In attendance at the funeral for Roger D. Haight, S.J., on June 25, 2025, at St. Ignatius Loyola Church in New York City were some of the most prominent figures in American religious scholarship over the past half-century, from professors to ministers to editors and more: Here a Paul Knitter; there an Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J.; here a Frank Oveis; there a Shawn Copeland, and so on. Recipients of the John Courtney Murray Award—the Catholic Theological Society of America’s highest honor, one that Father Haight himself received in 2023—were close to a majority in some pews.
The 1997 recipient of that award was not present—she died in 2008—but was recognized by Leo O’Donovan, S.J., in his homily: Anne E. Carr, B.V.M. Father O’Donovan recalled a trip he had taken with Father Haight and Sister Carr in 1978, calling the trip with the two renowned theologians “an experience of transfiguration.” The phrase might have special resonance for those who have treasured one of Carr’s famous theological texts, Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women’s Experience.
A leading figure in academic Catholic feminism after the Second Vatican Council—her colleague the Rev. David Tracy once praised her as a founding mother of the discipline—Carr not only educated generations of students but also inspired many voices in a Catholic theological world that when she began (and still when she died) was dominated by men. In an obituary for her in 2008, Tracy wrote of Transforming Grace: “In that amazing book, she never hesitated to expose the sexism of the Christian tradition, as well as to retrieve overlooked resources of the experience and theology of women.”
Born in Chicago, Ill., in 1934, Anne Carr received her undergraduate degree from Mundelein College, a Catholic women’s college that later became part of Loyola University of Chicago. After working as a kindergarten teacher and studying English literature at Loyola, she joined the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1958. She taught at Mundelein for a number of years while earning master’s degrees in theology from Marquette University and the University of Chicago. In 1971, she received her doctorate in theology from the University of Chicago Divinity School and was appointed the chair of the religious studies department at Mundelein.
After several years teaching there and at Indiana University in Bloomington, Carr returned to the Divinity School in 1975 as an assistant professor of theology. Two years later, she became the first woman to be awarded tenure in the Divinity School, and later was the first woman to serve as associate dean. She would stay at the University of Chicago—by then one of the premier theological institutes in the world—for the next 28 years. Her peers remembered her on her retirement for her engagement with students at the university as well as her pioneering scholarship.
Carr was the author of three books: The Theological Method of Karl Rahner; A Search for Wisdom and Spirit: Thomas Merton’s Theology of Self and the aforementioned Transforming Grace. She was also an associate editor for the journal Horizons and co-editor of The Journal of Religion, and published frequently in edited volumes and academic journals.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Catholic theologians had a bit more leeway to speak out publicly against official church positions than they did after the Vatican crackdowns of the 1980s and 1990s that came out of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (now the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith) on theological dissent on hot-button issues. Carr was at the forefront of two issues that drew attention inside and outside the church in those decades, first in 1975 when she spoke at the Catholic Women’s Ordination Conference. “The ordination of women cannot be a stumbling block to faith because an authentic faith must recognize the full personhood of women, that they are not lesser human beings,” she said. Validating “the correlation of the church’s tradition with the experience of women,” she argued, “might result in a new understanding of the Church as sacrament.”
In 1984, Carr joined 23 other women religious and dozens of other theologians from the United States in signing a declaration published in The New York Times stating that Roman Catholics had a “diversity of opinions regarding abortion.” The statement was condemned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the Vatican announced that those sisters who did not recant their position should be dismissed from their religious orders. (Most didn’t, and most weren’t.)
A scholar of Karl Rahner since graduate school, Carr also engaged closely with Christian spirituality in her writing, recognizing that much fruit could be gained by exploring it with the same depth that scholars approached theology. “In its widest meaning, spirituality can be described as the whole of one’s spiritual or religious experience, one’s beliefs, convictions and patterns of thought, one’s emotions and behavior in respect to what is ultimate, or to God. Spirituality is holistic, encompassing all one’s relationships to all of creation—to the self and to others, to society and nature, to work and leisure,” she wrote. “As such it is a dimension of life that is generally unexamined, resting on convention, upbringing, or conformity to social and religious expectations.”
Already by 1979, Carr had begun to suffer health problems related to benign brain tumors, and underwent surgery that year and twice more in 1986 and 1996, continuing to teach before and after each surgery. She retired from the University of Chicago but continued her research and writing. She contributed two book reviews to America in the years after her retirement: on David Scott’s The Catholic Passion and on Joseph F. Kelly’s Responding to Evil.
Anne Carr died in 2008. The year before, the Catholic Theological Society of America, which had given her the John Courtney Murray Award a decade before, also honored her with its Ann O’Hara Graff Memorial Award. Her students, her colleagues from the University of Chicago, the B.V.M. sisters and the wider theological community gathered for her funeral. The aforementioned Father O’Donovan said on that occasion: “We all adored her.”
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Our poetry selection for this week is “The Half-Life of Longing,” by Egard Orode. To read more about the selection process for this year’s prize, click here. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:
- David Tracy was more than a theologian
- The priest-detectives of American fiction
- Riley Hughes, an unsung literary jack of all trades
- The history (and future) of covering conclaves
- Remembering Peru’s literary master, Mario Vargas Llosa
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
