News & Events

On Tuesday (Aug. 18), Pope Leo XIV appointed two University of Notre Dame faculty members, Emmanuel Katongole and Clemens Sedmak, as consultors to the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development. University Trustee Kathryn “Katie” Koch, president and CEO of TCW, a global investment management firm, was also named a consultor.

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Many modern secularists and so-called enlightenment thinkers made the mistake of assuming that progress required a complete sterilization of the premodern world, that the more archaic practices and undesirable elements of the past somehow meant that all premodern values must be false or a hindrance to the future. Turkey is a prime example of this.

Read More about The Twilight of Constantinople and the New Dawn of Nostalgia

Before traveling to Turkey, I understood Greek-Turkish relations primarily through stories of conflict. Much of what I knew came from theology classes and conversations with a former professor who was himself a Greek Orthodox priest. Throughout this course, we discussed the population exchanges of the twentieth century and the changing identity of Hagia Sophia. Those conversations gave me an important historical foundation, but they also shaped the way I imagined the relationship between Greeks and Turks. I understood that Christians and Muslims had lived alongside one another for centuries, yet I assumed the wounds of history were too deep for genuine coexistence in the present.

Read More about Two Lamps, One Light: Religious Identity and Coexistence in Turkey

Scholars and practitioners from the University of Notre Dame and across the globe recently gathered in Rome to examine how religion can serve as a resource for democratic renewal amid authoritarian attempts to weaponize it. The convening aligns with larger work of the Notre Dame Democracy Initiative. 

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