“The Newman Foundation has given so much support to the music program at my local Newman Center. Participating in liturgy through music ministry helped invigorate my faith.”
“I am so thankful to Newman Foundation for the many service and educational opportunities they provided. My college experience would not have been the same without it, and because of their devotion I still continue to serve at my college parish and have decided to raise my family here.”
“I have been a part of my Newman Center community for 22 years and still consider myself as such even after moving away for grad school. That community provided me with a second family. Through the generous help of Newman Foundation, Inc. I have grown in my faith through music, which amplified my spiritual experience and allowed me to give back to my community.”
“Newman Foundation has always been a staple of my community. The organization always represented a humble, active group of people who worked to bridge the space between the college community and greater Lexington.”
Philipp Rosemann
Cottrill-Rolfes Chair in Catholic Studies
College of Arts & Sciences
University of Kentucky
The University of Kentucky has a Chair of Catholic Studies!
The College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky welcomes Philipp Rosemann as the new Cottrill-Rolfes Chair in Catholic Studies. He will begin teaching in the Department of Philosophy in January 2023. Prof. Rosemann has pursued high and varied academic ventures, from the time of his undergraduate studies at a German university, with triple qualifications in Philosophy, English Linguistics, and Islamic Studies. He holds a number of international degrees: an M.A. from Ireland, a Licentiate and Ph.D. from the Université catholique de Louvain, and, in 2020, a D.Litt. (the European “higher doctorate”) from the National University of Ireland. He is also an elected member of the Royal Irish Academy. Upon completion of his doctorate, he taught at the Uganda Martyrs University, before going to the University of Dallas, where he was on the faculty for twenty years, with an interlude at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. He established the publication series Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations, which has published twenty-six volumes to date under his oversight, with many more commissioned. Notably, these are not texts in the typical “canon” taught to previous generations, but texts that deserve wider attention, including texts by women and translated by women. While at the University of Dallas, he led a successful initiative for academic exchanges with the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México, which, in addition to bringing students from Mexico to Dallas for graduate studies, produced an annual conference held alternately in Dallas and Mexico City. In 2018, he took the position of Chair of Philosophy and Head of Department at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His list of publications is extensive: it includes six single-authored books, many of them widely reviewed as monumental, and nine co-authored or co-edited volumes. He writes in three languages.
Philipp Rosemann’s work is both profound and accessible. In addition to his studies of several medieval centuries of writings that were formative for Catholic traditions, he writes about the work of contemporary philosophers—especially Heidegger and Foucault, whose work has touched all disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences. His writing applies these philosophical approaches to central questions in Catholic thought and tradition, probing especially the condition of Catholicism in a modern, secularized world. Lately he has been working on topics related to religion and the environment. His teaching explores questions such as the relationship between truth and time, the nature of language, the possibility of religious faith in the age of technology, mysticism as a source of religious knowledge, the impossibility of describing God, and many more. We welcome his invitation for us to engage in deeper reflection on faith, meaning, and the world around us.