June is conference season for many academic guilds. The academic year is over for most professors, and it becomes time to meet up in far-off locales to reconnect and to share the intellectual fruits of academic labor. The world of Christian theology in the United States has lost so many giants this calendar year—from Martin Marty to David Tracy to Theresa Kane to Walter Brueggemann to Roger Haight to Alasdair MacIntyre to Larry Cunningham—that such gatherings can take on a bit of the feel of an Irish wake. But some of the honors awarded at this year’s Catholic Theological Society of America and College Theology Society annual conventions were a helpful reminder that amid loss, the work continues.
At its 79th annual convention, held in Portland, Ore., during the second week of June, the C.T.S.A. honored Stephen Bevans, S.V.D., with the John Courtney Murray Award, its highest honor. Named for the distinguished American Jesuit theologian renowned for his contributions to the Second Vatican Council as well as for his profound influence on American Catholic theology, the award is given yearly by the CTSA to a scholar for a “lifetime of distinguished theological achievement.”
Father Bevans, who was also honored by the American Society of Missiology in 2021 with that society’s Lifetime Achievement Award, was born in 1944 in Baltimore, Md. After joining the Society of the Divine Word, he studied at the Pontifical Gregorian University, receiving his licentiate in theology in 1972. Ordained the year before, he then spent nine years in the Philippines in mission work. After returning home and earning his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame in 1986, he began teaching at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, Ill. (In case you’re wondering, Robert Prevost, O.S.A., got his M.Div. from the CTU in 1982, so Bevans did not teach the pope), until his retirement in 2015.
His published works include a number of influential texts on missiology, including Models of Contextual Theology (2002), Constants in Context: A Theology of Mission for Today (2004), An Introduction to Theology in Global Perspective (2009), Mission and Culture (2012) and last year’s Community of Missionary Disciples.
Also at C.T.S.A., the Women’s Consultation in Constructive Theology honored Christine Firer Hinze with the Ann O’Hara Graff Award. Graff, who died in 1996, was a theologian and historian who taught for many years at the University of Seattle and Loyola University Chicago. A professor of theological and social ethics in the department of Theology at Fordham University, Hinze is the author most recently of Radical Sufficiency: Work, Livelihood, and a U.S. Catholic Economic Ethic (2021). Reviewing Radical Sufficiency for America in 2021, Karen Peterson-Iyer called it “a book that is both hopeful and searing, an account of our daily work and civic relationships that illuminates their connection to the divine while also spotlighting the ways that the American Dream can seem more like a nightmare to those for whom it is structurally inaccessible.”
Hinze’s previous works include Glass Ceilings, Dirt Floors: Women, Work, and the Global Economy (2015) and Comprehending Power in Christian Social Ethics (1995). Longtime readers of America may remember her 2012 response in the magazine to an article that year by Peter Sartain, then the archbishop of Seattle, on the Vatican’s controversial 2012 “Doctrinal Assessment of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.” As Hinze noted, the Vatican’s investigation into the L.C.W.R. had not been without its tensions, including a sense by many women religious that there had been significant overreach by the Vatican into the charisms and ways of proceeding of these communities. “Insofar as each group comes to the table understanding the narrative differently,” she wrote, “the dangers of talking past one another, stalemate or alienation are high.”
While recognizing the stated desire on the part of Archbishop Sartain (the delegate for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in the aforementioned investigation and assessment) for reconciliation and collaboration with the L.C.W.R., Hinze wrote that the investigation and assessment “raises larger questions concerning the freedom and obligations of religious communities to discern their missional priorities, and how these relate to papal and episcopal priorities.”
C.T.S.A. also honored Flora Tang of the University of Notre Dame with the Catherine Mowry LaCugna Award, given “to new scholars for the best academic essay in the field of theology within the Roman Catholic tradition,” and Katherine Dorsey Bellow of Xavier University of Louisiana with the C.U.E.R.G. Distinguished Scholar-Leader Award, given by the Committee for Underrepresented Racial and Ethnic Groups to honor a member “whose work as a scholar-leader has carried forward the theologizing of underrepresented and underrecognized communities in the academy, Church, and/or wider society.”
At the College Theology Society annual meeting at the University of Dayton the week before, C.T.S. recognized three members, including Timothy Hanchin of Villanova University, who was honored with the Monika Hellwig Award for Excellence in Teaching; Cristina Lledo Gomez of the Australian Institute of Theological Education was recognized with the society’s Best Article Award for her “Bangon Na, Pinays Rise Up: Reclaiming Pinay Power Dismantled by a Christian Colonial Past and Present”; and Julia Feder of Saint Mary's College in Notre Dame, Ind., was honored with the Best Book Award for her 2023 publication, Incarnating Grace: A Theology of Healing from Sexual Trauma.
Karen Peterson-Iyer reviewed Incarnating Grace for America in 2024. Commenting on Feder’s “thoroughgoing retrieval” of the theologies of Schillebeeckx and Teresa of Ávila, she noted that “it is ultimately Feder herself who skillfully weaves their insights into genuine resources for survivors and their allies—as well as for society more generally. It is long past time that the Christian tradition honestly addresses the struggles of multitudes of survivors of sexual trauma. Feder provides a much-needed template for doing so, inviting us into a spiritual-religious understanding of post-traumatic recovery that is searingly honest on the one hand, but also visionary and deeply hopeful on the other.”
Searingly honest; visionary and deeply hopeful. Like many of the theologians past and present mentioned here.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Imitations of Eternity,” by Brooke Stanish. 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
