Dr. Shannen Dee Williams is Associate Professor of History at the University of Dayton. She is an award-winning scholar of the African American experience and Black Catholicism with research and teaching specializations in women's, religious, and Black freedom movement history. Dr. Williams holds a B.A. in history with magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa honors from Agnes Scott College, a M.A. in Afro-American studies from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. The first Black woman elected to the Executive Council of the American Catholic Historical Association, Dr. Williams is a co-founder the Fleming-Morrow Endowment in African American History at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. In 2020, Williams also submitted successful proposals to establish the Mother Mary Lange Lecture in Black Catholic History at Villanova University and the Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. Prize through the American Catholic Historical Association and the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. A lifelong Catholic, Dr. Williams authored the award-winning column, The Griot's Cross, for the Catholic New Service from 2020 to 2022.
For most people, Whoopi Goldberg's performance as Sister Mary Clarence in Sister Act is the dominant interpretation of an African American nun and the desegregation of white Catholic sisterhood in the United States. In this presentation, Dr. Shannen Dee Williams will explore the story of America's real sister act: the story of how generations of Black women and girls called to the sacred vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience fought against racism, sexism, and exclusion to become and minster as consecrated women of God in the Roman Catholic Church. In so doing, she will turn attention to women's religious life as a stronghold of white supremacy and racial segregation, and thus an important battleground in the long African American freedom struggle. Dr. Williams will also illuminate Thomas Merton's connections to Black sisters' largely suppressed history.
Daniel P. Horan, OFM - True and False Love: Thomas Merton’s Spirituality of the Restless
Malgorzata Poks - The Geography of Lograire as Thomas Merton’s Ultimate Autobiography
Gordon Oyer - Re-Visioning a Fragmented World: Learnings through Merton’s Letters on Social Change
Deborah Kehoe: Thomas Merton and Southern Writing
BONUS episode: Sr. Elena Malits, CSC, an interview by Jonathan Montaldo
Gregory K. Hillis: What Does Thomas Merton Have to Tell Us About Catholic Identity?
2022-02-08 - Steven P. Millies: Our Crisis of Authority and Thomas Merton
Doug Hertler - Merton, You and Me: The Reality of Life in the Paschal Mystery
Paul Pearson - ”I love beer, and, by that very fact, the world.” The Humor (and Humanity) of Thomas Merton
Kathleen Tarr - From the Inner Frontier to the Last Frontier: Thomas Merton‘s Alaska Journey
BONUS episode: Scott Russell Sanders - Reading Merton in the Rain
BONUS episode: Andrew Prevot—”Contemplation in Times of Crisis”
Sophfronia Scott -The Radio of Nature: Merton‘s Tuning Into God Outdoors
Judith Valente - Why We Still Read and Need Thomas Merton: A Personal Journey
BONUS epidode: David Golemboski—"Absurdity and Imagination in a Time of Upheaval"
Lynn R. Szabo - Poetry as Spiritual Direction with Thomas Merton and Denise Levertov
Jim Forest - An Army that Sheds No Blood: Thomas Merton’s Response to War
Michael W. Higgins - Merton and David Jones: Visionaries Both
Kathleen Deignan - Overshadowed: Thomas Merton and the Cloud of Unknowing
BONUS episode: Robert Ellsberg — "The Gate of Heaven Is Everywhere"
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