‘Fordham’s Jesuit You’ve Likely Never Heard of: William F. Lynch, S.J. (1908–1987)’

In May 1960, following the publication of his best-known work, Christ and Apollo: The Dimensions of the Literary Imagination, Time magazine hailed the Jesuit William F. Lynch as “one of the most incisive Catholic intellectuals in the U.S.” However, by 1987, Daniel Berrigan could write in his obituary for Lynch (Berrigan’s close friend) that his later years were marked by “remarkable public neglect.”

Aided by documents found in Lynch’s papers in Fordham University’s Archives and Special Collections, this lecture from Stephen Schloesser, S.J., will try to remember Lynch: his childhood years in an Upper East Side tenement along the East River; attending Regis High School; his years at Fordham—first as a student earning his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees, then as a teacher, and later as the editor of Thought, Fordham’s journal of culture and ideas; his struggles with mental illness; and his later years. The lecture will conclude by identifying several key themes in Lynch’s studies of the imagination, especially the question: “Can we trust the limited and finite to lead somewhere?”

About the Speaker
Stephen Schloesser, S.J., has been a professor of European cultural and intellectual history at Loyola University Chicago since 2011. After receiving his Ph.D. in history and humanities from Stanford University, Schloesser was a member of the Boston College history faculty between 1999 and 2011. He is the author of Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919–1933 (2005) and Visions of Amen: The Early Life and Music of Olivier Messiaen (2014); curator and editor of “Mystic Masque: Semblance and Reality in Georges Rouault, 1871–1958” (2008); co-editor with Kyle B. Roberts of Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience, 1814–2014 (2017); and co-editor with Jennifer Donnelson of Mystic Modern: The Music, Thought, and Legacy of Charles Tournemire (2014).

Co-sponsored by the Spellman Jesuit Community