The Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California
A Personal History
- History & Biography
- Publisher: Wipf and Stock
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
I asked a distinguished international group of Catholic scholars what would most help Catholic universities stay Catholic and break new intellectual ground. Their reply was unanimous: found an independent research institute, locate it in the United States at a major secular research university, and form a lay board of trustees capable of funding, guiding, and defending it. This book explains why the Institute's leadership chose as its home the University of Southern California rather than Yale and Princeton, and why two Cardinals of the Catholic Church tried but failed to close it down. It tells this story in vivid detail, documents challenges, victories, and mistakes, and describes the richness and critical importance of the Catholic intellectual tradition as one of the most fundamental intellectual and religious resources for true distinctiveness that Catholic universities offer to a polarized and insecure world. The Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies is unique; there is nothing like it in the world.
Endorsements (5)
“Fr. James Heft has created a much needed and important scholarly research center with the IACS. Anyone interested in higher education, and not only Catholic higher education in particular, but higher education more broadly, is urged to read this book. It provides some brilliant insights into the state of the field and makes the case why the work of the IACS is so very necessary, not only for academia, but for the world which we all share.”
“Intellectual and institutional histories benefit from both broad overviews and detailed studies. Jim Heft’s engaging narrative of his struggles and successes in developing the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies offers readers the kind of local history that adds texture to our broader understanding of the intellectual sweep of American Catholicism and the complex diversity of American higher education.”
“Beyond the history of a Catholic research institute, Heft offers a lively personal take on trends in the Catholic intellectual world from the 1930s to the 2020s—including bishops, universities, scholars, funders, the Catholic ‘culture wars,’ and the impact of Pope Francis. . . . This book recreates a vivid journey back to twentieth-century political dynamics around Catholic theology, especially worries about its genuine ‘Catholicity.’ Heft writes with the authority and investment of a survivor!”
“I know Father Dr. Professor James L. Heft, SM, as Jim, and he knows me as Reuven. I have had the enormous pleasure of learning from him, co-teaching with him, sharing podia with him, and sitting alongside him in classrooms, boardrooms, and lecture halls. As I look back at my own spiritual and academic career as a practicing Jew, a rabbi, and an academic, I don’t think I ever had more stimulating growth experiences than I was afforded as Jim’s colleague and fellow traveler in the quest for combining academic and spiritual excellence through the IACS. Jim’s energy, kindness, honesty, and humility are matched only by his intellectual integrity and willingness to honestly consider virtually any question from virtually any angle.”
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