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In the fortieth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with William T. Cavanaugh, Professor of Catholic Studies and Director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University. Cavanaugh begins by drawing from his most recent book, The Uses of Idolatry, a means of assessing the currents of contemporary culture. In a world which is often referenced as secular or post-secular, Cavanaugh contends humanity engages in the worship of all sorts of gods including politics and wealth. Cavanaugh then shifts to discussing his own formation as a scholar, beginning with his years as an undergraduate at the University of Notre Dame during which he switched his major form chemical engineering to theology. He began his career at the University of St. Thomas but returned to his hometown of Chicago when he was appointed Professor of Catholic Studies and a Director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University. In addition to being the author or editor of 18 books, Cavanaugh, along with Jim Fodor, has served as the co-editor of Modern Theology for approximately 20 years. Cavanaugh closes by discussing his understanding of the academic vocation, the virtues one needs to cultivate when committed to such a vocation, and the ways such a vocation and the Church can be of greater service to one another in the years to come.
- William T. Cavanaugh’s The Uses of Idolatry (Oxford University Press, 2024)
- William T. Cavanaugh’s The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (Oxford University Press, 2009)
- William T. Cavanaugh’s Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and the Body of Christ (Blackwell, 1998)
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
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Our guest is William T. Cavanaugh, Professor of Catholic Studies and Director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University. Thank you for joining us.
William T. Cavanaugh: Oh my pleasure, Todd.
Todd Ream: I’d like to open our conversation by asking you about your most recent book, The Uses of Idolatry, published in 2024 by Oxford University Press.
In Exodus 20:2-3, we read the first of Ten Commandments that the Lord entrusts to Moses and the Israelites, which reads, “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.”
What, if anything, do you believe that commandment indicates about the nature of God? And what do you believe that commandment perhaps indicates about the nature of humanity?
William T. Cavanaugh: I think one of the things it indicates about God is that we’re best off with one instead of many. Um, you know, the Babylonians thought that creation came from a war amongst the gods, and so there’s something sort of peacemaking to have one. Uh, and so I, I think that’s one of the things that it says about God. You know, it’s, it sounds bad to talk about a jealous God because that kind of sounds like humans that are jealous, and that’s not a good thing to be. But I think the basic idea behind having one God is peacemaking.
One of the things it says about us humans, I think, is that we have a tendency to try to make our own gods. Um, and, you know, we see the consequences of that in the fall story. You know, “Eat of this and you will be like gods.” And, and, you know, within a few chapters the world is full of violence, as it says in chapter six. So I think that’s part of what’s going on there.
But it also, there’s something kind of hopeful about it, too, because it tells us that human beings are naturally worshiping creatures, I think. You know, the Israelites could stand only six weeks of Moses’ absence before they demanded other gods to worship. And I think that tells us something not just about our tendency to deceive ourselves, but also something that, you know, we have this kind of natural, spontaneous desire to worship and to worship God. But oftentimes our worship kind of falls on other things, and that’s where we get into trouble.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Why, if at all, do you believe that commandment perhaps was placed first of all?
William T. Cavanaugh: It’s pretty foundational, right? Sorting out how many gods you got is kind of a that’s, that’s kind of a basic thing, right? Um, if you’re going to have a god, then finding out how many you got is pretty important and everything follows from that.
Todd Ream: Thank you. While graven images such as golden calves may not plague our North Atlantic modern culture in the ways that they plagued, say, the ancient Israelites, is the present relationship shared by God and humanity perhaps any less susceptible to threats posed by idols?
William T. Cavanaugh: Well, you know, we, we had our, our president presented himself as Jesus last week, and so it’s kinda, it’s kinda a pretty easy case to make these days that no, I mean, so I mean, even in the Bible, so in the Bible, idolatry is often and usually about the kind of bowing down in front of a statue of a another god, you know, Baal or something like that.
But it’s also about putting too much trust in the Egyptians and their military to come rescue you. And Paul says greed is idolatry. And Paul says their gods are their bellies in Philippians. And Jesus says you cannot serve God and mammon. So there’s, there’s a, a broader category of idolatry that already in the Bible is not just about worshiping other gods with names, but is already about loyalty.
You know, where, where do you put your ultimate loyalty? Um, and that can be a lot of different things that aren’t God. And so it, I think, really relevant today. Do you put your trust in your retirement account to save you? Um, you know, what do you kill for? You know, will you kill for the flag? You know, all kinds of questions like that. The question is as relevant as it’s ever been.
Todd Ream: Yeah. And that relevance, and you just mentioned, for example, you know, flags and retirement accounts, where do you see the presence of idols in our culture that may be more far-reaching than others, because they perhaps are numerous?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah. Um, I mean, I, in the book, I do a kind of interdisciplinary analysis of idolatry and look at Max Weber and Charles Taylor and the Bible and Augustine and so on. But I, I, I then kind of get down to case studies in chapter six and seven, and the two that I chose were chapter six is on nationalism and chapter seven is on consumerism. And I think there’s other thing, you know, you could very easily do one on celebrity. You could do one on technology. You can do one on racism. You know, there’s a lot of different sorts of idolatries out there.
But the two that I chose because they kind of structure, they’re not just about personal preferences but they’re kind of things that structure our social world, the world that we live in. The two that I chose are nationalism and consumer culture because that’s kind of the air that we breathe in a lot of ways.
Todd Ream: What practices, if any, do you think humans can invest in which could help them properly reorder their relationships with those components of the culture in which they otherwise invest as idols?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah. I mean, one practice I think is just being aware of the ubiquity of worship and, and being aware of uh, kind of being on guard to look for the, look for false gods. Um, and, and it should always be self-critique. Even in the Bible, it’s mostly about the Israelites’ idolatry and not about their, you know, the, the surrounding people. So it should mostly be self-critique rather than pointing the finger at others and saying, “Oh, you know, you don’t worship like we do, so you’re, you’re an idolater.”
Also some of the positive practices, I think, I end the book with a chapter on incarnation and sacrament. And so I kind of present sacrament as a way of seeing God in things without making a god of things. Uh, and so sacraments both kind of elevate and limit material reality. You know, Jesus becomes incarnate, God becomes incarnate in Jesus, and that means something important, that material reality is not bad in and of itself, and it’s not as if we should choose the spiritual instead of the material. We are material creatures. You know, as Madonna sang, we are living in a material world, and I’m a material girl. You know, we’re, we’re material creatures, and so that’s, material things are good. You know, God saw that it was good.
And there’s a way in which sacrament kind of appreciates the goodness of creation. And, you know, the Book of Wisdom talks about idolaters and, and gives a kind of sympathetic take. Well, they, you know, they, they get attached to material things because God made the world beautiful, right. In Wisdom chapter 13. Um, and so that’s, you know, that, that’s all good. And, and, and the sacramental point of view kind of sees the dearest freshness deep down things, as Gerard Manley Hopkins said, you know, that just the, the universe as kind of pulsing with the, the beauty of God.
Um, but at the same time, that means that it’s not God, right? I mean, the, the, the sacraments kind of give us access to God, but they’re not God. It’s always something uh, that it’s a, it’s a sign and it’s not, it’s not, you know, kind of God Himself. So you, so we’re meant to to see the beauty of, of God in things, but not to make things into an end in themselves. And I think sacrament can be a good discipline for that.
Todd Ream: Would you describe process, the discernment process that led you to pursue this book project?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah. Um, I think I’ve been interested since graduate school in this idea that we don’t necessarily live in a secular world. We live in a world where worship is still very much alive but it just attaches itself to other sorts of things. And so you know John Milbank’s book, Theology and Social Theory I, I think was a really important book for me in graduate school because it kind of makes this case that a lot of what passes for social science is just theology in disguise. Um, and so I’ve been interested in those kinds of things.
I wrote a paper in graduate school in, for a political science class on the idea that religion causes violence, which I was taking a class on liberal political theory, and you find, you know, John Rawls and Richard Rorty and people like this making this argument that liberalism is born because religion causes violence and needs to be marginalized. And that paper then became eventually a published article, and then became a book called The Myth of Religious Violence. And what I argue there is that, um people kill for all sorts of things that they treat as if they were gods, right. So there’s no, there’s, there’s nothing kind of inherently violent about what we call, what we tend to call religion that’s not also found in the things that we tend to separate off as being about politics and economics and so on.
And so I, that book was directed at a secular audience and but I told audiences for years that it’s theologically, it’s really about idolatry. And so there really wasn’t much theology in that book, so I came back and did the theology behind that argument, and that’s this book, The Uses of, of Idolatry.
Todd Ream: This book obviously has special relevance for theologians. But in what ways perhaps do you also believe this book has unique relevance to individuals called to the academic vocation, perhaps regardless of discipline?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah. I mean, I would hope that it’s not just theologians that read it. Um, The Myth of Religious Violence got a, a, a lot of readership outside of theology, and I’m kind of looking, I’m hoping that some of those people will read this one too. The first chapter is on Max Weber, and Max Weber is famous for saying that the modern world is disenchanted, right. The German word is entzauberung, the un-magicking of the modern world. And that’s most of what people know about Weber.
But I do an analysis of Weber and show that even Weber didn’t really think that the modern world was disenchanted in this sense. He actually says, you know, “Many old gods ascend from their graves and take the form of impersonal forces.” Uh, and he thought that these were things that ruled over us, and he was thinking in particular of the, the nation state and and money the, the market. And so so all of that is kind of trying to show the implicit theology, as it were. He talks about the modern world as being polytheistic. And so that’s an argument about Weber that I don’t think has been made before. And so I think, you know, scholars who don’t consider themselves to be theologians could find that argument interesting.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. I want to ask you now about your life and your calling to study and teach theology in that you earned an undergraduate degree in theology from the University of Notre Dame, a master’s degree in theology from the University of Cambridge, and then a PhD in theology from Duke University. And after completing your master’s, you served for two years in Chile with the Catholic Church.
Would you describe the discernment process that led you to accept theology would play a central role in how you were called to express your vocation?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah, it’s all pretty mysterious in some ways, but you know, who knows?
Todd Ream: Make for a good answer then.
William T. Cavanaugh: Uh, that’s right. But yeah, I mean, I started out at Notre Dame as a chemical engineering major, and because math and science were always my best subjects. Uh, but I took a theology class, and I just got hooked. So I became a theology major, but I always thought, “Well, what are you going to do with a theology major, you know?” Um, it’s not very, not very useful. So I always thought I’d go to law school.
Um, but junior year, I ran into Stanley Hauerwas and took a couple courses from him, and I told him I was thinking of going to law school, and he said, “Oh, lawyers are a dime a dozen.” He said, “You know, go to, go to graduate school in theology.” Um, and so that’s what I ended up doing. I wasn’t sure that I was going to do that, but when I got back from Chile that seemed like the next step, and I’m, and I’m glad that I did that instead of becoming a lawyer.
Todd Ream: So you mentioned Stanley Hauerwas, with whom I believe you then also studied with at Duke University.
William T. Cavanaugh: Right.
Todd Ream: And was by time also on the faculty had transitioned to serving on the faculty there.
Other mentors along the way that helped shape that discernment process for you and your calling?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah, I mean, he was, he was kind of the main one, but I had some other really good teachers along the way that I think made me think that this was a possible a possible vocation. And, and not necessarily in, in theology either. I took a class from Michael Francis in the politics department, the government department on international relations freshman year that just turned me around. Um, yeah, there were I had some, some really good uh, people in my life that encouraged me to, to keep on it. And so and, and a lot of the people that I was reading too, you know, Dorothy Day and Henri de Lubac and people like that, that just made me think, yeah, this is what I want to do.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. You served on the theology faculty at the University of St. Thomas for the first 15 years of your career.
In what ways did those years contribute to your understanding of the academic vocation and the work to which you were called?
William T. Cavanaugh: I had great colleagues at the University of St. Thomas. I was in the theology department there, and we had a big theology department. There were 30 faculty and it was a time of great growth. It was a time when every undergraduate had to take three theology classes and two philosophy classes, everybody. And they didn’t always do it willingly, but so it was a matter of kind of winning them over.
But I, it, it was a really kind of coherent, uh attempt to give students a notion of what theology is and how it all kind of fits together. So the first class, the 101 class, was basically Christianity from Genesis to Vatican II. So it was in a semester, you know, so you’re hitting the highlights, but the highlights are great. You know, the highlights of Christianity are, are really, really great things. And so the students, I think, got on board. You know, you teach it right, and the students found that really attractive. And so, I found that a really enriching environment to teach in.
And somebody told me, actually, when I was still in grad school, that you don’t learn theology until you have to teach it. And that I found to be absolutely true. So I would teach that course. I would teach a course in kind of intro to systematic theology, where we kind of used the creed as the backbone of the class. And, and that, I think, is really where I learned theology, when you’ve got to kind of teach it to undergraduates that don’t know anything about it but have questions, and you’ve got to stand and deliver. You know, you’ve got to come up with questions. And so I found that a really a, a really enriching uh, time of my life.
And I had great colleagues. We also had a couple really interesting programs there. Uh, a few of us started a homeless a, a sort of Catholic Worker model house for, um homeless Latina women and, and children which in some form is still going today. And we had a Latino leadership scholarship program where the scholarship recipients would kind of help out at, at, at, at the house, the Casa Guadalupana. And that was a really kind of enriching way of overlapping. I taught a course on the Catholic Worker Movement at, at the same time, and so that was a kind of enriching sort of overlap as well.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Most Catholic colleges and universities, the charisms that animate them reside in their origins with a religious order that sponsored them. St. Thomas is a diocesan school.
In what ways did you encounter that relationship and the charisms that animated the institution as being unique?
William T. Cavanaugh: Um, yeah. I mean, it’s one of, I think it was one of only, like, four diocesan universities. And now I think officially it’s not diocesan anymore. The archbishop is no longer the head of the board of trustees. Uh, and that kind of happened because there were some difficult relationships with the archbishop that we had, and I think the university decided this is not a viable arrangement.
But yeah, I mean, it usually, you’re, you’re absolutely right. Usually there’s a charism that the order has. Uh, here at DePaul, it’s the Vincentians, and that means something. Uh, it means St. Vincent de Paul, who was all about serving the poor, and DePaul has always been a poor kids’ school. We still have 38% of our undergraduates are first-generation college goers.
Um, and so that was something that wasn’t there at St. Thomas. But, um and so we kind of had to, had to look elsewhere and create our own charism as it were. Um, I think the current president of St. Thomas is doing a really excellent job at that.
His brother is the guy who started VeggieTales. Robert Vischer, who’s the president now is a legal scholar and one who takes his Catholicism very seriously, I think. I hear he’s doing a great, great job. But I love the VeggieTales connection. I can still sing the songs that you know, that we watched with our kids.
Todd Ream: Yeah. In 2010, you just mentioned that you now serve at DePaul University in the Chicago area, and you serve as a faculty member in Catholic studies as well as the director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology.
Would you describe the discernment process that led you from St. Thomas to DePaul?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah, I mean there are a number of factors. One is Chicago is where I grew up and my family is. And so it was that’s been nice to be close to family. You know, my brother went through pancreatic cancer and died, and I was able to see him all the time, and that was a, that was a really good thing to be here. Um DePaul has, has that charism of really kind of social justice and serving the poor and, and that Vincentian charism, and that’s a really good thing. Um, my teaching load was lightened, and so I have more time to do research.
Um, and the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology has been a really fun thing to be part of. So it’s a, it’s a, a research center on the Church in the Global South, so Africa, Asia, and Latin America. So we bring in people from all around the world. We do conferences. We’ve done conferences in Rio de Janeiro and Manila and Nairobi and Enugu in Nigeria and so on. Um, and and have lots of events on campus. So it’s been a, a, a really wonderful new kind of challenge for me to learn more about the Church in Africa and Asia. I knew something of the Church in Latin America from living in Chile during those years under the military dictatorship, living in a poor area of Santiago.
Um, but it’s been a real gift to to be part of this center. That, that was the trip to Ivory Coast that I was telling you about, or maybe that was before we started recording. But yeah, we do conferences. We did a conference in Ivory Coast last year, and my colleague, Stan Chu Ilo, has created this network of Catholic scholars from around Africa, and so we get together and, and people from all over Africa share their experiences and their scholarship, and that’s been really really great.
Todd Ream: That’s wonderful. Thank you. You’ve now served as a faculty member at two institutions with Catholic studies programs. St. Thomas is actually historically the location where the first Catholic studies program was established by Don Briel, and then you now serve on the Catholic studies faculty there at DePaul University.
In what ways do you think the gifts of these programs are uniquely poised to serve the universities where they’re housed, but also Catholic universities as a whole and the Church?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah. I mean, when, when Don was starting the Catholic Studies program at St. Thomas, I think the argument against it was, this is going to “ghettoize” Catholicism at Catholic universities. I don’t think that fear has been borne out, but, but one way of putting that a different way is that in an ideal situation, you might think that you wouldn’t need a Catholic studies program at a Catholic university because, you know, Catholic stuff would be going on, you know, in every part of the university, but that’s just not the way things have gone over the last few decades.
And so I think at DePaul, it serves as a place where we can do serious scholarship engaging the Catholic tradition from an interdisciplinary point of view, and it wouldn’t be going on at DePaul except in scattered form if we hadn’t kind of created this. Uh, I can’t take any credit for it, but I came in when it became a department. Um, it was a program for a while, and it was meant to kind of, you know, we advertised ourselves as the nation’s largest Catholic university, but, you know, it was also called the least Catholic university and the least Catholic university.
And so kind of gathering up the Catholic scholars that were scattered around the university and kind of making a program out of that, that then became a department, and then I was hired when it became a department. And I think it’s been a, a, a, a gift for it’s been a gift for me certainly, but it’s been a gift for DePaul. Uh, students can take courses in Catholic stuff that they couldn’t before. And I really love my colleagues. I think we’ve got some really great people, so that’s I think that’s been a good thing.
So, you know, yeah, in an ideal world that you wouldn’t have to talk too much about Catholic studies because Catholic things that kind of, you know, in the economics department, people would be taking, you know, Catholic social teaching seriously and that sort of thing. Uh, but we all know that that doesn’t really happen. This is one, one effort to kind of do that sort of thing.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Including The Uses of Idolatry that we talked about earlier, you’re the author or editor of 18 books. And when you look back over the arc of those efforts, what questions, if any, prove to be more pronounced than others, or perhaps what themes do you notice that are more pronounced than others?
William T. Cavanaugh: I guess my area of specialization, if I have one, is talking about the way in which what we do on Sunday connects with what we do Monday through Friday. Um, and so that’s what I’ve tried to do, and that’s why I’m interested in political theology and theology of economics and theology of violence and, and those sorts of things. So I’m trying to kind of make those connections explicit, and I guess that would be the kind of overriding theme that that I would see in my work.
So the, the first book, um came out of my experience in Chile, so Torture and Eucharist and it’s about this kind of competing, you know, performances of torture, which kind of scatters and atomizes the body politic, and Eucharist that brings it back together. So I talk about the Church’s response to human rights abuses under the military regime in Chile when I lived there and, you know, before and after. Um, and, and that kind of, in a lot of ways, that was my dissertation and, and my first book. And I did a lot of kind of ethnographic work interviewing people and so on after I went back to Chile and did some of that interviewing and so on. And so that kind of, I think, sort of set that trajectory for me, and I’ve been following up on that ever since.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Did you find your work on perhaps any one of those books more vocationally fulfilling than the others?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah, I think I, in a lot of ways, I think my first book is my, still my favorite, you know. Um, and in a lot of ways because it came out of my experience of living in a poor area of Santiago under the military regime. And I can see the story that I’m telling in my friends and other people that I knew there. And the, the kind of ethnographics, like, since then there’s been a lot of deliberately kind of ethnographic theology. Um, but at the time it was, it was unusual.
I found that really fulfilling to go back down to Chile for three months and, and travel around and interviewing, you know, bishops and torture victims and, you know, all kinds of other people. It’s my kind of most grounded book and in some ways I think the most kind of unique book because of that sort of ethnographic work.
So I think that’s probably, it’s hard to say what your favorite, I mean, asking about your favorite book is kinda like asking about your favorite child, so. Um, and so there’s a couple others that I think have kind of, you know, made a small impact in, in other ways, but I think that one’s still my favorite. I don’t know if that was the question.
Todd Ream: Thank you. So you serve as a faculty member, you serve as a center director, a scholar, but then you’re also co-editor of Modern Theology, because you need more to do, of course which is arguably the leading English language theology journal in the world.
For how long have you served as co-editor? And over the years of service, in what ways have the question changed that you think theologians are asking?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah, I can’t even say exactly. Um, I think it’s, it’s been at least 20 years, that I’ve been co-editor with Jim Fodor. Um, Jim Fodor, by the way, is just terrific to work with. He’s such a gentleman, and he’s so good. Um, so Jim and I have been doing this together for at least 20 years.
And what has changed? Yeah, I, I don’t know if I could say, I mean, I, I do think that we, speaking of ethnography, I do think when that we get more kind of grounded stuff that’s not just based on books, but is kind of based on, you know, empirical work. I think that’s becoming more common over the last 20 years. Um, I think stuff from the Global South certainly is more prevalent than ever. Uh, we get essays from all over the world.
And unfortunately, one of the recent changes is AI, and we’re now getting inundated with submissions. Uh, we’re getting more than one a day. Uh, it’s more, more than one submission per day so far this year. And some of them we suspect are AI generated, so we have to be really careful about that, and it makes everything worse. Uh, so uh, so that has not been a I’m, I’m not a, not a fan of AI. I tell my students it’s going to make you dumber and take your jobs, so.
Todd Ream: When you and Jim crack that code there and figure out how to discern that which is generated by AI or in large portion is, there are several of us out there who do comparable work who are very eager for you to share those.
William T. Cavanaugh: You can smell it though, can’t I mean, you can just smell it.
Todd Ream: Yeah.
William T. Cavanaugh: You know, there’s, it has a certain sort of antiseptic quality to it that, yeah, anyway.
Todd Ream: Yeah. For individuals considering whether to submit their names for consideration to serve as an editor of a leading journal in their field, regardless of their field, what advice might you offer in this season?
William T. Cavanaugh: Don’t do it. What are you, nuts?
Todd Ream: I didn’t about going into administrative work. I asked you about editorial work.
William T. Cavanaugh: Oh, Lord. Yeah. Um, one of the really nice things about it is that it makes me read journal articles, you know. Otherwise, I’m too busy to read journal articles unless I have to, right. Unless they’re something that I have to read for something I’m working on. But this makes me read journal articles in all sorts of different fields in all sorts of areas that I may have no expertise or interest in. Uh, and that kinda keeps me up on what’s going on more generally. You know, that’s a good thing. That’s an advantage.
Um, sending rejection letters to your colleagues is not . And we have to send a lot of them because we get many, many times more submissions than we could ever publish. But so that’s no fun.
But it does like for a younger scholar coming up, I think, you know, if you have the opportunity to, to do that, it’s an opportunity to get to know not just the field, but people in the field and kind of network. And so that’s a good thing.
And you can also think of it just in terms of service. It’s a worthwhile service to the, to the field that you’re doing.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Before we close our conversation today, I want to ask you about how you define your calling, the academic vocation as expressed to theology, and what practices nurture it, what opportunities per se advance it, and what forces maybe even threaten it too?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah in some ways it’s easier to start with the threats. I mean, I, I kind of feel like I got really lucky and hit the sweet spot for a Catholic lay theologian. Um, lay theologians were rare before me because it was all done by priests. And lay theologians after me might be rare for other reasons. Those reasons being that Catholic colleges are closing or they’re cutting back on their theology requirements and the humanities in general are taking a hit because of a really, I think, ill-founded and short-sighted idea that business and, and other fields makes more sense that’ll keep the lights on for colleges.
Um, so that I think is a, is a certain sort of threat that that theology is facing now, and I have to think really hard before encouraging a student to go on to study theology for those reasons. Um, so I think of, when I think of my vocation, I think, I think I got really, really lucky in a lot of ways.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. What intellectual and/or moral virtues do you believe theologians need to cultivate in order to flourish in relation to the work that they are called to do should they pursue it?
William T. Cavanaugh: Again, my mind goes right to the vices instead of the virtues, um.
Todd Ream: started by asking, idols about humanity? Uh, what do vices and a propensity to talk about them say?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah. Yeah. You know I mean, it’s just so much easier to talk about what academics are tempted to do and we have a tendency to claim that we know more about God than we do, you know, kind of grasping God in God’s essence instead of being more honest about our inability to know.
Um, you know, pride and the need for recognition and prestige and claiming that such and such is my argument, you know, then those are all kind of things that beset us. Um, Stanley Hauerwas used to say, “Having an original idea just means you forgot where you read it.” Um, and I think being a little more honest about that.
Uh, there’s a certain sort of cynicism about the academy and the Church that those become, you know, besetting uh, vices. But so whatever the opposite of those things are, so humility and honesty and hope is a theological virtue to counter cynicism. Those are the kind of things that we need.
Courage, another virtue to speak theologically when we’re encouraged to not speak theologically, to translate it into some putatively neutral secular language. Um, you know when we’re uh, when we’re speaking in the college of arts and letters or whatever to resist the temptation to translate theological language into something else to try to gain the, you know, respect of your peers. Um, I think those are things that an academic theologian needs.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. For our last question then today, I want to ask you, in what ways do you believe theologians can be of greater service to the Church in years to come? And in what ways do you believe the Church can be of greater service to theologians?
William T. Cavanaugh: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of different ways to go at that question. My mind as a Catholic goes to the relationship between theologians and bishops, and I think it would be really healthy if we talked to each other more than we do. I have been part of an initiative that involves both theologians and bishops getting together called The Way Forward. Um, and that’s been a really enriching thing.
If there were, if for years there was a kind of antagonistic relationship between academic theologians and the hierarchy in the Catholic Church. Uh, and I think a lot of that has kind of dissipated and I think that’s a really good thing. But it seems now like bishops are more willing to call on the expertise of academic theologians, even laypeople like me.
Um, and at the same time, I think there’s more of an openness from the academic side to listen to what the bishops are saying about what people need uh, what the people in the pews really need from us. Uh, and that’s been a really positive thing. And in some ways I can credit Pope Francis and now Pope Leo for opening some of those doors, I think.
Todd Ream: . Thank you. Thank you very much.
Our guest has been William T. Cavanaugh, Professor of Catholic Studies and Director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology at DePaul University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
William T. Cavanaugh: Oh, my pleasure, Todd. It’s been fun.
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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
