Academic Advisory Council

David Albertson, Ph.D., is associate professor of religion in the School of Religion at the University of Southern California. Before arriving at USC in 2007, he studied at Stanford University, University of Oxford, the University of Chicago and the University of Cologne. Albertson’s research has been supported by a Fulbright Association Fellowship, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Dr. Albertson also serves as the executive director of the Nova Forum for Catholic Thought.

Scott Appleby, Ph.D., is professor of history and the Marilyn Keough Dean of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. He previously directed Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism and the Keough School’s Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. The author or editor of fifteen books, Appleby examines the ways religions and religiously inspired actors shape and are shaped by modern ideas, institutions, practices and conflicts. Appleby has also written extensively about American religious history, Catholicism in the United States, and strategic peacebuilding around the world. Among other media appearances, he was called to offer public commentary on 9/11 and on the clergy sexual abuse crisis in Roman Catholicism. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences.

Dominic F. Doyle, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Systematic Theology at the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. Born in London, England, he holds a B.A. in Theology and Religious Studies from the University of Cambridge. After teaching literature and history at the British School in Colombo, Sri Lanka for two years, he earned an M.T.S. from Harvard Divinity School, followed by a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Boston College. His dissertation, directed by Professor Michael Buckley, S.J., was published by Crossroad and awarded a John Templeton Award for Theological Promise. Most recently, Dr. Doyle led the STM’s “Neuroscience Education for Theological Training” grant from the Science for Seminaries program sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science/Dialogue on Science, Religion and Ethics. He is currently working on a book exploring the history of the theological virtues, tentatively entitled Thematic Variations in Theological Virtue. A parishioner at St. Ignatius Church in Chestnut Hill, he is married with three children.

 Daniel K. Finn, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus of Theology and Clemens Professor Emeritus of Economics at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict. His books include Christian Economic Ethics (Fortress), Consumer Ethics in a Global Economy (Georgetown), and The Moral Ecology of Markets (Cambridge). He has received lifetime achievement awards from the Catholic Theological Society of America and the Association for Social Economics. He is a former president of those two professional societies and of the Society of Christian Ethics. For 25 years, he has been the Director of the True Wealth of Nations project at the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies. He has lectured in more than twenty nations in Latin America, Europe, and Asia and has led a successful affordable housing campaign among five cities in central Minnesota.

Kevin T. FitzGerald, S.J., Ph.D., Ph.D., is the John A. Creighton University Professor and chair of the Department of Medical Humanities in the School of Medicine at Creighton University. He received a Ph.D. in molecular genetics, and a Ph.D. in bioethics, from Georgetown University.  His research efforts focus on the utilization of the Humanities in medical education, on the investigation of abnormal gene expression in cancer, and on ethical issues in biomedical research and medical genomics. He has published educational, scientific, and ethical articles in peer-reviewed journals, books, and in the popular press. Fr. FitzGerald has given presentations nationally and internationally, and often been interviewed by the news media, on such topics as human genetic engineering, cloning, stem cell research, and personalized medicine. He has served on many advisory committees for healthcare organizations, the U.S. government, and international organizations, including having been a Corresponding Member of the Pontifical Academy for Life since 2005.

Dana Gioia is the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at USC and teaches in USC Thornton’s Arts Leadership and Musicology programs. An internationally acclaimed poet and writer, Gioia is the former California Poet Laureate and chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Gioia was born in Los Angeles of Italian and Mexican descent. The first person in his family to attend college, he received a B.A. and M.B.A. from Stanford and an M.A. from Harvard in Comparative Literature. For 15 years he worked as a businessman before quitting at 41 to become a full-time writer.

Roberto S. Goizueta, Ph.D., is a Cuban-American theologian who holds the Margaret O’Brien Flatley Chair in Catholic Theology at Boston College. He holds a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Marquette University. His academic research concentrates primarily in the areas of U.S. Latino/a theologies, Theology and culture, Theological aesthetics, and Christology. Dr. Goizueta has received several professional awards, including Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from Elms College and Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, from University of San Francisco. He is past-President of the Catholic Theological Society of America (2004-2005) and past-President of the Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians of the United States (1990-1991), an organization of which he is a co-founder. Dr. Goizueta is married and has three children.

Bryan Hehir, Ph.D., is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also the Secretary for Social Services in the Archdiocese of Boston. He served on the faculty of Harvard Divinity School beginning in 1993 as a professor of the practice of religion in society, and from 1998 to 2001 was the first Catholic priest to lead Harvard Divinity School. Prior to his years at Harvard, Fr. Hehir worked for two decades in Washington at what is now the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, including as director of its international affairs office, secretary of its Department of Social Development and World Peace, and a counselor for social policy. A prominent scholar on the theory of just war, Fr. Hehir is regarded as the principal architect of the bishops’ influential 1980s pastoral letters on nuclear weapons and economic justice. Fr. Hehir is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Catholic Theological Society of America. A 1984 MacArthur Fellow, he serves on the boards of several organizations, including the Arms Control Association and the Council for a Livable World. He currently serves on the Board of Trustees of Catholic Charities Boston.

Peter Steinfels, Ph.D., is University Professor Emeritus at Fordham University in New York and was senior religion correspondent of the New York Times from 1988 to 1997, where he also wrote “Beliefs,” a biweekly column on religion, until 2010.  In 2004, with Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, he founded the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, which they co-directed until 2012.  Earlier he was an editor at Commonweal and worked, in the 1970s, in the field of bioethics. He is the author of The Neoconservatives (1979, reissued 2013) and A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America (2003). He has contributed chapters to twenty books and published over 2000 articles in major newspapers and magazines as well as reviews in academic and general readership journals. He has been a visiting professor at Notre Dame, Georgetown, University of Dayton, and St. John’s University in New York City. He graduated from Loyola University in Chicago and holds a Ph.D. in modern European history from Columbia along with seven honorary doctorates. In 2003, he and Margaret O’Brien Steinfels received the Laetare Medal for service to the church and society from the University of Notre Dame.

Jan E. Stets, Ph.D., is a sociological social psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside, where she directs the Social Psychology Research Laboratory. She is past Director of the Sociology Program at the National Science Foundation, and past editor of the journal Social Psychology Quarterly. Dr. Stets is a micro-theorist who works in the areas of self and identity, emotions, and morality. She uses identity theory to understand individuals’ self-views, emotions, and moral sensibilities within and across situations. Her research primarily employs experimental and survey designs, and her analytic approach is quantitative. She is the author of nine books and 90 articles and book chapters.

Charles Taylor, Ph.D., is professor emeritus at McGill University. His writings have been translated into 20 languages and have covered a range of subjects that include artificial intelligence, language, social behavior, morality and multiculturalism. In November 2008, Dr. Taylor became the first Canadian to win Japan’s Kyoto Prize for arts and philosophy, an achievement marked by a ten-day lecture tour of Japan. He is a member of the Order of Canada.

Patrick Whelan, M.D., Ph.D., is associate professor of Pediatrics at UCLA, adjunct faculty in Molecular Microbiology & Immunology at USC, and lecturer in Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. He is a past president of the Los Angeles Pediatric Society, and helps organize the society’s summer program for high school students interested in careers in pediatrics. He is a pediatric rheumatologist and coordinates care at UCLA for children with autoimmune encephalopathy and other neuroimmune disorders. Dr. Whelan lectures in virology at USC and also teaches a Harvard undergraduate psychology course, “Music and the Mind,” on the evolutionary origins of musicality and the role of auditory processing in health and disease.

Emeritus Members

Margaret Archer, Ph.D. † was a renowned sociologist who served as professor at the l’Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland and president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. She was also Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom, where she founded the Centre for Social Ontology. Her most important contributions to social theory included advancing schools of thoughts centered on “critical realism” and “analytical dualism.” She was the first female President of the International Sociological Association (1986-1990).

Bernard McGinn, S.T.L., Ph.D., is the Naomi Shenstone Donnelley Professor Emeritus of Historical Theology and of the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He works in the history of Christianity and the history of Christian thought, primarily in the medieval period. He has written extensively in the areas of the history of apocalyptic thought and, most recently, in the areas of spirituality and mysticism. His current long-range project is a seven-volume history of Christian mysticism in the West under the general title The Presence of God, five volumes of which have appeared: The Origins of Mysticism; The Growth of Mysticism; The Flowering of Mysticism; and The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany, and The Varieties of Vernacular Mysticism.

Ernesto Rossi
European Publisher and Entrepreneur