Global Catholicism

To strengthen the College's teaching and research on global Catholicism, the McFarland Center provides supplemental research funding through a competitive grant program open to all Holy Cross faculty.

The Fall 2026 Global Catholicism Grant recipients are:

The Liturgical Movement from a Global Perspective

Fall 2026

Grant Recipient: Audrey Seah

This project challenges the conventional Eurocentric history of the modern Catholic Liturgical Movement by demonstrating its global, bidirectional origins. While the movement is traditionally traced to nineteenth- and twentieth-century European monastic centers, this research argues that reforms later codified by the Second Vatican Council—including vernacular liturgy, indigenous clergy, and the integration of local cultural traditions—were anticipated in mission communities in East Asia and the Catholic Kingdom of Kongo as early as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Drawing on archival research and previously understudied liturgical sources, the project repositions non-European Catholics as active contributors to modern liturgical reform and reframes the movement as the product of centuries of global exchange rather than the one-way diffusion of European ideas.

Northern (In)visibility: Retrieving Black Catholic Stories 

Fall 2026

Grant Recipient: Chanelle Robinson

This project investigates the overlooked history of Black Catholicism in Canada, challenging narratives that position Black Catholic experience primarily within the United States while obscuring Canada's own histories of slavery, migration, and racial segregation. Beginning with the life of the enslaved Black Catholic woman Marie-Joseph Angélique and extending to the development of Black Catholic communities in twentieth-century Ontario, the project draws on archival research to examine how Black Catholics shaped ecclesial life, negotiated belonging, and responded to changing cultural and religious landscapes. By centering Canadian experiences, this research expands the field of Global Catholicism and offers a more historically and geographically inclusive understanding of Black Catholic life in North America.  

J.R.R. Tolkien: A Life in Ten Letters

Fall 2026

Grant Recipient: Jonathan Mulrooney

This project develops a new biography of J.R.R. Tolkien through ten significant letters spanning his life, from childhood through the final days before his death in 1973. Moving beyond the conventional image of Tolkien as a secluded Oxford academic, the project examines the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual experiences that shaped his writing and its extraordinary reception. The selected letters illuminate Tolkien’s relationships with family, fellow writers, scholars, and readers, as well as the linguistic, literary, and religious foundations of his work. By organizing the biography around these letters rather than a strictly chronological narrative, the project offers a new approach to understanding the complex relationship between Tolkien’s life and the imaginative world he created. Archival research at Oxford University, Marquette University, and Wheaton College will draw on Tolkien’s papers and those of his wider literary circle, the Inklings, to situate his work within the intellectual and religious currents of the twentieth century.

Save China, Save Peace: Transnational Activism and Internationalism in the Global World War II

Fall 2026

Grant Recipient: Ke Ren

This book project examines Chinese engagement with transnational peace movements and international organizations from the 1930s through the early Cold War, placing China at the center of a global history of World War II-era internationalism. Focusing on networks ranging from antifascist campaigns and grassroots peace organizations to anti-imperialist movements, the project explores how Chinese activists and their international counterparts connected resistance to imperialism and fascist aggression with broader efforts to secure world peace. It also considers the role of religious organizations and communities, including the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Chinese Buddhist and Muslim movements, in developing diverse approaches to pacifism, peacebuilding, and transnational justice during a period of global conflict. Archival research at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam will provide materials from major international peace organizations and movements, contributing to a monograph that brings Chinese participants into a history of twentieth-century internationalism from which they have often been absent.

More than a Human Mirror: Animals, Confucian Ethics and Buddhist Reinterpretation of Xu Qian’s Even Animals Are Thus

Fall 2026

Grant Recipient: Ji Hao

This project examines the role of animals as moral and religious agents in Chinese ethical thought through Xu Qian’s (1776–1864) Even Animals Are Thus (Wuyou ruci). Rather than treating its animal stories as entertainment or simple allegories for human behavior, the project explores how Xu used narratives of animal loyalty, suffering, and retribution to address moral causality, human responsibility, and compassion at the intersection of Confucian ethics and Buddhist thought. It also traces the text’s reinterpretation by Buddhist writers and artists during the Republican era, when new editions and adaptations connected its animal narratives to Buddhist teachings on compassion, karmic causality, non-killing, and the protection of life. Research at the National Library of China will include consultation of the earliest woodblock-printed edition of Even Animals Are Thus, supplemented by archival and library research elsewhere in China and fieldwork in Jiangxi and Hangzhou related to Xu Qian and artist Feng Zikai. By tracing the text from its late-imperial origins through its twentieth-century Buddhist reinterpretation, the project demonstrates how animals became an important site for negotiating religious belief, ethical responsibility, and moral self-cultivation in modern Chinese intellectual history.