June 10–14, 2013
The deadline for applications has passed.
The Museum’s Committee on Ethics, Religion, and the Holocaust is pleased to announce the 2013 Annual Seminar for Seminary and Religious Studies Faculty, which will explore the shift in Catholic thought on the Jews since 1965 resulting from the promulgation of the Vatican II declaration Nostra Aetate (“In Our Age”).
The statement about Jews in Nostra Aetate reversed and refuted ideas that went back to the Church’s earliest days and grew out of deep theological reflection occasioned by witness to the Holocaust. While the best-known images from Vatican II emphasize the deliberations of bishops, the actual intellectual impetus for the revolution came from the margins of the Church, specifically a small group of converts to Catholicism—many of them from Judaism. How did they succeed in making themselves heard in an institution that, to many, had seemed impervious to change? The seminar will examine the primary influence—historical, theological, and biographical—on this revolution in Catholic teaching.
The seminar is designed particularly for professors of theology, ethics, and religion at theological schools and other institutions of advanced education, but faculty from all disciplines are welcome to apply.
Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about Museum resources for their teaching and to consult and interact with Museum staff and visiting scholars. To learn more about the Museum’s programs on the history of the churches during the Holocaust, please visit ushmm.org/research/center/church/.
Seminar Leader
John Connelly, professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, will teach the seminar. Author of From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Harvard University Press, 2012), Professor Connelly also wrote Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech and Polish Higher Education (2000), which won the American Historical Association’s 2001 George Beer Award, and he co-edited Universities Under Dictatorship (2005). His articles have appeared in Minerva, the Journal of Modern History, Slavic Review, the Nation, the London Review of Books, and Commonweal.
To Apply
Applicants must be faculty members at accredited, degree-awarding institutions in North America.
Applications must include: (1) a curriculum vitae; (2) a statement of the applicant’s specific interest and purpose for attending the seminar; and (3) a supporting letter from a departmental chair or dean addressing the applicant’s qualifications and the institution’s potential interest in having Holocaust-related courses taught.
The Center will select a maximum of 20 applicants for admission, without regard to age, gender, race, creed, or national origin. For non-local participants, the Center will (1) reimburse the cost of direct travel to and from the participant’s home institution and Washington, DC, up to but not exceeding $500; and (2) defray the cost of lodging for the duration of the course. Incidental, meal, and book expenses must be defrayed by the candidates or their respective institutions. All participants must attend the entire seminar.
The Center will notify all applicants of the results of the selection process by Monday, March 18, 2013.
Contact
For questions, please contact Victoria Barnett at 202.488.0469 or vbarnett@ushmm.org.
This seminar is made possible by the Hoffberger Family Fund and by Joseph A. and Janeal Cannon and Family.
