The 16th Annual Julio Burunat, Ph.D., Memorial Lecture

Spiritual Friendship and a Buried Catholic History: Insights for Today
Brenna Moore, Th.D., Fordham University

Brenna Moore will be sharing research from her book Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the Edges of Modern Catholicism (winner of John Gilmary Shea Prize from the American Catholic Historical Association). She will describe her discovery of an archive of a remarkable, global network of Catholic intellectuals, activists and artists from the mid-20th century, for whom “spiritual friendship” was a key to both the divine and human realms, a means of accessing the transcendent while also engaging with our social and political existence. This buried history speaks to our own time, about the need for human connection as an antidote to isolation, and what it might look like to place deep friendship at the center of our social, political, and even spiritual lives.