FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
CONTACT: Cristina Diaz
Media and Community Relations Manager
215.753.3684
Philadelphia, PA- Chestnut Hill College’s Institute for Religion and Science will host Thomas J. Reese, SJ, Ph.D., senior analyst at the National Catholic Reporter on Sunday, April 17, at 1:30 p.m., at the College’s SugarLoaf Campus. Father Reese will deliver the lecture “Laudato Si’: Reflections on Pope Francis and the Environment.”
In the encyclical “Laudato Si’,” Pope Francis reflects on what science and theology can tell us about our responsibility for our common home, and how politics and economics are getting in the way of our fulfilling that responsibility. Father Reese will help us explore the radical changes in our lifestyle, economics and spirituality Pope Francis is calling us to make.
Father Reese was educated at St. Louis University, the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and at the University of California Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in political science. He was an associate editor of America magazine — where he wrote on politics, economics and the Catholic Church — from 1978 to 1985 and served as editor-in-chief from 1998 to 2005. He was senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center from 1985 to 1998 and 2006 to 2013.
His trilogy on the organization and politics of the church includes: Archbishop: Inside the Power of the American Catholic Church, A Flock of Shepherds: The National Conference of Catholic Bishops and Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church.
In 2014, Father Reese was appointed by President Obama to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, an independent, bipartisan U.S. federal government commission that reviews the facts and circumstances of religious freedom violations and makes policy recommendations to the President, Secretary of State and Congress.
The lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact Kathleen Duffy, SSJ, Ph.D., at 215.248.7197 or kduffy@chc.edu.
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About Chestnut Hill College
Celebrating more than 90 years of tradition and risk, Chestnut Hill College is a four-year coed Catholic college in the Ignatian tradition that offers a traditional liberal arts undergraduate program as well as accelerated undergraduate degrees, master’s and doctoral programs. The College has been rated by US News & World Report as among the best master’s universities in the North, as among the best Northeastern colleges by The Princeton Review, and has been classified as selective by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Since 1924, the College has offered a rigorous curriculum that provides students with a broad background in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. The goal of Chestnut Hill College has been to prepare students for life’s challenges by helping them to grow intellectually, spiritually, emotionally, and socially.
