- Arlington, MA
- 857-222-6955
- College of the Holy Cross, Religious Studies, Post-Docadd
- Philosophy, Anthropology, Anthropology of Religion, Social Anthropology, Anthropology of Media, Romanian Studies, and 9 moreHungarian Studies, Eastern European Studies, Central and Eastern Europe, Phenomenology, Tourism and Hospitality Education, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Cultural Heritage, Heritagization, and Heritagisationedit
In April 2023, 30 priests and pastors, dressed in heavy boots and military fatigues, gathered in the sanctuary of Kyiv's Saint Sophia Cathedral for a special ceremony. As they bent their heads to receive the priest's blessing, the group... more
In April 2023, 30 priests and pastors, dressed in heavy boots and military fatigues, gathered in the sanctuary of Kyiv's Saint Sophia Cathedral for a special ceremony. As they bent their heads to receive the priest's blessing, the group of clergy from across Ukraine's Christian denominations-not only Orthodox but Protestant and Catholic, too-became the first ever class of chaplains inducted into Ukraine's armed forces. Religious leaders have ministered in the armed forces for years, even though the Ukrainian military had no official chaplaincy.
Research Interests:
Given Michel Foucault’s immense influence on anthropology, assessing his account of pastoral power is an inescapable task for anthropologists who aim to make ‘pastors and priests’ into distinct objects of ethnographic inquiry. I develop a... more
Given Michel Foucault’s immense influence on anthropology,
assessing his account of pastoral power is an inescapable task for
anthropologists who aim to make ‘pastors and priests’ into
distinct objects of ethnographic inquiry. I develop a variation on
this Special Issue’s theme by returning to Foucault’s Security,
Territory, Population and Omnes et Singulatim, and also the essay,
‘The Subject and Power’ to consider what Foucault had to say
about pastoral institutions within the genealogy of pastoral
power outlined in these works. In the first two sections, I propose
taking up a speculative and associational mien in response to
Foucault’s provocative claims about the declining vitality of
pastoral institutions in the modern West. In the third section, I
sketch out how the questions generated through this interpretive
practice can help frame an ethnographic inquiry towards
understanding the problems and purposes cultural professionals
embrace and develop through their involvement in a Hungarian
government-funded effort to canonise ‘Transylvania’s good
pastor’, the deceased bishop a Catholic archdiocese in Romania,
Márton Áron (1896–1980). In the conclusion, I identify the
contemporary politics of Catholic memory in the wake of the
Second Vatican Council as a blind spot in Foucault’s work, a
lacuna akin to his lack of analytical interest in other major
twentieth-century political trends.
assessing his account of pastoral power is an inescapable task for
anthropologists who aim to make ‘pastors and priests’ into
distinct objects of ethnographic inquiry. I develop a variation on
this Special Issue’s theme by returning to Foucault’s Security,
Territory, Population and Omnes et Singulatim, and also the essay,
‘The Subject and Power’ to consider what Foucault had to say
about pastoral institutions within the genealogy of pastoral
power outlined in these works. In the first two sections, I propose
taking up a speculative and associational mien in response to
Foucault’s provocative claims about the declining vitality of
pastoral institutions in the modern West. In the third section, I
sketch out how the questions generated through this interpretive
practice can help frame an ethnographic inquiry towards
understanding the problems and purposes cultural professionals
embrace and develop through their involvement in a Hungarian
government-funded effort to canonise ‘Transylvania’s good
pastor’, the deceased bishop a Catholic archdiocese in Romania,
Márton Áron (1896–1980). In the conclusion, I identify the
contemporary politics of Catholic memory in the wake of the
Second Vatican Council as a blind spot in Foucault’s work, a
lacuna akin to his lack of analytical interest in other major
twentieth-century political trends.
Research Interests:
Despite Ukraine’s efforts to professionalize the military chaplaincy, when Muslim soldiers don’t disclose their faith, it makes the job of the Muslim chaplain not only complicated but occasionally urgent.
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Neutrality or solidarity? In Ukraine, faith-based humanitarian workers face a fundamental question about the nature of their work
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Romanian filmmaker Cristian Mungiu takes a hammer to true-to-life events and then puts the pieces back together again. R.M.N. is a kaleidoscopic allegory of all of Western civilization.
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The Dr. Ambedkar School is working to empower intellectual and political leaders from within Hungary’s Roma community, based on the Indian social reformer’s example. (Christian Science Monitor, September 6, 2023)
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As hungary’s right-wing strongman Viktor Orbán begins his fourth term as prime minister, a younger generation of Christian leaders is taking up the mantle of resistance. They face long odds: their attempts to organize against... more
As hungary’s right-wing strongman Viktor Orbán begins his fourth term as prime minister, a younger generation of Christian leaders is taking up the mantle of resistance. They face long odds: their attempts to organize against authoritarianism are complicated both by infighting and by the government’s dirty tricks.
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In one of the most intriguing overseas trips of his papacy,
Pope Francis has decided to return to a country taking
what many regard as a controversial and divisive path of
social and political reform.
Pope Francis has decided to return to a country taking
what many regard as a controversial and divisive path of
social and political reform.
Research Interests:
Meeting in a school auditorium in Legnica, Poland, the weeklong intensive training prepared Ukrainian actors to work with refugees in Poland and others in Ukraine who are struggling with the social and psychological wounds of war.
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The pope should make nuclear energy and the environment key talking points if and when he actually makes the trip.
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In run-up to Pope Francis’ visit to Budapest next month, revelations by Father András Hodászd have some asking if an influencer can have any “real” influence on Church.
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The sounds of farmers harvesting potatoes with horse-drawn plows have been heard across Transylvania for generations. But heavy, intense rainfall has caused rivers to overflow, destroying thousands of acres of potato fields.
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Some activists in Hungary have reacted to an anti-L.G.B.T.Q. law by calling for an investigation of the clergy sexual abuse crisis. But turning the crisis into a political football may backfire.
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In 2019, Pope Francis, leader of the global Catholic Church, celebrated an outdoor Mass at the Our Lady of Csíksomlyó Hungarian national shrine in Romania. When the Franciscan Order that runs the shrine published renovation plans for the... more
In 2019, Pope Francis, leader of the global Catholic Church, celebrated an outdoor Mass at the Our Lady of Csíksomlyó Hungarian national shrine in Romania. When the Franciscan Order that runs the shrine published renovation plans for the altar where the pope would appear, the Facebook post received over 800 outraged comments, including one man who asked, “How can such a beautiful Hungarian symbol, so perfectly integrated into the landscape, be humiliated like this?” By situating these expressions of outrage in the history of Eastern European material politics, I argue that the aesthetic value the commentators were defending – a locally integrated built environment – is actually the product of a complex history of the appropriation and reappropriation of material forms that binds the Csíksomlyó shrine into the material politics of the right-wing Hungarian nation-state.
Research Interests:
I examine Hungary’s Catholic arts industry and its material practices of cultural production: the institutions and professional disciplines through which devotional material objects move as they become embedded in political processes of... more
I examine Hungary’s Catholic arts industry and its material practices of cultural production: the institutions and professional disciplines through which devotional material objects move as they become embedded in political processes of national construction and contestation. Ethnographic data come from thirty-six months of fieldwork in Hungary and Transylvania, and focuses on three museum and gallery exhibitions of Catholic devotional objects. Building on critiques of subjectivity- and
embodiment-focused research, I highlight how the institutional legacies of state socialism in Hungary and Romania inform a national politics of Catholic materiality. Hungarian cultural institutions and intellectuals have been drawn to work with Catholic art because Catholic material culture sustains a meaningful presence across multiple scales of political contestation at the local, regional, and state levels. The movement of Catholic ritual objects into the zone of high art and cultural preservation
necessitates that these objects be mobilized for use within the political agendas of state-embedded institutions. Yet, this mobilization is not total. Ironies, confusions, and contradictions continue to show up in Transylvanian Hungarians’ historical memory, destabilizing these political uses.
embodiment-focused research, I highlight how the institutional legacies of state socialism in Hungary and Romania inform a national politics of Catholic materiality. Hungarian cultural institutions and intellectuals have been drawn to work with Catholic art because Catholic material culture sustains a meaningful presence across multiple scales of political contestation at the local, regional, and state levels. The movement of Catholic ritual objects into the zone of high art and cultural preservation
necessitates that these objects be mobilized for use within the political agendas of state-embedded institutions. Yet, this mobilization is not total. Ironies, confusions, and contradictions continue to show up in Transylvanian Hungarians’ historical memory, destabilizing these political uses.
Research Interests:
Media use is ubiquitous in much of social and cultural life, and religion is no exception. Religious institutions both large and small broadcast their services or auxiliary programming on radio, television, and the internet, and in the... more
Media use is ubiquitous in much of social and cultural life, and religion is no exception. Religious institutions both large and small broadcast their services or auxiliary programming on radio, television, and the internet, and in the process some of their leaders become celebrities known as much for their appearance through mediated channels as for their doctrines or ritual practices. These actors and institutions also produce specialized films, music, books, toys, apparel, and all kinds of material culture that have become part and parcel of people's everyday life. Mediatic forms are also increasingly important to how lay Catholics build a sense of their religious identity, and by making and circulating digital images on social media, they participate in dispersed religious communities and craft new visions of public devotional life. Scholars disagree on exactly when media's ascendancy began to reshape religious life, 1 but whatever religion may have been before media became so central to its workings, clearly it is now irrevocably different because of it. For many, this perceived difference is, in fact, what makes mediated religion so appealing. Increasing access to media technologies has effectively mediatized religious identities, practices, and communities as much as any other aspect of contemporary life. It is thus incumbent on scholars of religion to explore the intersection of religion and media in both the public sphere and people's interior lives. A comprehensive review of the literature on media and religion is beyond the scope of this essay, especially because several have already been attempted
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In this ethnographic study of Radio Maria Transylvania, a fast-growing Catholic media organization in Romania, I examine how, why, and under what broader social circumstances employees and volunteers display their evangelical work.... more
In this ethnographic study of Radio Maria Transylvania, a fast-growing Catholic media organization in Romania, I examine how, why, and under what broader social circumstances employees and volunteers display their evangelical work. Studies of ambient faith suggest that European secular norms prescribe evangelical labor’s invisibility. While Radio Maria Transylvania recognizes these norms, the notion that the organization “runs on love” indexes a broader effort to synthesize secular holistic management theory and Catholic ethics in service of a post-bureaucratic personal and caring workplace. This distinctive concern with bureaucracy demonstrates how Catholic media evangelism is refracted into a post-socialist context that embeds secularism in bureaucratic social forms. Simultaneously, the organization’s workers and volunteers embrace seemingly older bureaucratic values like punctuality and regimentation. Not simply an anachronism, Radio Maria Transylvania’s volunteers and workers use ideas about evangelical work to negotiate the incongruities entailed by prevailing views about gender, family, and labor.
Research Interests:
This article describes emerging structures of power and informal workers’ everyday resistance in the context of a European Union ecotourism project in the post-industrial Romanian mining town of Bălan. In 2011 and 2012, a public-private... more
This article describes emerging structures of power and informal workers’ everyday resistance in the context of a European Union ecotourism project in the post-industrial Romanian mining town of Bălan. In 2011 and 2012, a public-private partnership began demolishing Bălan’s mine buildings, a project that exemplifies neoliberal capitalist urban renewal. The project also featured a new hybrid of urban reconstruction and urban mining: the extraction and resale of metal from anthropogenic supplies in wasted post-industrial buildings. Unemployed industrial workers, whom I call “informal urban miners,” collected and sold metal alongside formal workers. Of primary importance to informal urban miners was attuning their skill and mode of communication to the demolition company’s workers and heavy machinery. Although at first glance it looked like informal urban mining facilitated their integration into Bălan’s neoliberal economy, I argue that this work offered unexpected opportunities for transgressing project organizers’ authority. Urban anthropologists often overlook such practices when, as in the case of informal urban mining, the differences between resistance and market activity are subtle and contingently negotiated. Informal urban miners’ skill and communicative practices were complexly embedded in emerging structures of power in the post-industrial city: simultaneously a necessity of the working environment, a way of sustaining a livelihood, and a way to transgress the very order that produces and reproduces such wasted urban environments.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
By overlooking the history of Catholic thought, anthropologists have made contemporary processes for negotiating intellectual authority in the Catholic Church into a lacuna in the anthropology of Christianity. I develop this claim by... more
By overlooking the history of Catholic thought, anthropologists have made contemporary processes for negotiating intellectual authority in the Catholic Church into a lacuna in the anthropology of Christianity. I develop this claim by examining an ethnographic memoir called The Secret of Csíksomlyó by Árpád Daczó, a widely known contemporary Transylvanian Hungarian Catholic intellectual. Daczó blends autobiography and ethnography to argue that the Hungarian Virgin Mary is a Christianized pagan moon goddess. Halfway through, Daczó switches genres to propositional theology and defends himself to the magisterium, the Church’s institutional guarantor of orthodoxy. I situate Daczó’se ffort to anticipate his critics in the history of Catholic-Protestant theological polemics, which helped make propositional theology into the Catholic Church’s privileged language for investigating heresy. By placing Daczó’s use of propositional theology against the backdrop of contemporary Catholic theologians’ debates about the magisterium’s authority, I challenge anthropological assumptions about the social significance of propositional belief.
Research Interests:
This essay presents an ethnographic account of two divorced Catholic women's memories of praying to the Virgin Mary while seeking illegal abortions under the Romanian socialist regime. These women's stories focused on troubling memories... more
This essay presents an ethnographic account of two divorced Catholic women's memories of praying to the Virgin Mary while seeking illegal abortions under the Romanian socialist regime. These women's stories focused on troubling memories of being in love, reflections that were retrospectively shaped by divorce. Drawing on Sigmund Freud's notion of the uncanny, I call these recollections uncanny memories of the self in love. Uncannily remembering one's self in love combines experiential self-examination and ethical assessment of actions. The notion of the uncanny self in love thus helps bridge the divide between experience-and action-oriented approaches to lived ethics. I argue that the ethical significance of the Virgin Mary's actions depended on my acquaintances' approach to love. For one woman seeking to stay estranged from her ex-husband, the Virgin Mary's actions accentuated his ethical imma-turity. My other acquaintance harbored more ambivalent feelings toward her ex-husband; for her, talking about the Virgin Mary helped her relativize feelings of ethical indignation. As a core implication of this argument, I urge greater awareness of the problematic tendency to include the need for greater awareness of tendencies in theories of lived ethics to reify socially situated perspectives on love.
Research Interests:
An interview with Marc Roscoe Loustau, Editor of the new peer-reviewed publication, the Journal of Global Catholicism.
Research Interests:
Anthropologists have begun to challenge the consensus that sainthood is not an operative factor in Charismatic Christianity, opening up space to re-examine how ritual and narrative shape habitual... more
Anthropologists have begun to challenge the consensus that
sainthood is not an operative factor in Charismatic Christianity,
opening up space to re-examine how ritual and narrative shape
habitual religious sensibilities. Through an ethnographic study of
Transylvanian Catholic Charismatics’ search for miracles to aid a
deceased Bishop’s canonization, I argue that canonization is driven
by a form of adaptive ritualization and storytelling, which I call
‘transcendentally oriented improvisation’. In this mode, ritualization
and storytelling are existential strategies by which subjects extrapolate
styles of action and discourse into new situations to transcend
disordered being-in-the-world. By engaging in improvisation, my
acquaintances renewed a sense of existential potentiality put at risk.
Studying transcendentally oriented improvisation draws attention to
risk and indeterminacy as central aspects of the lived experience of
canonization and other divine mediations. Transylvanian Charismatic
Catholics’ involvement in canonization is also evidence that the
global Charismatic movement is now integrating into mainstream
Catholicism. Movement, memorialization, authority, and religious
experience are the central points of contention shaping the outcome
of this process.
sainthood is not an operative factor in Charismatic Christianity,
opening up space to re-examine how ritual and narrative shape
habitual religious sensibilities. Through an ethnographic study of
Transylvanian Catholic Charismatics’ search for miracles to aid a
deceased Bishop’s canonization, I argue that canonization is driven
by a form of adaptive ritualization and storytelling, which I call
‘transcendentally oriented improvisation’. In this mode, ritualization
and storytelling are existential strategies by which subjects extrapolate
styles of action and discourse into new situations to transcend
disordered being-in-the-world. By engaging in improvisation, my
acquaintances renewed a sense of existential potentiality put at risk.
Studying transcendentally oriented improvisation draws attention to
risk and indeterminacy as central aspects of the lived experience of
canonization and other divine mediations. Transylvanian Charismatic
Catholics’ involvement in canonization is also evidence that the
global Charismatic movement is now integrating into mainstream
Catholicism. Movement, memorialization, authority, and religious
experience are the central points of contention shaping the outcome
of this process.
Research Interests:
Research Interests: European History, Cultural History, Sociology, Rural Sociology, Eastern European Studies, and 14 moreLatin American Studies, Anthropology, Folklore, Aesthetics, Catholic Studies, Practical theology, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Oral history, Music and identity, Film and Media Studies, Fine Arts, Oral History, Practical Theology, and global catholicism
I examine Hungary’s Catholic arts industry and its material practices of cultural production: the institutions and professional disciplines through which devotional material objects move as they become embedded in political processes of... more
I examine Hungary’s Catholic arts industry and its material practices of cultural production: the institutions and professional disciplines through which devotional material objects move as they become embedded in political processes of national construction and contestation. Ethnographic data come from thirty-six months of fieldwork in Hungary and Transylvania, and focuses on three museum and gallery exhibitions of Catholic devotional objects. Building on critiques of subjectivity- and embodiment-focused research, I highlight how the institutional legacies of state socialism in Hungary and Romania inform a national politics of Catholic materiality. Hungarian cultural institutions and intellectuals have been drawn to work with Catholic art because Catholic material culture sustains a meaningful presence across multiple scales of political contestation at the local, regional, and state levels. The movement of Catholic ritual objects into the zone of high art and cultural preservation...
Research Interests:
This article describes emerging structures of power and informal workers’ everyday resistance in the context of a European Union ecotourism project in the post-industrial Romanian mining town of Bălan. In 2011 and 2012, a public-private... more
This article describes emerging structures of power and informal workers’ everyday resistance in the context of a European Union ecotourism project in the post-industrial Romanian mining town of Bălan. In 2011 and 2012, a public-private partnership began demolishing Bălan’s mine buildings, a project that exemplifies neoliberal capitalist urban renewal. The project also featured a new hybrid of urban reconstruction and urban mining: the extraction and resale of metal from anthropogenic supplies in wasted post-industrial buildings. Unemployed industrial workers, whom I call “informal urban miners,” collected and sold metal alongside formal workers. Of primary importance to informal urban miners was attuning their skill and mode of communication to the demolition company’s workers and heavy machinery. Although at first glance it looked like informal urban mining facilitated their integration into Bălan’s neoliberal economy, I argue that this work offered unexpected opportunities for transgressing project organizers’ authority. Urban anthropologists often overlook such practices when, as in the case of informal urban mining, the differences between resistance and market activity are subtle and contingently negotiated. Informal urban miners’ skill and communicative practices were complexly embedded in emerging structures of power in the post-industrial city: simultaneously a necessity of the working environment, a way of sustaining a livelihood, and a way to transgress the very order that produces and reproduces such wasted urban environments.
Research Interests:
This essay presents an ethnographic account of two divorced Catholic women’s memories of praying to the Virgin Mary while seeking illegal abortions under the Romanian socialist regime. These women’s stories focused on troubling memories... more
This essay presents an ethnographic account of two divorced Catholic women’s memories of praying to the Virgin Mary while seeking illegal abortions under the Romanian socialist regime. These women’s stories focused on troubling memories of being in love, reflections that were retrospectively shaped by divorce. Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny, I call these recollections uncanny memories of the self in love. Uncannily remembering one’s self in love combines experiential self-examination and ethical assessment of actions. The notion of the uncanny self in love thus helps bridge the divide between experienceand action-oriented approaches to lived ethics. I argue that the ethical significance of the Virgin Mary’s actions depended on my acquaintances’ approach to love. For one woman seeking to stay estranged from her ex-husband, the Virgin Mary’s actions accentuated his ethical immaturity. My other acquaintance harbored more ambivalent feelings toward her ex-husband; for her, talking about the Virgin Mary helped her relativize feelings of ethical indignation. As a core implication of this argument, I urge greater awareness of the problematic tendency to include the need for greater awareness of tendencies in theories of lived ethics to reify socially situated perspectives on love.
Research Interests:
ABSTRACT By overlooking the history of Catholic thought, anthropologists have made contemporary processes for negotiating intellectual authority in the Catholic Church into a lacuna in the anthropology of Christianity. I develop this... more
ABSTRACT By overlooking the history of Catholic thought, anthropologists have made contemporary processes for negotiating intellectual authority in the Catholic Church into a lacuna in the anthropology of Christianity. I develop this claim by examining an ethnographic memoir called The Secret of Csíksomlyó by Árpád Daczó, a widely known contemporary Transylvanian Hungarian Catholic intellectual. Daczó blends autobiography and ethnography to argue that the Hungarian Virgin Mary is a Christianized pagan moon goddess. Halfway through, Daczó switches genres to propositional theology and defends himself to the magisterium, the Church's institutional guarantor of orthodoxy. I situate Daczó's effort to anticipate his critics in the history of Catholic-Protestant theological polemics, which helped make propositional theology into the Catholic Church's privileged language for investigating heresy. By placing Daczó's use of propositional theology against the backdrop of contemporary Catholic theologians’ debates about the magisterium's authority, I challenge anthropological assumptions about the social significance of propositional belief.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Why do post-pilgrimage slideshows help Transylvanian Hungarian Catholics perform domestic devotional labor? There is growing interest in breaking open pilgrimage research, and scholars have recently begun studying rituals of... more
Why do post-pilgrimage slideshows help Transylvanian Hungarian Catholics perform domestic devotional labor? There is growing interest in breaking open pilgrimage research, and scholars have recently begun studying rituals of return—including pilgrims’ practice of using photographs to narrate their journeys after returning home. I contribute to this effort by sketching out the general characteristics of Transylvanian Hungarian Catholics’ post-pilgrimage slideshows about the Medjugorje shrine. I then give a detailed description of an exemplary case: a married couple’s presentation for their children gathered around the family computer. Although we might expect pilgrims to routinize stories and images from a chaotic journey, many slideshows were quite disorganized and impressionistic. This disorganization helped travelers tailor their stories to the diverse spiritual interests of guests in a changing Transylvanian Hungarian Catholic religious landscape. Family members’ conversations al...
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Conference Paper, The Topos of Justice: 13th Annual International Young Researchers Conference, The Havighurst Center for Russian & Post-Soviet Studies, Miami University, Oxford, OH, March 2014
Conference Paper, The Lived History of Vatican II, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, April 2014
Conference Paper, Heritage and Healthy Societies, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, May 2014.
Conference Paper, American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington, DC, November 2014
Conference Paper, American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, San Diego, CA, November 2014
We invite proposals for articles to be included in a Special Issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism that use the concept of “pilgrimage palimpsests” to raise questions about narrative, memory, and meaning in the context of multi-sited... more
We invite proposals for articles to be included in a Special Issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism that use the concept of “pilgrimage palimpsests” to raise questions about narrative, memory, and meaning in the context of multi-sited pilgrimage research.
Research Interests:
We invite submissions of abstracts for a panel at the 2017 Society for the Anthropology of Religion meetings, “When the Gods Read What We Write.” This panel examines the unstable nexus between theological and anthropological practices of... more
We invite submissions of abstracts for a panel at the 2017 Society for the Anthropology of Religion meetings, “When the Gods Read What We Write.” This panel examines the unstable nexus between theological and anthropological practices of reading and writing. Our starting point is the investigation of what happens when scholars take divine beings seriously as subjects (and not only objects) of anthropological and theological reading and writing.
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Set against the backdrop of the rise of right-wing Christian nationalism in Eastern Europe, this book declares that Catholic theologians ought to be understood and studied as intellectuals: socially and historically situated creators of... more
Set against the backdrop of the rise of right-wing Christian nationalism in Eastern Europe, this book declares that Catholic theologians ought to be understood and studied as intellectuals: socially and historically situated creators of national cultural traditions. While the Romanian government funds thriving schools for the country’s Hungarian minority, NGOs founded by Transylvanian Hungarians continue to organize volunteers to supplement this formal pedagogy. These volunteers understand themselves to be reviving a national tradition of “serving the people” by educating the region’s rural Hungarian populace.
While this book is about the challenges Catholic educators face in teaching villagers, it is just as much about their new effort to call groups of volunteers from across the border in Hungary to teach alongside them. In these encounters, Transylvanian Hungarian educators remake their intellectual tradition, especially ideas about the basis of pedagogical authority, the ethical character of the nation, and the social location of selfhood. When contemporary Catholic intellectuals urge teachers to manifest their national self-consciousness, they carry with them the assumption that selfhood emerges where humans collaborate with God. While Transylvanian Hungarian intellectuals are enmeshed in constant competition, by focusing on contemporary theologians Reforming Apostles unmasks the struggle over the nature of divine presence that animates this revival of a Christian national tradition of intellectual service.
While this book is about the challenges Catholic educators face in teaching villagers, it is just as much about their new effort to call groups of volunteers from across the border in Hungary to teach alongside them. In these encounters, Transylvanian Hungarian educators remake their intellectual tradition, especially ideas about the basis of pedagogical authority, the ethical character of the nation, and the social location of selfhood. When contemporary Catholic intellectuals urge teachers to manifest their national self-consciousness, they carry with them the assumption that selfhood emerges where humans collaborate with God. While Transylvanian Hungarian intellectuals are enmeshed in constant competition, by focusing on contemporary theologians Reforming Apostles unmasks the struggle over the nature of divine presence that animates this revival of a Christian national tradition of intellectual service.