FA C U LT Y U P D AT E S
“Saints and Heroes: Augustine on the Love of Glory”
Holy Cross College welcomes new members to the faculty and staff Holy Cross College welcomed three full-time faculty members this academic year along, along with a new Director of Admissions.
(continued from previous page.) for immortality plays in his account of what a good leader is. The most ambitious people are, in a sense, the ones who most desire immortality and are accordingly most frightened by the certainty of death. That is why ambition can be dangerous for all of us. Instead of admitting to ourselves that we cannot have the real thing, the only thing worth striving for, by our own efforts alone, then we will settle for imitation. a passé imitation. As human beings, therefore, we are “substitutionary” creatures, powerfully endowed with a longing for immortality but forever placing our hope for it in things that cannot deliver. We want real cane sugar but, somehow, put up with Splenda. The point is not to stop desiring immortality - indeed, we are constitutionally incapable of doing so but to realize that even the pinnacle of ambition cannot satisfy this deepest thirst. Nor can any accomplishment do away with human dependence on God. The virtue of humility in a leader allows him or her to see, truths. and live by, these truths.
John Biddle joins the College as an assistant professor of physics. He will be teaching two physics sequences, one for people planning to study engineering and the physical sciences, and another for people planning to study life sciences, including those in preparation for careers in health-related fields. He holds a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Maryland and a master’s degree in education from the University of Notre Dame. “During my work at Maryland, I studied phase transitions and critical phenomena, focusing on supercooled water in particular,” said Biddle about his background. “During that time, I was also a teaching assistant for Maryland’s physics education research group. In graduate school, I became particularly interested in non-equilibrium statistical and thermal physics, and biological phenomena presented, as they do now, some of the most interesting problems in that field. So, after I graduated from Maryland, I worked in the Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School,” said Biddle about his background. He is excited to be in the Midwest and teaching at Holy Cross College. “I hope that by teaching students physics I can give them new ways of looking at the world and at certain problems; help them see science in the broader context of human knowledge and wisdom; prepare them for gainful employment; and do all of this as part of an education that sustains and nurtures their faith in Christ. I’d also like to work out some of the implications of my earlier projects at Harvard and keep contributing to the ongoing research into non-equilibrium statistical physics and in particular the physics of biological systems.” Emily Ransom is the new assistant professor of English. She earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of Notre Dame and also holds degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and from North Carolina State University, along with taking courses with University College Cork, the Folger Institute in Washington, D.C., National University of Ireland
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HOLY CROSS COLLEGE Connections | FALL 2020 / WINTER 2021
