Faculty Travel Seminar: The Historical Roots of the Current Immigration Crisis from a Catholic Perspective

Location

Zoom

Free

Please join Esteban del Rio, Communication Studies, David Miller, History, Victor Carmona, Theology and Religious Studies, and Dr. Jeffrey Burns, Director, Center for Catholic Thought and Culture via Zoom for a roundtable discussion on Immigration after our January 2020 Faculty Travel Seminar. 

Monday, October 19, 2020, 10:00 -11:30 a.m. via Zoom

To register and for the Zoom link: https://tinyurl.com/usdfacultytravel2020

The Frances G. Harpst Center for Catholic Thought and Culture held its 2020 Faculty Travel Immersion Seminar in January. Each year the CCTC takes a small group of inter-disciplinary USD faculty to a place connected in a broad sense with the Catholic intellectual and/or cultural and social traditions. This year the Travel Seminar took place in New York City, San Francisco, and San Diego.

Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free.
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
I lift my lamp beside the Golden Door.

The current “national emergency” has enflamed the ongoing debate on immigration. For all the sound and fury, the debate has paid scant attention to the historical roots of immigration to the United States. What does it mean that the United States is “A Nation of Immigrants?” What role has the Catholic Church played? The great historian Oscar Handlin once stated famously, “I set out to study the role of the immigrant in American history and found the immigrant was American history.” The same may be said of the Catholic Church in the United States — the immigrant was and is U.S. Catholic history. The Church in the United States was, and continues to be, an immigrant church.