Where are you from and how has it shaped you and led you to the CSTM?
As the youngest of six kids growing up in San Francisco, I am grateful that I have always known love, affection, and a sense of duty to live a life of public service. For many generations, many members of my family have been teachers, and I was raised to regard the work of education as crucial to forming good citizens. So I guess in my own way I am continuing the family business. But I was also profoundly affected by the education I received at a Jesuit high school. Somehow it instilled in me a sense of the importance of integrating a deep faith with an active sense of justice in the context of a vibrant intellectual life.
My main work as a Jesuit has been in higher education. I taught theology and classics at Santa Clara for many happy years before moving into central university administration. Both there and at Fordham, I was responsible for advancing the distinctively Jesuit, Catholic mission of the university. My experience as a faculty member and as an administrator in both places made me realize the importance of walking with students and colleagues, some of whom don’t share faith assumptions that are central to who I am. That taught me an openness and willingness to relate with others who are different from me, and I recognize it is a tremendous privilege to do so.
When Jesuit leadership asked me to make myself available and apply for this position at the CSTM, they thought the mix of a background in academic theology and administration, together with my own experience of ministry in the Catholic church would be useful here. I do believe, through all my previous experiences, God has been gently leading me, including now to the CSTM. I am just grateful for the opportunity to join such wonderful people that the CSTM brings together for this important work.
What are you most excited to do or try in the Boston area?
The ancient Romans believed that every place had its own particular spirit, which they called the “genius loci.” I love the idea of each place having its own unique mystery, and I really believe in it. I have been lucky to live in some of the best cities in the world and take great pride in being a third generation San Franciscan. When I moved to Fordham, my boss told me that he hoped I would fall in love with New York. And I did! I am absolutely sure I will fall in love with Boston too. It has so much to offer! For instance, a few days after arriving here, I went to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which I had heard so much about. Afterwards I walked the Back Bay Fens, which Olmstead said was part of the Boston’s “Emerald Necklace.” What I loved most, though, were the Victory Gardens—7.5 acres of small plots that people from every part of Boston are able to cultivate. Citizens steward these little tracts of land so diversely but with great care and creativity and pride. I don’t know why it moved me so much. Maybe it was the sense of civic participation in the common good of taking care of this particular part of the earth, each in their own way. So in addition to all the cultural and natural opportunities that Boston provides, my brief encounter with the Fenway Garden Society made me want to know the people of Boston: those who tend this acreage and their fellow citizens, who will help me see the local genius.
What impact would you like to have on the CSTM?
In truth, I first hope just to be a positive presence and slowly earn people’s trust. Over the years I have become a little suspicious of people who are overly attached to the particular impact they want to have on a place rather than listen carefully and humbly to where the Spirit may be leading us. I do not come to the CSTM with any specific program or agenda other than to nurture its growth as a truly excellent school. That said, I do hope I am able, in a genuinely collaborative way, to encourage and tender a kind of communal discernment of what the Church and the world needs most from the CSTM in the years to come. Only from that place can we determine the right visions, strategies, decisions, and measurable goals.
These can be hard times to be a theologian or minister in the Church, and in society more generally individuals and groups are motivated by a lot of fear, as well as some bad spirits. If I am able to nurture an institution that helps its members live from a place of joy so that we may be sustained for many years to come, I will have had the kind of impact I desire. If I can be useful to the CSTM and all its constituents in identifying and pursuing aspirations that are authentically God-centered, justice-oriented, and grounded in who we are, I will have fulfilled my own understanding of what a leader should be.
What is/are your non-theology related interests/hobbies/passions?
Lots. I genuinely love life and all its intricacies and am naturally curious, though I cannot claim a single passion, like my friend who is a serious baseball (actually, more specifically, Dodgers) fanatic. I like to cook, not because I am an especially good cook, but because I like to bring people together. I also like to watch garden shows on TV (though I am not a gardener) and like to study about wine-growing regions (whose produce, by the way, I do enjoy). Recently I took up swimming because one of my best friends growing up told me he swims in the San Francisco Bay four times a week and finds it “grounding.” (I haven’t had the courage to brave such cold water yet but do laps in a heated pool.) I love to walk in gardens and parks and just try to notice and appreciate things. For a long time, at night I have kept a practice of reading poetry. For me, it’s a way to recover a sense of depth and subtlety, when so much of our consciousness during the day is fractured by emails and text messages and our way of being tends to be more reactive than contemplative.
What’s something you’d like the CSTM community to know about you as you get started?
It would be hard to overstate just how much I love being a Jesuit and how grateful I am to the Society of Jesus for the formation and sense of community I have experienced therein. I also love being a priest and am genuinely grateful that God called me to a life of ministry. There is a risk you will think I am saying that because I’ve been appointed Dean of a School of Theology and Ministry. But in fact, it’s true. And when I have been discouraged by my own (or the Church’s or the Society’s or our country’s) failures, I have always been challenged and encouraged by St. Paul to remember that once “where sin abounded, grace did more abound” (Rom. 5:20), and so to look again with hope. When I look at my life, I am humbled at the quality of humanity I have encountered in so many diverse people. There have been hardships too, but as I start this job, I want the CSTM community to know that I begin from a place of tremendous gratitude to God and a desire to serve the People of God as well as I can.