academy when, in a post-9/11 world, the need for the broad religious literacy of all Americans, regardless of faith affiliation or no faith affiliation, is being increasingly recognized and called for. There is also a need for that religious literacy to extend beyond the boundaries of the United States, to understand Sikhism, Islam, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, and other faiths in all their transnational and diasporic contexts. • Hofstra’s religion department is interdisciplinary, with textualists and sociologists and historians and philosophers among us, and all of us working, teaching, and researching with other disciplines and colleagues across the arts and sciences. “In such a department and in such a university, the context for studying Catholicism is rich—the context for the best of what ‘Catholic Studies’ means is there—that is, studying Catholicism as the historic, international, multifaceted, complex phenomenon that over two millennia it has come to be.” Dr. Byrne said. • Hofstra’s religion department draws from and touches New7 York City. While there are not many religion departments in the universities of New York, there are many religions in New York, Catholicism prominent among them. Dr. Byrne will develop a cycle of courses on Catholic thought, practice, and history that will be offered at regular intervals. This cycle would form the basis of an eventual concentration in Catholic Studies for undergraduates that could involve capstone research
Catholic Studies at Hofstra will be designed for all students, Catholic and non-Catholic, and for the publics beyond Hofstra, both Catholic and non-Catholic.
Innovations in Education
projects that address student interests in whatever graduate school or career path they choose to pursue in the future, as well as study-abroad options in traditional places for Catholic history, such as Rome and Ireland, or in a largely Catholic non-European country, such as Belize, Brazil, Uganda or the Seychelles.
Innovations in Education
Eventually, Catholic Studies at Hofstra could include a graduate component, with a Master of Arts degree in the Religion Department, as well summer seminars and conferences to which graduate students in religion programs across the country are invited.
The Hartman Model of Catholic Studies at Hofstra University
Lecture Series in Catholic Studies The Hartman model will also engage the community on and off the Hofstra campus. To that end, Hofstra University will hold its first annual Hofstra Religion Department Lecture Series in Catholic Studies: Catholicism and Literature this spring (2007). Catholicism and Literature will feature artists whose work touches upon some aspect of Catholic faith or culture: • Peter Manseau, author of the critically acclaimed memoir, Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, (New York: Free Press, 2005, the author’s story of growing up as the son of a former nun and a censured priest. Feb. 28, 2007. • Mary Gordon, the award-winning novelist, essayist, and critic whose works include The Short Stories of Mary Gordon, Final Payments, The Company of Men, Women and Angels, April 18. In addition, the Department of Religion has coordinated a two-day visit to Hofstra by noted New Testament Scholar Bart Ehrman Feb. 15-16. He is the author, most recently, of Peter, Paul, and Mary Magdalene: The Followers of Jesus in History and Legend, and Misquoting Jesus: The Story of Who Changed the Bible and Why. For more information on Hoftra Universtiy's Catholic Studies program and Department of Religion and to watch a video of Dr. Byrne's installation speech, please go to:
www.hofstra.edu/catholicstudies
v Find Out More at hofstra.edu
Dr. Julie E. Byrne, the Monsignor Thomas J. Hartman Chair in Catholic Studies at Hofstra University, is the author of the critically acclaimed O God of Players: The Story of the Immaculata Mighty Macs. (Columbia University Press, 2003), which examines the ways religion, class, gender and athletic identities intersected in the basketball program at Immaculata College, an all-female Catholic college outside Philadelphia.
O God of Players identified Dr. Bryne as a scholar at the forefront of a movement to view religious traditions “from the bottom up.” Through heavy reliance on ethnographic studies and archival data, this approach is presenting a new portrait of Catholicism in America, one that is based on what the people in the pews are actually saying and doing. Dr. Byrne earned a B.A. at Duke University with concentrations in Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Religion (1990). Continuing at Duke, she earned an M.A. in Religion in 1996, and a Ph.D. in 2001, where she focused primarily on American religion with special concentrations in Catholicism, African American Religion, cultural studies and critical theory. Dr. Byrne taught at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth Texas from 2000-2004. She returned to Duke University in 2004 and came to Hofstra in September 2006. Dr. Byrne has been a recipient of the Charlotte Newcombe dissertation award, was selected to be a participant in the Lilly Young Scholars in American Religion seminar, and was a winner of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion research award.
Innovations in Education
Just a year after it established a Department of Religion in the fall of 2005, Hofstra University celebrated the installation of Dr. Julie Byrne as its new Msgr. Thomas J. Hartman Endowed Chair for Catholic Studies. This was the second of three planned endowed chairs in the department, the first being for Sikh Studies, and the third for Jewish Studies. Dr. Byrne used the occasion to introduce “The Hartman Model” of Catholic Studies at Hofstra University, a means of integrating the study of religion into the context of the larger university and of the world through teaching, research, study-abroad programs, seminars, conferences, speaker series and other ongoing programming. And she argued that Hofstra was ideally situated at this point in time to put its distinctive mark on Catholic studies.
History of Catholic Studies
From the 90s into the new millennium, as Catholic scholars increasingly taught and published in nonCatholic venues – and as non-Catholic scholars began to take an interest in Catholicism – the study of Catholicism was mainstreamed in the liberal arts academy.
Department of Religion at Hofstra University
“This religion department is uniquely situated to have a platform for public education about religion in, of course, one of the most important centers of influence in the country and the world.”
The study of Catholicism at American Universities dates back to 1958 when Harvard seated its first Charles Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Studies. The field expanded as Catholic universities underwent a secularization and Catholics in the United States increasingly attended non-Catholic colleges.
v Find Out More at hofstra.edu
Throughout the late 80s and 90s, American higher education as well as society in general roiled with the so-called “culture wars,” which are perhaps most simply seen as the latest of many historical moments when American society struggled to come to terms with increasing diversity, according to Dr. Byrne.
“Hofstra University can have a hand in shaping Catholic Studies, present and future,” said Dr. Byrne, in part because Hofstra’s new Department of Religion is committed to the study of religion in a liberal arts context. “This religion department is uniquely situated to have a platform for public education about religion in, of course, one of the most important centers of influence in the country and the world.”
Innovations in Education