I was awestruck when I met Andrew Greeley in my second year as an assistant professor at the University of Arizona. My mom was devoted to Father Greeley’s columns in the Catholic press. Through my high school years, my father (a convert) was struggling with the reforms of Vatican II. To every query or qualm my mother intoned “Father Greeley says ….” and then paraphrased the latest column. My wife’s father read the columns aloud to her mother as she cooked after church. The tableau repeated in millions of Catholic homes.

Andy became my sociological godfather. He taught me that the quantitative sociologist’s work is not done when the statistics are correct; the work is not done until we figure out what they mean and communicate that meaning to our readers. I am sure my other mentors gave me that message, too, but Andy persisted until I got it. Our collaboration evolved as I got up to speed. Continue reading →

One of the very first times I met Andy, I had to pick him up at his hotel and bring him to the Survey Research Center at UC Berkeley.  He and my advisor Mike Hout were planning to spend the day crunching numbers.  It was during that trip that they probably wrote the first draft of two, if not more, of their many co-authored pieces in the American Journal of Sociology or the American Sociological Review.

When he came out to my car and got inside, he looked at the clock and gave a little start, “I didn’t realize it was that late!”  (Andy hated to be late.)  I said, in true Berkeley-graduate-student-style, “Oh, don’t worry about it.  It is ten minutes fast.  I set it that way so that I’m on time.”  Andy’s response, “Well, that’s stupid!”

My clocks have been on time ever since. Continue reading →

The first time I ever saw Andy Greeley’s name was on the cover of a book resting on my Irish-descended grandmother’s coffee table. It was not a work of sociology.

Two decades later, during graduate school at the University of Arizona, I encountered some of Andy’s sociological work, which Carol has nicely highlighted.  I encountered Andy, too. (When I first mentioned meeting Andy to my mom, she smiled–Andy had been her graduation speaker at Mercy College some decades before. His influence spanned generations).

Despite his advanced years, and his “snowbird” identity of arriving in Arizona each year when the weather worked in his favor, Andy had a warm reputation inside the department. I occasionally heard rumors of weddings and baptisms he had done for students in past decades. This is no small thing, given that Andy’s sociology of religion had nearly as much verve aimed at the secularization theory of social scientists as that aimed at the tin-eared attitudes of Catholic bishops. I once saw Andy give a paper on Chicago’s ethnic tribes to our department’s weekly “brown bag,” a no-holds-barred forum for sociological work in progress. Andy was still on his game, and still held the audience’s interest, albeit using transparencies instead of the now-ubiquitous Powerpoint. Continue reading →

I received a letter out of the blue from Andrew Greeley sometime in the late 1980s commenting on a book I had just published. As a postscript, he asked me if I wanted to see a yet unpublished work of his which, of course, I did want to see. Not to put too fine a point on it, within a few months I had on the floor of my study a pile of Xeroxed manuscripts of works “to be published” with approximate dates of their publication. When I joined the faculty of the University of Notre Dame in 1988 he invited me over to Chicago for lunch. It was then that I discovered that however pugnacious Andy was in print, he was reserved in person almost to the point of reticence. From that time until his terrible accident in 2008 I was the recipient of newsletters, books at Christmas, occasional exchanges of emails. And a few chance meetings when I would spy him on campus for football games. Continue reading →

I am pleased to announce that our next few blog posts will be short reflections on Fr. Greeley from people who knew him.   To avoid any unnecessary confusion:  While most of these posts will show up under my byline (since I will be posting reflections sent or e-mailed to me), these are not my reflections and the actual writer’s name will be found in the post title.  I hope you enjoy the reflections.

Multiple media outlets are reporting that Father Andrew Greeley has died in Chicago at the age of 85. Father  Greeley was a prolific author of academic scholarship, fiction, and is often noted as an important in-house critic of the church. Greeley received his PhD from the University of Chicago and taught at the University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Chicago and at the University of Arizona. Among his many works, I have often consulted Can Catholic Schools Survive? and “The Demographic Imperative in Religious Change” but my favorite is The Catholic Imagination. Which of Father Greeley’s works has had the most impact on your work or on you as a person?

Ian Matthew Starks was born at home on April 30 at 5:31 PM.  He weighed in at 8 lbs. 3 ozs. and was 20 inches long. Continue reading →

Lex orandi, lex credendi is usually associated with the fifth-century theologian Prosper of Aquitaine and it basically means “the law of worship determines the law of belief.”  It is actually the shortened form of the phrase legem credendi lex statuit supplicandi.  Many theologians have interpreted the phrase in causative terms and therefore argue that “the law of praying forms or causes the law of believing.”  So prayer before belief, worship before doctrine.  Continue reading →

“We are called to establish with truth, justice, charity, and liberty new methods of relationships in human society.” So states Pope John XXIII’s seminal encyclical Pacem in terris (PT), which celebrates its 50th Anniversary this year. A variety of Catholic media outlets have capitalized on the anniversary to highlight some of the encyclical’s enduring hallmarks. Likewise, universities and peace-building organizations have hosted international conferences on the topics of war and peace. Notre Dame’s recent “Peace Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow” conference was one such gathering, which I was fortunate to attend. The conference aimed at facilitating an international, interfaith exploration of thematic peace and justice issues, especially those emerging in PT. I share a few reflections on the conference here.

The call to “establish truth, justice, charity and liberty” aptly captures a core conviction shared by the conference’s diverse presenters and attendees. Laity, clergy, Muslims, Christians, Westerners, Easterners, academics and practitioners, all brought experience working at a particular level of global society to promote peace, reconciliation efforts and conflict resolution. Those I encountered certainly merited the moniker a fellow attendee used for them: “artisans of peace.” Rather than a strict reading of PT in light of its historical context, speakers impressed me with their astute applications of its content to 2013 “signs of the times.” Worthy of particular mention were Fr. Paul Kollman’s insights about the tremendous power for today’s technologies, even as they accelerate human works, to displace human dignity. They can also result in our “ethical deskilling,” he argued, evidenced in the operation of drones in the Middle East from remote U.S. operating centers. With such technologies, “our ethics muscles become atrophied,” even as drone-operators sit at a computer in the comfort of an Arizona office building. Continue reading →

Over the last several years, considerable attention has been paid in the secular and religious media to the growth of Hispanics in the United States. Much information has come from the Pew Research Center and the US Census Bureau. From them, we have learned that the US Hispanic population grew 43% between 2000 and 2010, and that non-Hispanic whites will become a minority sometime after 2040. This Hispanic growth has the potential to radically change the face of America, both politically and religiously. Political commentators generally have stated that President Obama was re-elected in 2012, in part, because of strong Hispanic support.

Meanwhile we also learned the religious implications of Hispanic growth. The Protestant share of the population dropped between 1972 and 2010 but the Catholic share held constant because of immigration from Latin America and the larger families that Hispanics typically raise. An estimated one-third of all US Catholics are now Hispanic and this percentage is almost certain to grow in the coming decades. Continue reading →