Holy Cross Presidential Colloquia to Examine European Origins of Jesuit Education

WORCESTER, Mass. – Rev. Thomas Worcester, S.J., of the history department, and Rev. William Stempsey, S.J., of the philosophy department, will give a lecture, titled "European Origins of Jesuit Education," on Wednesday, Dec. 1 at 4:30 p.m. in the Rehm Library at the College of the Holy Cross.  Donald Brand, of the political science department, and Nancy Andrews, of the classics department, will serve as respondents.  James Kee, of the English department will be the moderator. For additional information on the talk, which is free and open to the public, please contact Pat Hinchliffe at 508-793-3869.

Fr. Worcester is a specialist in the religious and cultural history of early modern France and Italy.  He is the author of several journal articles and a book, Seventeenth-Century Cultural Discourse: France and the Preaching of Bishop Camus (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997). His current research on Jesuit history includes an article, "A Defensive Discourse:  Jesuits on Disease in Seventeenth-Century New France," forthcoming in French Colonial History (2005).  A member of the faculty since 1994, he recently accepted a contract from Cambridge University Press to edit The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, a collection of essays scheduled for publication in 2007.  Fr. Worcester is one of four curators of Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500-1800, an exhibition opening in April 2005 at the Worcester Art Museum.  He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge.

Fr. Stempsey has published on the philosophy of medicine, medical education, health and disease, the relation of contemporary philosophy of science to bioethics, the ethics of end-of-life decisions, and the ethics of organ transplantation.  He is the author of Disease and Diagnosis: Value-Dependent Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999) and editor of Elisha Bartlett’s Philosophy of Medicine (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, forthcoming).  Fr. Stempsey has organized faculty discussions on Jesuit education and a colloquium on the Ratio Studiorum (the Jesuit philosophy of education) in conjunction with the Rhodes Consultation on the Future of Church-Related College.  In fall 2004, he edited the first issue of a new journal, Fundamental Questions: A Journal of the Liberal Arts, titled "Jesuit Education and the Ratio Studiorum." In addition to three master’s degrees and a doctor of medicine degree, Fr. Stempsey holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Georgetown University.

This presentation is part three of the "Presidential Colloquia: Jesuit Liberal Arts Education and the Engaging of Cultures," a year-long series of presentations and discussions sponsored by the President’s Office and Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture. Each event will focus on a particular moment in Jesuit history and its connection to Jesuit educational aims today. In addition to facilitating an exchange of views, the colloquia also aim to further explore the principles of today's Holy Cross education within its Catholic and Jesuit traditions.