The hallway outside the first plenary buzzed with greetings, hugs and quick catch-ups. Colleagues reunited, picking up conversations and friendships with ease. But beneath the warmth and laughter, a tension lingered.
The theme of this year’s annual College Theology Society convention at the University of Dayton from May 29 to June 1 was the future of theology in an era when academic structures are eroding. Theology courses are being cut from core curricula, departments downsized and faculty positions eliminated. The undercurrent was a growing worry that everything, including the College Theology Society itself, was heading toward collapse.
It was personal for almost everyone. I had spent the day before the conference in board meetings. When I looked around the table, over half the members had been directly affected by upheavals in the academy. Some had moved institutions because of financial distress. Others had lost their positions or left academia entirely. These weren’t just career shifts. They were signs of a field in transition. What struck me most was that none of it felt surprising. This precarity was simply the new normal.
As the incoming president of C.T.S., I felt the stress and anxiety because these changes in higher education are having a profound effect on the society. During the conference, I spoke with a younger scholar who had spent several years teaching theology in high school and still held out hope for a college position. Later, I swapped stories with a longtime colleague, reminiscing about past conventions. By the end of our conversation, we found ourselves quietly saying, “I guess those times are past.”
What could be lost
What the society is facing is not isolated or abrupt. It is the cumulative effect of long-building forces, forces reshaping not only theology but the entire structure of higher education. The national conversation around college has narrowed to return on investment and workforce readiness. Catholic institutions face the same enrollment pressures, financial constraints and market logics as their secular peers. Theology, which doesn’t usually drive enrollment or boost revenue in academia, is frequently sidelined.
The consequences are visible. Fewer students encounter theology in their core curriculum. Fewer full-time faculty are hired to teach it. Some institutions eliminate theology departments altogether. Others retain them but starve them of resources. Scholars in the field face heavier teaching loads and fewer tenure-track positions. Academic societies wither.
The concern here is deeper than job loss. Theology helps communities reflect on human dignity, the power and priority of love and the hope of salvation for both souls and creation. Its slow erosion means people lose spaces and time to ask deep questions, to reflect on the gospel, to read and write about the life of discipleship. It means the church loses part of its life of thought, formation and witness. What is lost is not just individual goods but the good of each and the good of all.
The College Theology Society has long served theologians. It has been a space of intellectual companionship and encouragement. For many, it was the first professional society where they presented a paper. Through its journal, Horizons, and its annual volume, it is a source of rigorous scholarship and a platform for diverse voices. But C.T.S. was never only about professional development. It has been a space where theology is treated as a discipline that matters to students, to the church and to the wider world. It created room for friendships rooted in a shared vocation, for conversations that blend scholarship with pastoral concerns, for a vision of theology that values both the classroom and the broader public square.
From the start, C.T.S. was for theologians teaching undergraduates. Now, as higher education reshapes itself and Catholic colleges and universities waver in their support for theology, the context that once sustained the society is unraveling. What had once felt stable—rooted in classrooms, scholarly networks and institutional backing—now felt fragile. Its value and purpose have come into question. Can C.T.S. survive? What future awaits theology?
Wise voices
This worry surfaced immediately in the opening plenary, where Agbonkhianmeghe Orobator, S.J., dean of the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University at Berkeley, asked an important question: How do we sustain “a modicum of hope for the survival of our vocation and our guild for generations present and to come”? He eschewed the toxic binaries of culture war politics that thwart the capacity for mission and witness. He cautioned against a retreat into selective, safe and self-referential academic niches that offer the comfort of “monocultural ghettos of theological affinities.” Instead, he called those in the society to find a way to make theology more synodal, more transdisciplinary and more rooted in real communities.
The next plenary, from Matthew Cressler, took that call and turned it outward. He did not speculate about what theology might become. He showed where it might go. In a world on fire with rising authoritarianism, corporate surveillance and digital dehumanization, Cressler argued that theologians are urgently needed. They are experts in power and meaning, cross-cultural empathy, slow thinking and unstructured problem-solving. His own position outside of academia in the realm of public interest technology and cultural storytelling offered an example of the theological vocation reimagined. Hope, in his vision, meant finding meaningful, even missionary, work outside the classroom.
Matt Shadle’s plenary returned to history to widen the horizon. He reminded us that theology’s presence in the modern university is a relatively recent phenomenon. Long before the postwar boom of Catholic higher education, theologians preached in courts, formed minds in monasteries and shaped the church’s life far beyond any classroom. Even the so-called “golden age” of theology in U.S. Catholic universities, beginning in the 1960s, was not without cost. It brought visibility and resources but also conformity to academic norms that narrowed who counted and what theology could be. In its current unraveling, Shadle saw a chance for theology to be more synodal, more evangelical and more free. It could be not only for captive students, but for people who truly hunger for it, people in parishes, in protests or online.
In the final plenary, Catherine Punsalan-Manlimos turned to the university—but with a different kind of hope. Even as many Catholic institutions seem adrift, struggling with their mission and market pressures, she insisted that theologians still have a vital role to play. “Theologians,” she argued, “can help an institution reflect on how its mission is ultimately a participation in the mission of the church, which is ultimately the mission of Christ.” Far from being limited to the classroom or siloed in academic research, theology faculty could shape institutional culture, clarify Catholic commitments, especially if they overcome the divide between administration and faculty.
I felt all the hopes the speakers offered. None pretended there was an easy fix. There is no toolkit, no five-year plan, no pivot strategy that will save Catholic higher education or theology as we have known it. The ground is shifting. Catholic higher education is changing, and we can neither return to what was nor freeze in place. To help us, each thinker imagined possibilities, speculating about what could be in the wake of looming changes.
A new vision
And their visions did give me hope. They spoke to my own longing to see theology endure, not just as an academic discipline, but as a way of seeking and serving. They opened up a future for the College Theology Society, one capacious enough to support these different paths. A future in which theology continues to nourish schools and society, believers and citizens.
But amid the joy and hope were still the griefs and anxieties. Were these visions enough? If theology does move beyond higher education, will the structures the College Theology Society built for theologians in the academy—like the annual convention each summer, the pedagogical workshops, Horizons, the annual volumes—still matter? Won’t new contexts need new theologies? Won’t being an activist or an administrator, a corporate leader or a comic artist, demand change in one’s theology? And won’t these new theologies radically change the kind of society one needs?
Theology is a living tradition that helps the church think and believe with greater depth, clarity and compassion. For decades, colleges and universities expanded the possibility for people to engage theology, to learn it and teach it, to read it and write it, to ask hard questions and discover joyful truths. This increased access to theology enabled more people to serve the church and the world. Theology should expand beyond the boundaries of the academy, but without the academy, I don’t see how theology doesn’t become smaller and scarcer.
I want to believe this will not happen. I want to believe that the College Theology Society will continue because there will be a need to serve lots of theologians, inside and outside the academy. I want to believe, but, Lord, help my unbelief.
