Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

(Translation: For The Greater Glory of God)

Come this fall, I will start applying to schools for my doctorate.  It is a daunting task that looms rather menacingly in my near future.  After spending both my undergraduate and the first leg of my graduate years at Georgia State University, I feel the implacable need to move onwards and upwards.  Rather literally, as it happens.  Out of all the schools I plan to apply to only one of them is in the South.

But more importantly, I’m applying almost exclusively to Catholic universities.  Loyola, Georgetown, Boston College, Fordham, Marquette, and Catholic University are my current prospects.  (Northwestern and Emory are the non-Catholic loners.  Godless heathens, the lot of them.)  At first, I wasn’t entirely sure why I wanted to do so.  That changed, however, after the campus visit I had a couple of weeks ago at Loyola in Chicago.  The Madonna della Strada chapel dominates the landscape of the Lake Shore campus and the bell tower tolls the hour to all the students.  (An interesting side note: the science building stands just as tall as the chapel and directly opposite the chapel in the main thoroughfare of the campus.  You’d almost think they did it like that on purpose.).  I realized then that what I want is a physical Catholic presence at the school I attend.  While there is a church down the street from the Georgia State campus (I would like to say, however, that the priest there plays fast and loose with the text of the Mass), the idea that there is a chapel on campus that is undeniably attached to the school is attractive.

Perhaps I want these physical signs because I feel as though they would ensure that I will not experience the same kind of distaste, uninterest, flippancy, and at times downright prejudice towards my research as I have received at Georgia State.  I hate to put it like this, but there is a very liberal bias (not that I’m surprised) that pervades the history department.  People like me who study religion, and Catholicism in particular, not to condemn it, but rather vindicate it, are not widely regarded as serious scholars.  The problem, it seems, is that the field is not conducive to writing history in that way.  Most of the Catholic historians out in the world now – and by that I mean historians who are Catholic – leave theology by the wayside in their religious histories.  They don’t take it into account when they examine the actions of Catholics in years gone by.

All the same, and to get me back on point, I somehow feel as though I can expect a more welcoming environment for my studies at a Catholic school.  Whether this is true or not I’ve no idea, but I’d like to think that professors who teach at Catholic universities, whether they themselves are Catholic or not, have a certain sympathy for the Church.  And it isn’t that I’m not getting support from Georgia State per se, it’s that, well, I’m not on a certain level.  I feel as though I’m being pushed away from my religious beliefs in my work.  As though I have to set them aside to write history.  This approach is anathema to my purposes.  But can I be sure that this won’t happen at a religiously affiliated school?  I don’t know that I’d be able to find out because there are so few people doing religious history at the doctoral level who are doing it in the way I want to, which is to say, in keeping with and in support of the teachings of the Church.

When I told my advisor that I’d done a campus visit at Loyola and that I was seriously considering going there, he didn’t seem entirely pleased with my choice of school.  His job, he contends (and rightfully so), is to get me into a school that will give me a fighting chance at landing a job at least within the first couple of years out of school.  However, he wants me to apply to schools based almost entirely upon their academic reputation.  Some of those may include schools like Notre Dame or Boston College because of the professors they have in their history departments, but I know that Loyola is not on his list.  To give an example, I mentioned to him that I wanted to apply to Emory and his response was that it wasn’t in the top 25 schools in the country.  I checked the US News & World Report rankings and found them to be ranked within the top 30.  I’m almost positive that when we have our discussion he’s going to say he wants me to apply to UNC Chapel Hill or NYU or University of Chicago.  Besides the fact that I’m not good enough to get into those schools, I can’t shake my desire to attend a Catholic institution.  Unfortunately, I don’t think that I can explain that to him, and even if I could, I’m sure he will try to talk me out of the notion.  I may apply to those schools to appease him, but when I get rejected or wait listed at those schools and if I get accepted at the ones I really want to attend, I will accept their offers first.

At any rate, I will be speaking with both my priest and my advisor in the coming weeks to sort out this jumbled mess.  It will mostly concern these issues, but I also have the ever-increasing desire to move in a more theological direction.  I have over the past couple of years become intensely interested in liturgy.  Unfortunately this interest did not manifest itself along historical lines; no, instead, it decided to throw a wrench in my plans and drive me to theology.  Why can’t things ever be simple?

~ by jhoffacker on August 7, 2009.