Contact the Center on Religion and Culture

The Fordham Center on Religion and Culture was founded in 2004 by journalists Peter Steinfels and Margaret O’Brien Steinfels. James P. McCartin, a historian of American Catholicism at Fordham, succeeded them as director in 2011. The current director is David Gibson, a veteran journalist and author, who joined the CRC in 2017.

David Gibson was appointed the director of the CRC in July 2017, coming to New York’s Jesuit university after a long career as an award-winning religion journalist, author, and filmmaker. He is also a convert to Catholicism and he came by all those vocations by accident--or Providence--while working at the English Program at Vatican Radio in Rome in the late 1980s. He returned to the United States in 1990 and worked for newspapers throughout the New York area and has written for a variety of magazines and periodicals.

Gibson is the author of two books on Catholicism: The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism and The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World. He co-wrote and co-produced several documentaries on Christianity for CNN and the History Channel and co-authored a book on biblical archeology, Finding Jesus: Faith. Fact. Forgery, the basis of a popular CNN series of the same name.

Before coming to Fordham, Gibson worked for six years as a national reporter at Religion News Service and specialized in coverage of the Vatican and the Catholic Church. Gibson is a frequent media commentator and op-ed writer on topics related to the Catholic Church and religion in America.

Eileen Markey is an assistant professor of Journalism at Lehman College of the City University of New York and a Fordham alumna (FCRH ‘98). A reporter for more than two decades, she has covered urban policy and social movements with particular attention to the role of religion in public life. Her work has appeared in The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Daily News, Citylimits, The Village Voice, Commonweal, America and elsewhere.

Her book A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sr. Maura was an editor's pick in the New York Times Book Review. It tells the Cold War story of Maryknoll sister Maura Clarke, killed by U.S. trained forces in El Salvador in 1980, tracing the transformation of American Catholicism in the twentieth century. Markey is the editor of Without Compromise: The Brave Journalism that First Exposed Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani and the American Epidemic of Corruption, an anthology of the work of Village Voice investigative reporter Wayne Barrett.

While at the CRC, Markey is writing a book of narrative nonfiction that examines the religiously informed community movement that fought for the survival of Bronx neighborhoods during an era of abandonment and arson in the 1970s and 1980s.