Director of Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at Holy Cross to Analyze Anti-Semitism

William M. Shea, the director of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross, will give a talk titled “Why the Jews? A Reflection on Three Weeks at Yad Vashem” on Sept. 27 at 7:30 p.m. in the College’s Rehm Library. The talk is free and open to the public.

Shea will be talking about his own youthful experience with anti-Semitism in New York City, about the impression the Holocaust made upon him, and his reflections on Yad Vashem and Jews during and after his three week seminar there. His visit coincided with the struggle between Israelis and Hamas and Hizbollah.

Yad Vashem in Jerusalem is Israel’s official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust established in 1953 through the Memorial Law passed by Israel’s parliament. It is a study center for educators who wish to learn about the Holocaust as well as an architecturally stunning museum, two art galleries, an administrative center, a library and the Avenue of the Righteous Gentiles where trees are planted for a number of gentiles who hid Jews during the Nazi persecution of 1939-1945.

Shea graduated from the Columbia University School of Philosophy in 1973. He taught at Catholic University of America (1972-1980), at the University of South Florida (1980-1991), and at Saint Louis University (1991-2003). He was president of the College Theology Society (1984-86), and has been a resident fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center at the Smithsonian (1986-87) and of the Ecumenical Institute at St. John’s University in Collegeville (1999). He has been director of the Center at Holy Cross since 2003.

His book, Naturalism and the Supernatural, was published by Mercer University Press (1984), and he has edited several collections of papers including The Struggle Over the Past: Religious Fundamentalism in the Modern World for University Press of America (1994), Knowledge and Belief in America: Enlightenment Traditions and Modern Religious Thought for Cambridge University Press (1995), and Trying Times: Essays on Catholic Higher Education in the 20th Century for Scholars Press (1999). His book, The Lion and the Lamb: Evangelicals and Catholics in America, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2004. He has also published more than 50 essays and articles in scholarly and professional journals.

The event is sponsored by the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture. The Kraft-Hiatt Fund for Jewish-Christian Understanding underwrote his study trip.