- Science, Ethics, and Responsibility
- Global Issues - Toward a Just Peace
- American Arts, Popular Culture, and Social Change
Global Issues Towards a Just Peace Seminar is based on the premise that the problems facing the world in the 21st century—from climate change, resource wars, and ethnic and religious conflict to poverty, discrimination and human rights — cannot be addressed by any one nation, religion, academic discipline or social movement, but by collaboration across boundaries of all kinds. How are these problems interwoven, and how can we craft workable solutions to them? How can actors (individuals, movements and institutions) from religious and secular communities, developed and developing worlds, science and the arts, politics and economics work together to address these complexities with compassion and creativity? And what is Notre Dame’s role in such collaboration? With the help of Notre Dame faculty from several disciplines, we will explore these knotty questions together and sketch some ways forward.
Academic Director
R. Scott Appleby is Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, where he also serves as the John M. Regan Jr. Director of the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. A historian who earned the Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (1985), Appleby teaches and writes in three areas: the roles of religious actors in violent conflict, the theory and practice of strategic peacebuilding, and the history of modern Roman Catholicism.
Appleby is the author of The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence and Reconciliation (2000) and Strong Religion (2003); editor of Spokesmen for the Despised: Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East (1997); and the co-editor, with Martin E. Marty, of the University of Chicago Press five-volume series on global fundamentalisms, which won the American Academy of Religion’s Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion. He is the director of the Notre Dame research and education project “Contending Modernities: Catholic, Muslim, Secular,” and co-director of a Social Science Research Council project on Peacebuilding, Development and Religion.
In recent public policy work, Appleby chaired the Task Force on Religion and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and co-authored its report, “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy” (April 2010). He is a member of the Religion and Foreign Policy Working Group of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Strategic Dialogue with Civil Society.
Appleby is the general editor of the Cornell University Press book series, “Catholicism in Twentieth Century America”; the author of Church and Age Unite! The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism (1992); and, editor or co-author of four additional volumes on U.S. Catholicism: Catholics in the American Century: Recasting Narratives of U.S. History (2012); Creative Fidelity: American Catholic Intellectual Traditions (2004); Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America (1995); and, Transforming Parish Ministry: The Changing Roles of Clergy, Laity, and Women Religious (1989).
In his capacity as a peace scholar Appleby is co-editor of the Oxford University Press book series, Studies in Strategic Peacebuilding, and of the OUP Handbook on Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding. As director of the Kroc Institute, he established the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, an international association of peace scholars and practitioners, and co-edited its first scholarly volume, Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics and Praxis (2010).
Professor Appleby serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Religion and The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, Appleby holds three honorary doctorates, from Fordham University, the University of Scranton and St. John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota.
