Benedictine College’s Fifteenth Annual
Symposium on Transforming Culture

Duncan G. Stroik is a practicing architect, author, and Professor of Architecture at the University of Notre Dame. His award-winning work includes the Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity Chapel in Santa Paula, California, the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in LaCrosse, Wisconsin, and the Cathedral of Saint Joseph in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. A frequent lecturer on sacred architecture and the classical tradition, Stroik authored The Church Building as a Sacred Place: Beauty, Transcendence and the Eternaland is the founding editor of Sacred Architecture Journal. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia and the Yale University School of Architecture. Professor Stroik was the 2016 winner of the Arthur Ross Award for Architecture and was a member of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts from 2019 to 2023.

Jennifer Newsome Martin is a systematic theologian with areas of interest in 19th and 20th century Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox thought, trinitarian theology, theological aesthetics, religion and literature, French feminism, ressourcement theology, and the nature of religious tradition. Her first book, Hans Urs von Balthasar and the Critical Appropriation of Russian Religious Thought (University of Notre Dame Press, 2015), was one of ten winners internationally of the 2017 Manfred Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise. She is co-editor of An Apocalypse of Love: Essays in Honor of Cyril O’ Regan (Herder & Herder, 2018) and the second edition of the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Catholicism. Over twenty articles and book chapters have appeared in such venues as Modern Theology, Communio: International Catholic Review, The Newman Studies Journal, International Journal of Systematic Theology, and in a number of edited volumes and collections of essays. She serves on the editorial board of Religion & Literature and the University of Notre Dame Press, as well as steering committees of the Hans Urs von Balthasar Consultation of the Catholic Theological Society of America and the Christian Systematic Theology Unit in the American Academy of Religion. Martin was appointed director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture in 2023, succeeding O. Carter Snead in the position on July 1, 2024.

Writer, editor, publisher, and teacher, Gregory Wolfe has been called “one of the most incisive and persuasive voices of our generation” (Ron Hansen). Both as a thinker and institution-builder, Wolfe has been a pioneer in the resurgence of interest in the relationship between art and religion—a resurgence that has had widespread impact both on religious communities and the public square. As an advocate for the tradition of Christian Humanism, Wolfe has established a reputation as an independent, non-ideological thinker—at times playing the role of gadfly but ultimately seeking to be a reconciler and peacemaker. In 1989, Wolfe founded Image, which Annie Dillard has called “one of the best journals on the planet.” Now one of America’s top literary quarterlies, Image is a unique forum for the best writing and artwork that is informed by—or grapples with—religious faith. In 2013, Gregory Wolfe launched his own literary imprint, Slant, through the Wipf & Stock publishing company. In 2021, it was announced that Slant had been re-launched as a fully independent, non-profit press. Among his books are The Operation of Grace: Further Essays on Art, Faith, & Mystery (Cascade, 2015), Beauty Will Save the World: Recovering the Human in an Ideological Age (ISI Books, 2011), Intruding Upon the Timeless: Meditations on Art, Faith, & Mystery (second edition, Square Halo, 2017), Malcolm Muggeridge: A Biography(ISI Books, 2003) and Sacred Passion: The Art of William Schickel (2nd edition, University of Notre Dame Press, 2010). Wolfe is also the editor of The New Religious Humanists: A Reader (Free Press, 1997), God With Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Advent & Christmas (Paraclete, 2007), God For Us: Rediscovering the Meaning of Lent & Easter (Paraclete, 2013), and Here at Last is Love: Selected Poems of Dunstan Thompson (Slant, 2015). A convert to the Roman Catholic Church, Wolfe is a member of the international lay movement Communion and Liberation.

The Founder and CEO of Source & Summit, Adam has published and edited multiple liturgy and music resources, composed over 3000 vernacular chant settings, and is active as a writer, teacher, speaker, and workshop presenter. Formerly he served as a parish and cathedral music director, an instructor in liturgical chant at Mundelein Seminary, Assistant Director at the Liturgical Institute, an adjunct faculty member for the Augustine Institute, and as a sacred music consultant for FOCUS. He resides in Grand Rapids, MI with his with and three children.

Jennifer Donelson-Nowicka is Professor and the Director of Sacred Music at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, California, where she holds the William P. Mahrt Chair in Sacred Music and serves as the founding Director of the Catholic Institute of Sacred Music. She has co-edited Mystic Modern: The Music, Thought, and Legacy of Charles Tournemire, published by the Church Music Association of America (CMAA). Her publications also include articles in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Sacred Music, Antiphon: A Journal for Liturgical Renewal, the proceedings of the Gregorian Institute of Canada, the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, the Adoremus Bulletin, Liturgy in the Twenty-First Century (Bloomsbury/T&T Clark), and Messiaen in Context (Cambridge University Press). She serves as the Vice President and Director of Publications for the CMAA, is the managing editor of the CMAA’s journal Sacred Music, and is a regular member of the faculty for the CMAA’s annual Sacred Music Colloquium. As academic liaison of the CMAA, she has organized and presented papers at several academic conferences on Charles Tournemire, the work of Msgr. Richard Schuler, the role of Gregorian chant in pastoral ministry and religious education, and the work of William Mahrt. She was a co-organizer of the Sacra Liturgia conferences in New York (2015) and San Francisco (2022), and has presented papers at the Sacra Liturgia conferences in New York, London, Milan, and San Francisco and, together with Archbishop Cordileone, is the founder of the Fons et Culmen Sacred Liturgy Summit. The sometime president, she is currently a board member of the Society for Catholic Liturgy. Donelson-Nowicka serves as a Consultant to the USCCB’s Committee on Divine Worship.

Lawrence and Katie Joy Daufenbach both have backgrounds in arts and business. Katie Joy studied Theater at Northwestern University, served as a FOCUS missionary after college, and worked in marketing and branding until leaving to start this new venture. Lawrence is a cinematographer by training and an entrepreneur at heart. He started his own camera company right out of college and continues to serve on a number of local industry boards.

Dr. David Deavel was born and raised in Bremen, Indiana.  He received a B.A. with majors in English and philosophy from Calvin College and attended Fordham University, where he received the M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in theology. He is currently an Associate Professor of Theology at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas. A Senior Contributor at The Imaginative Conservative, an Associate Editor at Voegelin View, a Contributing Editor for Gilbert, and an editorial board member for Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture (for which he was editor in chief for six years), he has served one term on the Board for the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. He is a past Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute and also the 2013 winner of the Acton Institute’s Novak Award. With Jessica Hooten Wilson, he co-edited Solzhenitsyn and American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West. In addition to his academic work, his public and popular writings have appeared in Catholic World Report, City Journal, First Things, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal.

Ryan McDermott is an associate professor of medieval literature and culture. He earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia after completing an M.T.S. at Duke Divinity School. His first book, Tropologies: Ethics and Invention in England, c. 1350-1600 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), tracks changes and continuities in vernacular religious literature across the intellectual and cultural watershed of the English Reformation. Ryan directs the cross-disciplinary, multi-institutional project Genealogies of Modernity, and is working on a second book, Genealogies: How to Think about the Past and the Future in the Humanities. He is a convert to Roman Catholicism from the Episcopal Church.