Ann O’Hara Graff Memorial Lecture Series
Established in 1996 to honor Ann O’Hara Graff, professor in the Theology and Religious Studies Department, after teaching for many years at the Institute for Pastoral Studies at Loyola University in Chicago.
2023 Lecture
Heidi Schlumpf, Senior Correspondent, National Catholic Reporter
November 2023: "Report from Rome: Did the church listen to women and LGBTQ Catholics at the synod?"
In this lecture, co-sponsored with Seattle University’s Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture, she shared her experience of reporting on the October 2023 Synod on Synodality.
Past Lectures
Speakers in this series have included:
- Sr. Simone Campbell, Executive Director of NETWORK, Catholic social justice lobby
- Sallie McFague, Distinguished Theologian in Residence, Vancouver School of Theology, Canada
- Susan Ross, Professor, Theology, Loyola University, Chicago
- Diana Hayes, Professor, Systematic Theology, Georgetown University
- Ivonne Gebarra, Professor of Philosophy and Theology, Instituto Teologico do Recife
- Richard McBrien, Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology, University of Notre Dame
- Natalia Imperatori-Lee, Professor, Religious Studies, Manhattan College
- M. Shawn Copeland , Professor, Systematic Theology, Boston College
About Ann O'Hara Graf
Dr. O'Hara Graff, who received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, was well known for her commitment to the vitality of the Church, the role of women in Catholicism, and diversity in the Church and the academy. In general, she sought to bring together academic theological insights and lived experience.
She was the editor of and a contributor to In the Embrace of God: Feminist Approaches to Theological Anthropology. Dr. O'Hara Graff was one of the founders of the Women's Seminar for Constructive Theology in the Catholic Theological Society of America.
This seminar now presents an annual award in her honor.
- In the Embrace of God: Feminist Approaches to Theological Anthropology (Maryknoll, NY : Orbis, 1995), which includes her own essay, “The Struggle to Name Women's Experience” and “Strategies for Life, Learning from Feminist Psychology”
- “Ecclesial Discernment: Women's Voices, New Voices, and the Revelatory Process” in Women and Theology, edited by Mary Ann Hinsdale and Phyllis Kaminski, Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1995
- “The Practice of Compassion and the Discipleship of Equals” in Ex Auditu, 10 1994, pp. 105-112
- “The Struggle to Name Women's Experience: Assessment and Implications for Theological Construction,” Horizons, 20 no 2 Fall 1993, pp. 215-233
- “Catholic feminist theologians on Catholic women in the Church” in New Theology Review, 6 May 1993, pp. 6-19
- “Women in the Roman Catholic ministry: new vision, new ethics” in Clergy Ethics in a Changing society: Mapping the Terrain, Louisville, Ky: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991, pp. 215-230
- “Women and Dignity: Vision and Practice,” in Prophetic Visions and Economic Realities, ed. Charles R. Strain (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), pp. 219-228
- Vision and Reality: Discernment and Decision-Making in Contemporary Roman Catholic Ecclesiology, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1986