McGreevy, John T.

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McGREEVY, John T.

PERSONAL:

Male. Education: University of Notre Dame, B.A. (history), 1986; Stanford University, A.M. (history), 1987; Stanford University, Ph.D. (history), 1992.

ADDRESSES:

Home—South Bend, IN. Office—Department of History, 219 O'Shaughnessy Hall, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556-0368; fax: (219) 631-4268. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Educator and historian. Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, former assistant professor; University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, currently associate professor of history and chair of department. Distinguished lecturer for Organization of American Historians, 2004-05.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Mellon Foundation Interdisciplinary Graduate fellowship, 1990-92; John Gilmary Shea Prize, American Catholic Historical Association, 1996, for Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North; American Council of Learned Societies fellowship, 1996-97; Erasmus Institute fellowship, 1999; Louisville Institute Major Project grant, 1999-2000.

WRITINGS:

Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 1996.

Catholicism and American Freedom: A History, Norton (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to books, including Major Problems in American Religious History, edited by Patrick Allitt, Houghton, 1999; The Challenge of American History, edited by Louis Masur, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999; and Governance, Accountability, and the Future of the Catholic Church, edited by Francis Oakley and Bruce Russett, Continuum, 2003. Contributor to periodicals, including Commonweal, American Quarterly, Journal of American History, and Religion and American Culture.

SIDELIGHTS:

John T. McGreevy, an associate professor of history at the University of Notre Dame, studies the history of Catholics in America. His first two books, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North and Catholicism and American Freedom: A History, are both about this subject.

" Parish Boundaries is clearly the most comprehensive and thoroughly researched analysis of urban, northern Catholics and race published in America," declared Journal of Social History reviewer Timothy Kelly. The book examines the dilemma that formerly all-white Catholic parishes in northern cities faced when African-Americans began streaming from the South into those cities after World War I. McGreevy argues that Catholics had a stronger bond with their neighborhoods than did Protestants and Jews, because Catholic parishes were defined by geography. Because of this geographic focus, Catholics and Catholic churches invested much in creating a strong, frequently ethnic neighborhood built around their parish church and school. As Protestant and Jewish worshippers fled to the suburbs, their churches often picked up and followed—an option that was not open to the geographically defined Catholic parishes. Thus, Catholics, more frequently than Protestants and Jews, found themselves remaining in urban neighborhoods and, because they were so emotionally and spiritually invested in their neighborhoods, working to protect it from—as they viewed them—the "invading" African-Americans. "After finishing [ Parish Boundaries ], readers are apt to think that they always knew that Catholics played a pivotal role in the way race relations evolved in the great cities of the north since the 1920s," Philip Gleason commented in Journal of American Ethnic History. "But that is only because McGreevy makes the case so convincingly."

In his second book, Catholicism and American Freedom, McGreevy examines the different views of freedom held by America's Protestant founders and its Catholic citizens. The book, described as "ambitiously conceived, prodigiously researched, and beautifully executed" by Philip Gleason in a Church History article, contains an intellectual history both of American Catholic social thought and of anti-Catholic, Protestant reactions to it. The divide is between Catholics who believe that freedom is found in being part of a unified, righteous community that submits to the Church's moral authority on social issues, and Protestants who believe that freedom of conscience to make up one's own mind on those issues, and even the freedom to decide in error, is a necessary component of political freedom. McGreevy examines a number of American political divides where these two competing conceptions came into play, from the nineteenth-century arguments over slavery to twentieth-century debates on contraception, abortion, and other issues of sexuality. "There is nothing in American Catholic historiography that comes close to rivaling [McGreevy's three-chapter discussion of the latter issues] in scope of coverage, nuance of interpretation, or depth of research," wrote Gleason. "It is a remarkable tour de force." "All in all," Richard John Neuhaus concluded in First Things, Catholicism and Freedom "is the most informative, analytically insightful, and even-handed account we have of the troubled relationship between Catholicism and the American experiment."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

America, December 6, 1997, Dominic P. Scibilia, review of Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North, pp. 26-28; July 21, 2003, Thomas Murphy, review of Catholicism and American Freedom: A History, p. 27.

American Historical Review, December, 1996, Robert Orsi, review of Parish Boundaries, pp. 1640-1641.

Booklist, May 1, 2003, Margaret Flanagan, review of Catholicism and American Freedom, pp. 1556-1557.

Books and Culture, March-April, 2004, Allen Guelzo, review of Catholicism and American Freedom, pp. 22-23.

Catholic Historical Review, January, 1998, R. Scott Appleby, review of Parish Boundaries, pp. 157-159.

Choice, November, 2003, J. C. Scott, review of Catholicism and American Freedom, p. 559.

Church History, September, 1997, Jay P. Dolan, review of Parish Boundaries, pp. 668-670; December, 2003, Philip Gleason, review of Catholicism and American Freedom, pp. 910-911.

Commonweal, July 12, 1996, Don Wycliff, review of Parish Boundaries, pp. 23-24.

Crisis, April 1, 2004, John C. Chalberg, review of Catholicism and American Freedom.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, March, 1998, Michael P. Hornsby-Smith, review of Parish Boundaries, pp. 367-369.

First Things, August-September, 2003, Richard John Neuhaus, review of Catholicism and American Freedom, pp. 66-71.

Historical Journal, June, 1999, Amy S. Greenberg, review of Parish Boundaries, p. 519.

Journal of American Ethnic History, winter, 1998, Philip Gleason, review of Parish Boundaries, pp. 83-85.

Journal of American History, September, 1997, James T. Fisher, review of Parish Boundaries, pp. 614-617.

Journal of Social History, winter, 1998, Timothy Kelly, review of Parish Boundaries, pp. 480-482.

Journal of Urban History, May, 2000, Arnold R. Hirsch, review of Parish Boundaries, p. 519.

Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 2003, review of Catholicism and American Freedom, p. 366.

Library Journal, March 15, 2003, Anna M. Donnelly, review of Catholicism and American Freedom, p. 89.

Nation, September 22, 2003, JoAnn Wypijewski, review of Catholicism and American Freedom, p. 40.

New York Times, May 3, 1997, Peter Steinfels, "How Anxiety about Catholicism Helped Shape the Outlook of Modern American Intellectuals," pp. 10, 29; August 3, 2003, Michael J. Lacey, review of Catholicism and American Freedom, p. 13.

New York Times Book Review, August 25, 1996, Richard Wightman Fox, review of Parish Boundaries, p. 24.

Publishers Weekly, March 31, 2003, review of Catholicism and American Freedom, p. 59.

Review of Politics, winter, 1998, Cyprian Davis, review of Parish Boundaries, pp. 186-189.

Reviews in American History, June, 1997, Jay P. Dolan, review of Parish Boundaries, pp. 282-287.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, July 3, 1996, review of Parish Boundaries, p. C2.

Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), February 7, 1999, Bob Armbruster, review of Parish Boundaries, p. 8.