Emily Conroy-Krutz (Michigan State University) will discuss her book Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell, 2024) at the Cushwa Center's fall 2024 Jay P. Dolan Seminar in American Religion. Commentators for this seminar are Heather Curtis (Tufts University) and Amy S. Greenberg (Penn State). From the publisher Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in 19th-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems? As Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of U.S. citizens abroad and of the role of the United States as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the United States entered the First World War, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.Inaugurated in 1980 and named in 2023 to honor the Cushwa Center’s founding director, the Jay P. Dolan Seminar in American Religion convenes each semester at the University of Notre Dame to discuss a notable book recently published in the field. Along with faculty and graduate students from Notre Dame, scholars from throughout the Midwest travel to campus to attend as invited guests of the Cushwa Center. The featured author engages with two invited commentators as well as the larger group. The Saturday morning seminar is free and open to all. Originally published at cushwa.nd.edu.

An ensemble of leading lights takes the stage for Offenbach's fantastical final work, headlined by tenor Benjamin Bernheim in the title role of the tormented poet. Hoffmann's trio of lovers are sung by soprano Erin Morley as the mechanical doll Olympia, soprano Pretty Yende as the plagued diva Antonia, and mezzo-soprano Clémentine Margaine as the Venetian seductress Giulietta. Marco Armiliato conducts Bartlett Sher's evocative production, which also features bass-baritone Christian Van Horn as the Four Villains and mezzo-soprano Vasilisa Berzhanskaya in an important company debut as Hoffmann's friend Nicklausse. GET TICKETS  

The Wolves drops you outdoors into the midst of a suburban high school girls' soccer team daily practice for six games. Amid warmup and training suffused by the raw energy accompanying youth on the brink of adulthood, the undefeated Wolves psych each other up or out, tackling whatever sport and life throw their way through rapid-fire, unfiltered conversations about the world and who they are within it. Then, what happens when you discover life is not a drill? GET TICKETS  

The Wolves drops you outdoors into the midst of a suburban high school girls' soccer team daily practice for six games. Amid warmup and training suffused by the raw energy accompanying youth on the brink of adulthood, the undefeated Wolves psych each other up or out, tackling whatever sport and life throw their way through rapid-fire, unfiltered conversations about the world and who they are within it. Then, what happens when you discover life is not a drill? GET TICKETS