New York Unbound: Chronicles of Change and Resilience

Empire State Editions Author Panel

Continuing the dialogue sparked by University Press Week (November 11-15, 2024), join us for this Fall evening event featuring authors from Fordham University Press’s Empire State Editions imprint. This panel will explore significant moments in New York City's rich history and its ongoing transformation through the voices of these engaging authors.

Moderator:

David J. Goodwin, Assistant Director of the Center on Religion and Culture at Fordham University, and author of Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham (November 2023) and Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street (October 2017)

Speakers:

Jonathan Butler, author of Join the Conspiracy: How a Brooklyn Eccentric Got Lost on the Right, Infiltrated the Left, and Brought Down the Biggest Bombing Network in New York (September 2024)

Alice Sparberg Alexiou, author of Devil's Mile: The Rich, Gritty History of the Bowery (July 2024)

Nicole Gelinas, author of Movement: New York's Long War to Take Back Its Streets from the Car (November 2024)

Jennifer Baum, author of Just City: Growing Up on the Upper West Side When Housing Was a Human Right (April 2024)

Co-hosted by Fordham's Center on Religion and Culture and Fordham University Press

Dorothy Fortenberry and the Art of Screenwriting

113 West 60th Street | New York, NY 10023

The Emmy-nominated producer/screenwriter of Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Apple TV’s Extrapolations will talk about what it takes to make great television about important issues—and how her Catholic faith and her passion for combating climate change inform her career and her craft. 

Dorothy Fortenberry will draw on an assortment of clips from shows she has written and produced to explain her approach and prompt questions from the audience. 

CRC director David Gibson will moderate the conversation.

Andrea Tornielli on Jesus and the Pope

Vatican media’s editorial director discusses his novelistic new book, "The Life of Jesus,” written in conversation with Pope Francis

Andrea Tornielli is an Italian journalist and longtime vaticanista who now oversees the various Vatican media outlets. Tornielli’s latest book, The Life of Jesus, is a reimagining of the life of Jesus that, like the TV series The Chosen, helps readers approach the story of Jesus with fresh eyes and an open heart.

The book features a foreword by Pope Francis and is interwoven with commentary by the pontiff. 

Archbishop Gabriele Caccia, the Holy See’s permanent observer at the United Nations, will introduce Tornielli. Tornielli will give a brief presentation on the book, and then the CRC’s David Gibson will moderate a conversation with him and award-winning novelist Colum McCann about the writing process, faith and art, and the Vatican under Pope Francis.

The event will begin with a wine and cheese reception at 5:30 p.m., and the book discussion will begin at 6:15 p.m. After the event, Tornielli will sign books, which will be available for sale. Copies of The Life of Jesus can be purchased in advance as well.

Sacred Landscapes:

Memorialization in New York City Public Parks

A Duffy Fellows Program Event

Public parks are the theater of New York City civic life, serving as spaces of recreation, rest, learning, and protest. They host the diverse, occasionally conflicting desires of the living, while simultaneously exhibiting a record of our shared public history. 2023-2024 Duffy Fellow Amelia Medved’s research concerns the contemporary use of park memorial spaces in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, specifically those which are consecrated burial sites.

In her original print publication, A Breathing Place: Consecrated Memorial Sites in New York City Public Parks, Medved explores what it means to designate public space as sacred at four case study sites: the Prison Ship Martyrs Memorial in Fort Greene Park; the Enslaved African burial ground in Van Cortlandt Park; the public cemetery on Hart Island; and the National September 11 Memorial at the World Trade Center.

The Fordham Center on Religion and Culture invites you to attend the launch event for A Breathing Place, which will be accompanied by a presentation of Medved’s research and a light reception.

Amelia Medved (FCRH ‘23) majored in Environmental Studies and Visual Arts. She currently works as a Studio Assistant at SCAPE, a New York City-based landscape architecture firm. Medved is passionate about environmental justice, specifically with a focus on parks equity and community-based ecological stewardship.

Ethan Hawke on Wildcat:

Screening and Conversation

Ethan Hawke directs his daughter, the actress Maya Hawke, in Wildcat, a biographical drama that he co-wrote about the Catholic author Flannery O’Connor. Hawke joins us after the screening for a conversation on O’Connor, the Catholic imagination, and making great movies about life’s big questions. 

Fordham’s resident Flannery O’Connor expert, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, joins Fordham CRC director David Gibson in a conversation that will include questions from the audience.

Every Creeping Thing

A Conversation with Graphic Novelist Madison Morris

A Duffy Fellows Program Event

Join us for a conversation around the new graphic novel Every Creeping Thing. Author Madison Morris (FCRH ‘24) will give a brief presentation on the spiritual inspiration and ideas behind the story as well as the process of working on a long-form creative work as a Duffy Fellow. The talk will be followed by a Q&A and a light reception hosted by Fordham’s Center on Religion and Culture.

Every Creeping Thing is the story of a petulant girl and the transformations she and her family undergo in the wake of the 1950 polio epidemic. On the highway between suburbia and the state hospital, the family’s car gets a flat and they find themselves stranded. Carole and her brother wander into the timberlands alongside the highway where they encounter the uncanny: a world run by human-natured insects. Every Creeping Thing plays in the space between death and heaven, fusing the natural with the unnatural to explore the experience of being a finite piece of an infinite creation. 

Madison Morris (FCRH ‘24) is majoring in Theology and English with a concentration in Creative Writing. In her creative work, she strives to create stories and images that allow readers to stay in a question instead of rushing toward an answer.

Discerning the Call:

Change in the American Priesthood

A Duffy Fellows Program Event

When a man discovers a call to the priesthood today, his process of discernment looks much different than it would have decades ago. In the past, men entered seminary younger, the application process was quicker, and their friends and family usually celebrated the decision. Today, the norm is much different. But why?

El Niño at the Met:

Opera, Baby Jesus, and Today’s Refugees

The critically-acclaimed opera premiers at the Met, and director Lileana Blain-Cruz joins us for an evening of conversation on art, faith, and justice

Special appearance by Daniela Mack, the mezzo-soprano who will perform a selection from El Niño

A Christmas story at Easter time? That’s essentially what the Metropolitan Opera is doing in presenting the company premier of John Adams’s El Niño. But the opera-oratorio’s focus on the experience of the refugee and the migrant—how they struggled to find acceptance in Biblical times—could not be more contemporary, and urgent. 

The composition incorporates sacred and secular texts in English, Spanish, and Latin, from biblical times to the present day, in an extraordinarily dramatic retelling of the Nativity. 

The vivid new production also marks the Met debut of celebrated theater maker Lileana Blain-Cruz, resident director at Lincoln Center Theater, who joins us to talk about the opera and the importance of staging art that matters for our world today. She will be joined by Fadi Skeiker of Fordham’s theater department and Fordham theology professor Leo Guardado. 

David Gibson, director of the Center on Religion and Culture, will moderate the discussion with the panelists and the audience. 

This event was a partnership between Fordham University, the Metropolitan Opera, and Church of St. Paul the Apostle

Yield Not: Hope and Communion in the Bronx’s Toughest Years

A talk by journalist Eileen Markey

Image credit: Mel Rosenthal

A Conversation with John Patrick Shanley

The Tony-winning playwright and renowned screenwriter John Patrick Shanley visits Fordham to talk about the hit Broadway revival of his play Doubt and a career that runs from an Oscar for Moonstruck to his newest play, Brooklyn Laundry. Plus much more. The Center on Religion and Culture’s director, David Gibson, will moderate a conversation with the audience.

Shelter in Solitude

Screening and Talkback with Actor-Screenwriter Siobhan Fallon Hogan

Siobhan Fallon Hogan (Saturday Night Live, Seinfeld, Men in Black) is a longtime comedian, actor, and writer for film and stage—and a Catholic mom. She draws on all those vocations for her latest feature film, Shelter in Solitude. It’s a heartfelt and heart-breaking story of a down-on-her-luck bar owner in upstate New York who finds work as a guard on death row—and her unlikely friendship with a prisoner scheduled to be executed.

“Fallon is known for her witty sarcasm and humor but has taken on a more serious role in this film.” – People magazine 

“These are the kind of movies we need to go see.” – Seth Myers, “The Seth Myers Show” 

“She has terrific comedic timing and also excels during the film's poignant scenes.” – NYC Movie Guru

Siobhan Fallon Hogan joins us after the screening for a conversation on making movies, making people laugh, and making it in Hollywood as a woman—and a person of faith.

A Catholic Reckoning on Slavery

Rachel Swarns on her book The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church

The 2024 Russo Lecture

Catholicism as Cultural History

The Enduring Legacy of John O’Malley, S.J.

A Fordham University Symposium 

John O’Malley, SJ (1927-2022) was an extraordinarily talented and devoted scholar, writer, teacher, and Jesuit priest. The research of his early career helped re-cast our understanding of the Catholic response to the Reformation and the development of the Society of Jesus. The writings of the last twenty years of his long and prolific life—books and essays on church councils and Western cultures—brought him new audiences beyond the academy. 

The golden thread running through all of his work was the centrality of cultural history. This conference will highlight that legacy while expanding on the ways that O’Malley’s style can help us understand a more global and diverse Catholicism of the future. 

Anchored by a keynote address by Carlos Eire of Yale University, this afternoon conference will feature panels on “Catholicism as Cultural History” and “Languages of Dialogue and Inclusion,” and will include contributions from scholars Pamela Jones, Mary Dunn, Thomas Worcester, SJ, Mary Ann Hinsdale, Catherine Chaput, and James McCartin. 

Brenna Moore of Fordham will offer concluding remarks, to be followed by a wine-and-cheese reception. 

Program Schedule

2:00 - 2:10 p.m.
Welcome and Introduction
David Gibson, Director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture

2:10 - 3:00 p.m.
Keynote: “Catholicism and All That: John O'Malley, Consummate Historian”
Carlos Eire, Yale University

3:00 - 3:15 p.m.
Coffee break

3:15 - 4:30 p.m.
Panel One: Catholicism as Cultural History
Panel chair: James McCartin, Fordham University

"John O'Malley's Legacy in the Field of Art History"
Pamela Jones, UMass Boston

"Somewhere between Sacraments and Sensuality: John O'Malley and the Art of
Translating the Catholic Past"
Mary Dunn, St. Louis University

"Jesuit History as Cultural History"
Thomas Worcester, S.J., Fordham University

4:30 - 5:45 p.m.
Panel Two: Languages of Dialogue and Inclusion
Panel chair: James McCartin, Fordham University

"John O'Malley and the Next-Gen"
Mary Ann Hinsdale, I.H.M., Boston College

"John O’Malley, the Four Cultures of Rhetoric, and the Contemporary Predicament”
Catherine Chaput, Fordham University

5:45 - 6:15 p.m.
Concluding Reflections
Brenna Moore, Fordham University

6:15 - 7:00 p.m.
Reception

This event is organized by the Center on Religion and Culture and is also made possible through the support of the Spellman Jesuit Community of Fordham, the Fordham Division on Mission and Ministry, and the Fordham History Department.