Thomas Landy, director of the Rev. Michael C. McFarland, S.J., Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross, was awarded the Presidents’ Distinguished Service Award by the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities (ACCU) for his personal service of exceptional quality to Catholic higher education.
Landy, who has worked at the College for over 18 years and is a lecturer in the sociology and anthropology department, founded and leads research for “Catholics & Cultures,” a web-based initiative to explore the religious lives and practices of lay Catholics in their particular cultural contexts around the world.
In 1992, he also founded “Collegium: A Colloquy on Faith and Intellectual Life,” which consists of 65 Catholic colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada, and has been sponsored by the ACCU since 2001. “Collegium” aims to help faculty at Catholic colleges and universities better understand the mission of Catholic higher education, and to prepare them to become leaders in advancing that mission in creative ways.
“The great value that Tom brings to this campus is that he is intellectually curious about a wide variety of things," said Margaret Freije, vice president for academic affairs and dean of Holy Cross. "He can engage faculty from different disciplines in conversations with him and then with one another, facilitating interdisciplinary conversations about questions related to the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, related to social justice, related to our commitment to mission, and related to our Jesuit heritage.”
Landy is editor of "As Leaven for the World: Catholic Reflections on Faith, Vocation, and the Intellectual Life" (Franklin, WI: Sheed and Ward, 2001), and, with Karen Eifler, "Becoming Beholders: Cultivating a Sacramental Imagination in the Classroom" (Collegeville: Liturgical Press, 2014). He has given keynote addresses for academic events and association meetings at more than 20 campuses in the United States and abroad and has been interviewed by the New York Times, Boston Globe, Chronicle of Higher Education, and America. He is the 2009 recipient of the John Henry Newman Medal, which honors exemplars of Jesuit Catholic education, from Loyola College in Maryland.
