This collection includes recordings of presentations by students who received the Father Jack McGrath, S.M., Research Award, which recognizes students whose research in a Common Academic Program course demonstrates rigorous, deep, and creative engagement with thinkers, texts, and/or themes associated with Catholic intellectual traditions.
Honorees from 2025
Augustine’s Response to the Problem of Evil, Matthew Dawson
Jane Goodall’s Integration of Science and Spirituality, Estella Elpers
Medieval Philosophy and Theories of Knowledge, Brooke Hartzell
Faith and Hunger, Mason Hennessy
The Ideological Roots of the Holocaust, Sam Smith
Liberation Theology in Latin American Communities, Sandra Todd
Honorees from 2024
‘The Truth Only Dies When True Stories Are Untold’: The Story of Reconstruction in New Orleans, Alexandra Amrhein
Visual Rhetoric of the Persecuted Christian Right, Jules Carr-Chellman
The Arks of Noah and Utnapishtim, Daniel Dunphy
The Gift of the Holy Spirit: The Church’s Journey with the Sacrament of Confirmation, Maria Graziano
When Would the Platonist Books Have Taught Me That?' St. Augustine’s Dance with Neo-Platonism, Zachary O'Connor
Excavating the Sunken Places: Analyzing Jordan Peele’s "Get Out" as Apocalyptic Rhetoric, Lucy Waskiewicz
Honorees from 2023
Camus and the Absurdity of Desalination, Jules Carr-Chellman
Time in Religious Philosophy: A Comparison of St. Augustine and Avicenna, Jacob Kulig
Divine Revelation as Interpreted by Medieval Mystics, Daniel Napoli
Divine Labor and Delivery: A Woman's Christology, Emily Rotunda
The Catholic Church's Teachings on Suicide, Elayna Walloch
The 'Midnight Incendiary': America's Myth of Black Violence, Eleanor Yates-McEwan
Honorees from 2022
Cultivating Encounter: The Theology of Philia in a Broken World, Jordan McCormick
Rewriting “Love Yourself", Molly Obergefell
The Most Beautiful Moment in Life': A Summary & Rhetorical Analysis of Augustine’s Conversion Story, Julie Pugh
Werner Heisenberg - A Philosophical Physicist, Benjamin Schaiper
Rediscovering the Music of Seventeenth-Century Nun Composers within the Modern Catholic Musical Practice, Kate Sidor
He Came in like a Wrecking Ball: How Martin Luther Dismantled the Three Walls of the Romanists, Eleanor Yates-McEwan
Honorees from 2021
Reconstruction’s Black Church and its Role in the Healing Process, Maya Drayton
Music as a Window to the Soul: The Story Behind My Senior Recital, Margaret Feder
A Call for Renewal: How the Creation and Promulgation of Nostra Aetate Transformed Catholic-Jewish Relations, Emma Grace Geckle
Natural Selection: The Eschatological Role of Nature in 1 Enoch and Snowpiercer, Emily Georgopoulos
The Argument of a Modern Psychopath: I See God on Sunday, Emily Rotunda
The Effects of Clerical Sexual Abuse on the God Question, Mira Wilson
