O'Malley, John W. 1927- (John William O'Malley)

PERSONAL:

Born June 11, 1927, in Tiltonsville, OH. Education: Harvard University, Ph.D.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of Church History, Weston Jesuit School of Theology, 3 Phillips Pl., Cambridge, MA 02138. E-mail—jwo9@georgetown.edu.

CAREER:

Writer, editor, educator, theologian, historian, and Jesuit priest. University of Detroit, Detroit, MI, faculty member, beginning in 1965; Weston Jesuit School of Theology, Cambridge, MA, faculty member, 1979—, became Distinguished Professor of Church History; Georgetown University, currently professor of theology. Harvard University, visiting professor; University of Michigan, visiting professor; Boston College, visiting professor; Fordham University, visiting professor; Oxford University, visiting professor.

MEMBER:

Renaissance Society of America (president, 1998-2000), Catholic Historical Society (served as president), American Philosophical Society.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Guggenheim fellow, 1975; American Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellow, 1995—; Jacques Barzun Prize, American Philosophical Society, 1995, and Philip Schaff Prize for Religious History, American Society of Cultural History, 1996, both for The First Jesuits. Recipient of honorary degree from Marquette University.

WRITINGS:

(Coauthor) Challenge (prayers), Loyola University Press (Chicago, IL), 1958.

Giles of Viterbo on Church and Reform: A Study in Renaissance Thought, E.J. Brill (Leiden, Netherlands), 1968.

Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450-1521, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1979.

Rome and the Renaissance: Studies in Culture and Religion, Variorum Reprints (London, England), 1981.

(Editor, with Lucien Richard and Daniel T. Harrington) Vatican II, the Unfinished Agenda: A Look to the Future, Paulist Press (New York, NY), 1987.

(Editor) Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research, Center for Reformation Research (St. Louis, MO), 1988.

(Editor, with Louis A. Perraud) Desiderius Erasmus, Spiritualia, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1988.

Tradition and Transition: Historical Perspectives on Vatican II, M. Glazier (Wilmington, DE), 1989.

(Editor, with John W. Padberg and Vincent T. O'Keefe) Jesuit Spirituality: A Now and Future Resource, Loyola University Press (Chicago, IL), 1990.

The First Jesuits, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1993.

(Editor, with Thomas M. Izbicki and Gerald Christianson) Humanity and Divinity in Renaissance and Reformation: Essays in Honor of Charles Trinkaus, E.J. Brill (New York, NY), 1993.

Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching, Rhetoric, Spirituality, and Reform, Variorum Reprints (Brookfield, VT), 1993.

(Editor, with others) The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1999.

Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2000.

Four Cultures of the West, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004.

(Editor, with Gauvin Alexander Bailey) The Jesuits and the Arts: 1540-1773, Saint Joseph's University Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.

(Editor) The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, University of Toronto Press (Buffalo, NY), 2006.

(Author of foreword) Giuseppe Alberigo, A Brief History of Vatican II, Orbis (Maryknoll, NY), 2006.

Contributor to books, including Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?, edited by David Schultenover, Continuum (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to periodicals and journals, including Theological Studies.

Author's works have been translated into five languages.

SIDELIGHTS:

John W. O'Malley is a writer, editor, and Jesuit priest. A professor of theology at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, he is a longtime historian of Jesuit and Catholic history. A graduate of Harvard University, O'Malley formerly served as Distinguished Professor of Church History at Weston Jesuit School of Theology. A prolific career scholar, O'Malley is dedicated to the transformative power of books and ideas. "I believe in the power of ideas, which is what scholars deal with," O'Malley was quoted as saying on the Marquette University Web site. "Through the results of their scholarship, scholars help us to see things differently, help us break out of our narrowness, help us ask questions that break the logjam of our predicaments."

The First Jesuits is O'Malley's history of the formation and early years of the Society of Jesus, in which he offers a "reconstruction of the goals, motivations, and activities of the first generation of Jesuits," noted Carl L. Bankston III in Commonweal. O'Malley's account "shows admirable care for detail and enviable mastery of the voluminous documents produced by the early Society of Jesus," Bankston continued. O'Malley seeks to "understand the early Jesuits as they understood themselves, and to see the contexts into which the Jesuits inserted themselves," observed Randall C. Zachman in Renaissance Quarterly. The author begins his history with Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola's decision to leave behind his position in the military and take up a religious life. He discusses the early founding of the Society in 1533, then traces the evolution of the early Jesuit order under Ignatius's direction. He finds that the Jesuits developed their overall plans as they went along and did not start out with a distinct direction for the society. He describes how the order became interested and deeply involved in education and scholarship because they found the academic discipline of rhetoric useful in preaching. He also concludes that the Jesuits were not intended to serve as part of the Catholic Church's struggles against the Protestant Reformation; they retained a pastoral mission rather than one based on theological warfare intended to recapture wandering Protestants. The Jesuits' goal, O'Malley notes, was to assist and redeem individual souls and to provide for spiritual needs, and everything they did was undertaken with this goal in mind.

"With his customary erudition, elegance of style, and occasional dry wit, the author has provided a much needed and remarkably skilful analysis of the origins of the Society of Jesus," commented A.D. Wright in the Journal of Theological Studies. America reviewer George W. Hunt called the book a "persuasive, masterly, and fascinating history" of the Jesuits. "There is nothing on the early history of the Society of Jesus in any language that can compare in scope or quality with John W. O'Malley's sensitive, dispassionate and informative work," commented H.M. Hopfl, writing in the English Historical Review. Historian reviewer John J. LaRocca named it "required reading for anyone interested in late medieval piety, religious life, Catholic Reform/Counter Reformation, and the Society of Jesus." James Hennessey, in a Theological Studies review, remarked that "this book is a superb achievement, the work of a theologically informed historian who is an expert in the period of which he writes." Hopfl concluded that O'Malley has produced "an admirable book."

O'Malley is editor, with Gauvin Alexander Bailey, of The Jesuits and the Arts: 1540-1773, a book that contains a scholarly examination of early accomplishments in the arts and related artistic undertakings of the Society of Jesus. "By any measure, this new volume is brilliantly conceived, consistently fascinating, and absolutely gorgeous to look at," remarked James Martin in America. The contributors cover topics such as Jesuit architecture; Jesuit influence on Baroque and Italian Renaissance painting; Jesuit theater; Jesuit-influenced artistic works in North America and Asia; and the Jesuits' artistic and architectural heritage in Latin America. An Internet Bookwatch reviewer made particular mention of O'Malley's introductory essay, which "lays the Jesuit involvement with the arts in historical perspective." The reviewer further called the book an "impressive compendium of erudite scholarship" that is "meticulously compiled and deftly edited" by O'Malley and Bailey.

O'Malley also served as editor of The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, a volume that D. Gillian Thompson, writing in the Canadian Journal of History, called a "model of what published conference proceedings can be." The book contains thirty-two essays derived from a 1997 conference on Jesuits at Boston College, and covers "the cultural and intellectual contributions of Jesuits in their roles as educators and missionaries from the inception of the order in 1540 until its suppression in the eighteenth century," noted Sheila J. Rabin in Church History. Rabin named the book "a work that must be consulted for anyone working on the Jesuits in the early modern period and is useful for anyone studying early modern cultural and intellectual life."

In Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era, O'Malley assesses the "historiographic controversy that has swirled around names used to characterize Catholicism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries," commented William V. Hudson in Theological Studies. "Surveying, digesting, explaining, and critiquing an incredibly broad range of scholarship in many languages, O'Malley shows how historians of the last half century or so have both recognized the limitations of names such as ‘Counter Reformation’ and moved beyond their confines," commented Church History reviewer Thomas Worcester. The Council of Trent is not the focus, but serves as the anchor as the author studies "the significance and implications of the various names used by historians for the whole era and reviews the history of the naming process from the late seventeenth century to the present," remarked Robert Trisco in the Catholic Historical Review. Worcester concluded that "O'Malley's accomplishment is large" and found that this book is "useful not only to students and scholars of early modern history, but to anyone interested in the heuristic and hermeneutical problems lurking behind names assigned to periods of history."

O'Malley delves deeply into Western cultural history with Four Cultures of the West. In the book, he explores "four distinctive paradigms or cultures that, taken together, handsomely help decode Western intellectual and cultural history," noted Library Journal reviewer Sandra Collins. O'Malley addresses "prophetic culture, academic/professional culture, humanistic culture, and artistic culture," all of which "represent discrete ways of thinking and doing," observed Historian critic Michael R. Lynn. These represent "four cultural configurations, styles, or rhetorics which historically developed side-by-side and continue to jostle and intermingle with each other to the present," remarked Glenn W. Olsen in the Catholic Historical Review. O'Malley traces the historical origins of each culture, finds points at which each took on a Christian form, and describes the secular form of each culture as it exists today. Brennan O'Donnell, writing in Christianity and Literature, called the book a "tour-de-force overview of the history of ideas in five delightfully written chapters." O'Donnell further remarked that "O'Malley's broad-stroke, big-picture survey of these four cultures is written with the confidence and briskness of a distinguished scholar wholly at ease with his materials." O'Donnell concluded: "Offered as an appreciation, rather than an exhaustive analysis, of its subject, it is a generous and genial contribution to our collective understandings of ourselves as inheritors of these complex and potent strains of culture."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Comerford, Kathleen M., and Hilmar M. Pabel, editors, Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honor of John W. O'Malley, S.J., University of Toronto Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 2001.

PERIODICALS

America, September 25, 1993, George W. Hunt, review of The First Jesuits, p. 2; December 5, 2005, James Martin, "Jesuit Arts: A New Book on Art and the Society of Jesus," review of The Jesuits and the Arts: 1540-1773, p. 16.

Canadian Journal of History, August, 2002, D. Gillian Thompson, review of The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540-1773, p. 412.

Catholic Historical Review, January, 2004, Robert Trisco, review of Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era, p. 125; April, 2005, Glenn W. Olsen, review of Four Cultures of the West, p. 339; April, 2005, Robert Bireley, review of Early Modern Catholicism, p. 369.

Christianity and Literature, summer, 2005, Brennan O'Donnell, review of Four Cultures of the West, p. 615.

Church History, September, 2001, Sheila J. Rabin, review of The Jesuits, p. 574; March, 2003, Thomas Worcester, review of Trent and All That, p. 211.

Commonweal, June 3, 1994, Carl L. Bankston, III, review of The First Jesuits, p. 22.

English Historical Review, June, 1996, H.M. Hopfl, review of The First Jesuits, p. 708.

Historian, summer, 1994, John J. LaRocca, review of The First Jesuits, p. 799; summer, 2006, Michael R. Lynn, review of Four Cultures of the West, p. 396.

Internet Bookwatch, April, 2007, review of The Jesuits and the Arts.

Journal of Ecclesiastical History, October, 2001, Thomas M. McCoog, review of The Jesuits, p. 748; April, 2006, Diarmaid MacCulloch, review of Four Cultures of the West, p. 317.

Journal of Theological Studies, October, 1994, A.D. Wright, review of The First Jesuits, p. 775.

Library Journal, August 1, 2004, Sandra Collins, review of Four Cultures of the West, p. 88.

National Catholic Reporter, December 3, 1993, Raymond A. Schroth, review of The First Jesuits, p. 16.

Publishers Weekly, August 16, 2004, review of Four Cultures of the West, p. 59.

Reference & Research Book News, February, 2006, review of The Jesuits and the Arts.

Renaissance Quarterly, spring, 1995, Randall C. Zachman, review of The First Jesuits, p. 186.

Theological Studies, March, 1994, James Hennessey, review of The First Jesuits, p. 152; September, 2000, William V. Hudson, review of Trent and All That, p. 589; March, 2006, John W. Padberg, review of Four Cultures of the West, p. 206; September, 2007, review of A Brief History of Vatican II, p. 693.

ONLINE

Catholic Books Review,http://catholicbooksreview.org/ (May 12, 2008), review of Vatican II: Did Anything Happen?

Georgetown University Jesuit Community Web site,http://jesuits.georgetown.edu/ (May 12, 2008), biography of John W. O'Malley.

Marquette University Web site,http://www.mu.edu/ (May 16, 2004), biography of John W. O'Malley.