By IHE Scholar Lucia Silecchia Many of my deepest childhood memories are the timeless ones about family traditions, school events, summer vacations, late 1970s fashions, my cat, and adventures with friends. Along with these, I remember the significant place of the American Bicentennial in my earliest memories. I remember our family mailbox filled with literature from […]
By IHE Graduate Scholar Molly Egilsrud, MA, MPhil Each June, the Church draws our attention and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This year, there is an added poignancy: Pope Francis’s October encyclical Dilexit Nos on this devotion proved to be the final teaching of his pontificate. The late Pontiff encouraged the Church to […]
By Lucia A. Silecchia “White smoke” was all that my friend’s text said. That was, of course, all that I needed to hear to know that the quiet afternoon I had planned in my office at Catholic University would no longer be so quiet. That text was followed by an invitation to everyone on campus to […]
By IHE Graduate Scholar Michael J. Bors “When an adventurer carries his gods with him into a remote and savage country, the colony he founds will, from the beginning, have graces, traditions, riches of the mind and spirit.” So wrote Willa Cather in Shadows on the Rock, her tale of early French-Catholic settlers in Québec. […]
By Lucia A. Silecchia Years ago, I read reports about a study positing that the American news media can bebiased toward reporting bad or negative news. What saddened me was the report’sassertion that negative articles are the ones most sought out by the public as reports ofbad news garner more clicks and public attention. Could […]
By MAHR student Veronica Smaldone Jakub Grygiel, professor in the Department of Politics at Catholic University, visited theMaster’s in Human Rights students in their Capstone course to share his perspective as an experton the history of American foreign policy and a former employee of the U.S. State Department. Dr. Grygiel explained that in the last […]
By IHE Graduate Scholar Marcela Duque When Mother Teresa heard the words of Christ on the cross — “I thirst” — she found both her vocation to serve Christ “among the poorest of the poor” and the spirituality that would shape the vocation of those who joined her as Missionaries of Charity. She heard in […]
By Lucia A. Silecchia Every year, when I flip my calendar to December, thoughts of Christmas overwhelm me with anticipation of the joys to come and the great gift of Christ’s Nativity. Yet, when I open that same calendar to the month of March, my initial thought has not been, “Yeah! The Solemnity of the […]
How should Christians approach suffering, especially in Lent when it takes on a renewed focus through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving? This question is even more important as our culture seems to see suffering as something to avoid at all costs or something that only distracts from our purpose, flourishing, or meaning. Lent, however, allows us […]
Zofia Joynt, an MA student and research intern at the Victims of Communism MemorialFoundation, will be one of our May 2025 graduates! She attended the Summit onInternational Religious Freedom, along with other students from the human rightsprogram: “As students of the M.A. in Human Rights program, my classmates and I had the opportunityto attend the University Partnership […]
By Lucia A. Silecchia “The seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake.” Thanks to the Disney franchise’s uncanny ability to generate memorable movie tunes and some time spent recently with a young “Little Mermaid” fan, this line keeps running through my mind. Like any good jingle, it has wormed its way into my ears. At […]
By William Saunders, IHE Scholar and Director of the MA in Human Rights Around the turn of the century, I met Saint Josephine Bakhita amid a forgotten and ignored conflict in a foreign land. However, this meeting requires a word of explanation since she died long ago in 1879. In the late 1990s, at the behest […]
