Center for Faith, Mission, and Catholic Education

I was raised in the south in Arkansas in a very Protestant community. There was not a great presence of Catholicism in Arkansas. And I went to college having renounced any faith and committed myself to studying philosophy in undergrad in a small liberal arts school in Arkansas.

Through the course of some friendships, some different professors, and some internships in Washington, D.C., I encountered a community of people living Catholicism that really fascinated me and kind of held a very radically different way of living and way of looking at reality that I became jealous of, that I was curious of. What makes them the way that they are? Between my junior and senior year of college, I fell head over heels for this community and discovered a vibrancy of life that I wanted for myself. I entered the RCIA program, the initiation program for entering the Catholic Church as an adult, and I entered the church my senior year of undergrad.

I went to study theology because I wanted to understand what I just did by entering the Church. I had been studying philosophy, so I had a great interest in these big existential questions of faith, of reason, of the human person and the heart. I went to the John Paul II Institute in Washington, D.C., which is housed at Catholic University of America to study theology after the undergrad in philosophy. I taught theology here and there in different communities for different continuing education programs or high school programs when I was first married and having children.

We moved to Cincinnati for my husband’s work and  Thomas More needed an adjunct in theology to contribute to the program and the students who take the theology classes. … it’s been beautiful because there have been increasing opportunities in the department and then also this year with the Center to invest myself more as a professor and also as a contributor to the Thomas More community.

My first priority was to understand better who the people are who make up this great community; to understand the history of the University, which is rich and long in 100 years. Also, to understand who the people are that are making big contributions in all areas – administrative {and} regarding students’ curricular contributions to the community. The goal of the Center for Faith, Mission, and Catholic Education is to integrate Catholic identity into all aspects of campus. To do that, I have to understand and better know all aspects of campus. The role of the Center is to valorize and bring to life more the things that are already good, true, and beautiful happening around the University, and to integrate all of the things that are already fruitful and bearing fruit and giving life to our community, to integrate them into our mission more and more to be a Catholic institution in the Diocese of Covington and for the wider region.

I want them to know that I want their involvement and contributions because it’s at the service of the University, and the University exists to serve the students, their questions, their passions, their skepticisms. Their contributions are essential for the Center to be useful for them and in order to serve them, I need to know them more. I’m really interested in having the Center be a place of academic rigor where we think through deep questions about life and faith, but also it has more than an academic component. It has a community component, or in that regards the community of Thomas More and the wider community. I think there are different tiers that the Center is operating in, the local reality of the faculty, staff and students, the wider reality of the diocese and the culture at large. Regarding students, I’m super interested in what they’re interested in. I want to know what they’re passionate about and the more things I discover that they’re passionate about, the more I can show glimpses of how their passion is relevant to the passion of the church, which is for their destiny, for their ultimate horizon and happiness.

The ideas we have for the 2025 year are to do more interdisciplinary initiatives. I really have a heart for bringing together departments – to have events on campus with students from different areas of study to come together for a

are the Massimo Robberto event on the James Webb Space Telescope that happened in the spring. This event brought together the physics department and also the theology department, but then other students as well. We had the papal astronomer come and that was a beautiful event bringing together the science and humanities a little bit more. We have a Flannery O’Connor film screening that drew together two different pieces of the humanities. For 2025, we hope to do more of this and focus on a broader conception of sustainability that has in mind what Pope Francis calls integral ecology, the whole person, and our personal involvement with all of creation. We’d like to have some events on different social topics like immigration.

The Wm. T. (Bill) Robinson III ’67 Institute for Religious Liberty, which is a facet of the Center, has a whole series of Saint Pope John Paul II events for spring 2025, and one event that we plan to do for the Center is on ecumenism, the dialogue between the different denominations of Christianity in the Catholic Church and what does it mean that we all recognize in our brothers and sisters in Christ? What is the unity among all of the faithful Catholics and Protestants? Pope Saint John Paul II wrote a great encyclical on ecumenism. We would like to contribute to that conversation as well. 

The goals of the Center, for the Thomas More community, for me, are to bring people into conversation from different pockets and different questions, to have everyone have a seat at the table to make a contribution.