Richard Gribble, CSC: During my period of graduate studies at The Catholic University of America, I had the opportunity one day to speak with fabled American Catholic Church historian, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis, who at the time was a resident at the nursing facility operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor on Harewood Road. “Why did you come to see me? You want a dissertation topic, don’t you?”
Catherine Osborne: At the 2010 Spring Meeting in Princeton, in a session on “American Catholics and Ecumenism,” I presented a paper on “The Chapel on the Moon: Maurice Lavanoux, Imaginary Architecture, and the Ecumenical Future.” This work is an early version of what will become the last chapter of my dissertation in the theology department at Fordham University, “American Catholics and the Art of the Future, 1930-1975.”
Angelyn Dries, OSF:: As of this writing, I am completing a history of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America. As my deadline approaches for the completion of the manuscript, I dreamt one night that I was awash in a sea of paper. When I awoke, I thought to myself, “At least I wasn’t drowning!”
Seth Smith, a graduate student and ACHA member, outlines his research project on Catholics in the South and discovers a unique brand of “American Catholicism without a ghetto.”
In the inaugural feature of our regular series featuring ACHA members’ essays about their research–and the experiences that shape their research–Larissa Juliet Taylor of Colby College reflects on her students and on her decade-long relationship with Joan of Arc.