Reference Book

I write with the exciting news that the Saint Vincent Center for Catholic Thought and Culture has published its first volume of Conversatio: A Journal in the Tradition of Catholic, Benedictine, and Liberal Education.

The idea of the journal is to provide a venue for Saint Vincent faculty to write for our community. The journal includes essays, poetry, and book reviews. As you can see from the contents below, the entries are academically serious and largely interdisciplinary in nature. They are the sorts of things one would expect a liberally educated person at a Catholic, Benedictine college in Latrobe to find informative, enriching, and—well—fun.  Authors come from all parts of campus. This has truly been a collaborative endeavor full of SVC charm. The journals contents include:

              Essays

Nathan Munsch, OSB – “Conversatio Morum: Hallmark of Benedictine Education or Invitation to a Way of Life

Jason Jividen – “Reading Xenophon’s Cyropaedia”

Robert Bufalini – “A Commemoration of Dante Alighiere: Dante’s Encounter with Saint Benedict in Paradiso XXII”

Aaron J. Sams and Kelsey S. Sams – “The Mind of Dorothy Sayers”

Michael Robinson – “Beyond Strength: The Cosmology of C.S. Lewis”

Daniel J. Heisey – “Mister Rogers’ Miniature Neighborhood”

Symposium on E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful

Lucas Briola – “A New Society within the Shell of the Old: Reflections on Small is Beautiful and an Integral Ecology”

Justin Petrovich – “Uncertainty is Beautiful”

Zachary G. Davis – “Of Course People Matter: A Response to Small is Beautiful from a ‘Modern’ Economist”

Book Reviews

Patricia Sharbaugh – Leon R. Kass, Founding God’s Nation

Matthew A. Fisher – Luigi Gioia, O.S.B., Saint Benedict’s Wisdom: Monastic Spirituality and the Life of the Church

Edward Mazich, O.S.B. – John Henry Newman, A Benedictine Education: The Mission of Saint Benedict and the Benedictine Schools

Daniel Vanden Berk – Stephen M. Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith

Reviews of Faculty Books

Steven Gravelle – Joseph Ogbonnaya and Lucas Briola, Everything is Interconnected: Towards a Globalization with a Human Face and an Integral Ecology

Sara Lindey – Jerome C. Foss, Flannery O’Connor and the Perils of Governing by Tenderness

Daniele Arcara – Michael P. Krom, Justice and Charity

Dana Winters – Eric J. Mohr and Holly k. Mohr, Mister Rogers and Philosophy: Wondering through the Neighborhood

Stacy Birmingham – Patricia Sharbaugh, Irrepressible Light: The Women of the New Testament

Ben Schachter – Bradley C.S. Watson, Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea

Poetry

Selected Poetry of Julia Snyder

Isabel Sicree, Nicole Fratrich, and Elizabeth Elin -  Winners of the 2021 Martin Luther King, Jr. Poetry Contest

Conversatio Volume IV continues the tradition of celebrating Catholic, Benedictine, and liberal arts scholarship and thought. This volume contains essays from Fr. Paul Taylor, Abbot Olivier-Marie Sarr, Eric Mohr, Timothy O'Malley, Guy Davids, Daniel Heisey, and Jerome Oetgen. The volume also contains poetry by SVC alumnus Edward Kunz as well as book reviews by Daniele Arcara, Nicole Buchek, Matthew Fisher, Sophia Geng, Jeannine Pitas, and Michael Robinson.  There is no better way to take the academic pulse of Saint Vincent than by reading Conversatio. We have much to celebrate!

Now available - the Telly Award-winning documentary about the Saint Vincent Fire of 1963!

Stunning original footage along with archival photos and narrative accounts by those who lived through the day of "fire and ice" allow Fire and Ice to trace the story of the devastating fire of 1963 and the subsequent rebuilding of the Saint Vincent Campus, in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the blaze. 

In addition to the documentary, the DVD also includes remarks by Br. Norman Hipps, O.S.B., college president; the entire raw footage of the fire from which the documentary was produced; and clips from the event held at Saint Vincent in January of 2013 honoring Fire Chiefs Ed Hutchinson of Greensburg and Earl Dalton of Latrobe, and the firemen who fought the blaze.