2010 Election: Meet The Vice Presidential Candidates - American ...

Thomas F.X. Noble

Thomas F.X. NobleUniversity of Notre Dame

As a member of the Association for thirty-five years, and as a former member of the Executive Council, I have observed its ups and downs with absorbing interest. My own work has focused on medieval Rome, the popes, the papacy, papal relations with Byzantium, and controversies over religious art. That is all pretty “Catholic” but it brings me to three points I would like to make.

I have the strong sense that our Association is perceived as narrow and sectarian. That is largely a matter of visibility and it ought to be unsettling to the membership of an Association with “Catholic” in its title. We have many distinguished members. Many distinguished scholars write on topics of relevance to a Catholic Historical Association. We should be more aggressive in getting historians’ best work into the pages of the Catholic Historical Review. I have several ideas on how we might pursue this end.

Second, I think our membership could be increased significantly. I have several ideas about how we might use Catholic chaplaincies at research universities to identify promising Catholic graduate students who might be recruited early in their careers as members. I would also like to challenge members to identify two or three colleagues who might be interested in membership and urged to join. A larger membership would enhance the visibility of the Association but it would also fatten its “bottom line” and thereby offer future prospects of prizes, scholarships, and even fellowships that would themselves further advance the visibility of the Association. Third, and in line with my second point, I think we have been passive in approaching prominent Catholics and friendly foundations for funds which might endow the kinds of projects mentioned under my second point.

Francis Christopher Oakley

Francis Christopher Oakley Oakley Center, Williams College

I was born in England of Irish immigrant parents, grew up in Liverpool, a rather gritty port city, and was educated at our local parish school, at a Jesuit high school in the city, and at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, which I dearly loved and with which I am still affiliated as an honorary fellow. After Oxford, I went on as a research student in Latin palaeography and the history of medieval philosophy to the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, Toronto, where, at the prompting of Etienne Gilson, then Director of Studies, I began dissertation work on the political and ecclesiological thinking of Pierre d”Ailly (1360-1420), a leading philosopher/theologian of Ockhamist sympathies who played a prominent role at the Council of Constance in the ending of the Great Schism. Out of that work was eventually to come my first book. But my studies were interrupted by two years of service in the British Army and it was at Yale that I finished my graduate work, and did so under the supervision of the Reformation historian, Roland Bainton.

Having stayed on for a couple of years as an instructor in the Yale History Department (my first full-time academic job), I moved in the early sixties to Williams College in western Massachusetts where I spent the next forty years. My teaching duties combined responsibility for medieval, Renaissance and Reformation history, along with an array of courses in the interdepartmental major in the History of Ideas which I had co-founded along with a colleague in philosophy. My teaching career, however, was punctuated by sixteen years of administrative service, first as Dean of the Faculty, then as President of the College, and, later, just before retirement, by the better part of two years further service as interim President of the American Council of Learned Societies in New York, of which ACHA has long been, of course, one of the constituent learned societies.

History of Ideas being the focus of my historical interests, I have largely concentrated in my research and writing on three overlapping and complexly-related areas, all of them calling for an attempt to surmount the dysfunctional barrier that our traditional periodization has erected between “medieval” and “early-modern” European history. The first has involved work on legal thinking (see, e.g. my “Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order” [1984] and “Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights” [2005] ).The second has involved work on medieval church history at large and especially on the Conciliar Epoch ( see, e.g., my “Council over Pope? [1969] and “The Conciliarist Tradition”[2003] ).The third has involved explorations in the history of political thought from late antiquity to the seventeenth century (see, especially, my “Politics and Eternity” [1999] and “Empty Bottles of Gentilism” [2010], this last being the first volume of a three-volume effort with which I am currently engaged.

Having served some years ago on ACHA’s Executive Council and witnessed the devotion with which those charged with its leadership have managed its affairs, I conclude that it would be an impertinence for me to claim the possession of any transformative vision for its future. What I can properly do, instead, is to indicate some bone-deep commitments hammered out in the course of a career that has not lacked variety of challenge, commitments that inform the way I think about the role of ACHA. First, a conviction, passionately held, about the fundamental importance of encouraging quality undergraduate teaching in the liberal arts/arts and sciences, which an overwhelming preoccupation with vocational or pre-professional courses of instruction threatens increasingly to marginalize. Second, a firm belief that good teaching and active scholarly research are mutually reinforcing and that it is the duty of our learned societies to do whatever they can to make that combination possible. Third, a comparably firm belief in the importance of strengthening the role of church history in the seminary formation of our Catholic priesthood, and especially so in the education of our future theologians. The record suggests, I believe, that theological work undisciplined by a real sense of history can all too easily degenerate into an unproductive flight into abstraction.