By Bishop James Conley
Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman, the 38th and newest Doctor of the Catholic Church and co-patron of Catholic education with St. Thomas Aquinas, was born Feb. 21, 1801. To mark the 225th anniversary of Newman’s birth, this past Saturday, I celebrated a Mass at St. Thomas Aquinas, the Newman Center on the campus of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
On this occasion, we also celebrated the 10th anniversary of the establishment of the Newman Institute of Catholic Thought and Culture at the Newman Center on the UNL campus. Funded by the generous proceeds of the Joy of the Gospel capital campaign, we launched the Newman Institute in the spring semester of 2016 with its first “great books” course, “Gold from Egypt,” taught by patristics scholar John Pepino, PhD.
When Newman converted to the Catholic Church in 1845, he had to leave his beloved Oxford University where he had attended as an undergraduate, doctoral student and eventually a full professor and tutor. At that time, Oxford would not allow Catholic students to attend, let alone a convert-professor. But Newman’s dream, which never materialized, was to return to Oxford as a Catholic priest and to establish a center for Catholic students, where they could attend a large public university and be exposed to a wide array of academic disciplines, and have a place to come and be around other fellow Catholic students, to pray and worship, build friendships and their Catholic imagination, and be immersed into the great Catholic intellectual tradition, through the truth, goodness and beauty of the arts, literature and music.
Newman never lived to see that dream come to fruition, but today there are scores of Catholic Newman Centers all over the world. When I came to the Diocese of Lincoln and discovered that the diocese already had a very successful and robust Newman Center, it became my dream to establish an intellectual and cultural institute that could complement the tremendous work that was already going on at 17th and Q streets in downtown Lincoln. In 2014, when the decision was made to build a new Newman Center, and about the same time when the diocese launched the Joy of the Gospel capital campaign, I was inspired to begin this new initiative.
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SNR photos | Natalie Bender. Click for more photos
It was about this time that I invited my good friend of happy memory, Dr. Don Briel, a great Newman scholar, and the founding director of the Catholic Studies Institute at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minn., and considered the “father” of Catholic studies programs in the United States, to come to Lincoln to help us to begin the process of a establishing a center. Father Robert Matya, then the pastor of the Newman Center, was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea, and together we formed a planning committee.
It was at one of those first planning meetings in 2014, when we were brainstorming what to call the institute, that Dr. Briel said, “why not call it the Newman Institute of Catholic Thought and Culture?” The name stuck and the idea became a reality.
In the spring of 2015, around the time the new Newman Center was dedicated, I named Msgr. Daniel Seiker to be the interim director of the Newman Institute, until we could hire a full-time director. In the fall of 2015, we had our first “Reborn in Wonder” lecture series, featuring Dr. R.R. Reno, Dr. John Freeh and Dr. John Pepino.
Later that year we hired Dr. Freeh, an Oxford-trained humanities professor from Wyoming Catholic College to be the first director of the Newman Institute of Catholic Thought and Culture. If it were not for Dr. Freeh’s energy, creativity, and zeal for the mission, I’m not sure we would have gotten the institute up and running so quickly.
In a unique collaboration between the Newman Center, the University of Nebraska and St. Gregory the Great Seminary in Seward, we are able to offer college level courses in the humanities that students can apply as ACE credit courses toward their undergraduate degrees. John served as director until he and his wife Helen and their three children moved to New Mexico to pursue other endeavors.
With the departure of Dr. Freeh in the summer of 2021, by God’s providence I discovered that Patrick Callahan, a former University of Dallas undergrad student of mine from my days as the UD Rome campus chaplain, had been serving as the director of the Humanitas Program at my alma mater, the University of Kansas, a program similar to ours, and was interested in what we were doing at UNL. I manage to persuade Patrick to move to Nebraska from Kansas with his wife Eleise and their four young children. Patrick has completed his fifth year as the director of the Newman Institute and has taken the institute to the next level.
Ten years after offering its first Great Books course, the Newman Institute has grown quite a bit. What started with a group of six students in a single class in the spring of 2016 has flowered into a program of for-credit and non-credit courses, pilgrimages, reading groups, lecture series, and retreats that has served many—including 400 students in 2026 alone.
This spring at the Newman Center, Callahan is capping off the fourth in the core sequence of Great Books courses for students at the UNL Newman Center. Father James Morin (vice chancellor and teacher at St. Gregory the Great Seminary) is teaching a for-credit elective on the sacramental worldview of the Church Fathers, also at the Newman Center. Logan Burda (of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students) has followed up his keynote address at FOCUS’ annual SEEK conference to packed classes for his two non-credit courses: Catholic Literature, History, & Saints and Bible Basics. The latter class is especially helpful in equipping students leading Bible studies on campus.
Max Chapman, founder and executive director of More Mercy, is teaching a short course, “May They Be One,” which takes up the theme pastor Father Ryan Kaup chose for the Newman Center this year and equips students in the work of restoring Christian unity.
Each fall, the Newman Institute offers its “Called 2 Greatness” program, a series of classes on virtue and leadership, to pledges at two fraternity houses. The program started and continues with Farmhouse fraternity in collaboration with Dr. Tom Field of UNL’s Engler Agribusiness Program. It expanded a few years ago to Phi Kappa Theta, the Catholic fraternity on campus. In addition to instruction, students meet in small groups to hold each other accountable in growing in virtue and volunteer 20 hours of service to local nonprofits to practice servant leadership.
In addition to classes, the Newman Institute holds its summer and winter book clubs, keeping students active and engaged with the Catholic intellectual tradition between semesters. Participation averages around 50 students. Notes and discussion questions keep students connected during break and they gather for a meal and discussion at the start of each semester. This January, students met to discuss Graham Greene’s “The Power and the Glory.”
Book clubs during the semester are run in conjunction with the UNL Chapter of the Thomistic Institute. For the spring of 2026, students are meeting biweekly to read and discuss the short stories of Flannery O’Connor.
Through partnership with the Thomistic Institute, two to three lectures are offered on campus each semester. Earlier this February, Dr. Michael Foley of Baylor University gave a lecture to a standing-room-only audience. The Institute’s director, alongside Dr. Geoffrey Friesen of UNL, serves as an advisor for the UNL Chapter of the Thomistic Institute.
Another exciting addition to the Newman Institute’s program this year comes through its participation in the In Lumine Network. This network of 13 Institutes and Centers of Catholic Intellectual formation at non-Catholic schools is operating a three-year, $2.1 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The Newman Institute’s portion of the grant covers a monthly series of lunch lectures with local university faculty, an expansion of the Institute’s Called 2 Greatness program, weekend colloquia, and an annual lecture series.
Outside of the Newman Center, Mark Hansen and Logan Pfeiffer, English faculty at Pius X High School in Lincoln, are giving students a jump start in the college Great Books experience with eight sections of dual-credit courses. The program, a collaboration between the Newman Institute, St. Gregory the Great Seminary, and Pius X High School, offers juniors and seniors the opportunity to receive three hours of college credit for either Classic Literature 1 or Classic Literature 2, where students read and discuss in seminar authors of monumental works such as Homer, Shakespeare, and Dante as well as study short lyric works of poetry that are all part of the Great Books tradition.
This past Saturday, we had former students, benefactors and current students join in the 10th anniversary of the Newman Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture. After the Mass in the Lady Chapel of the Newman Center, we assembled in the atrium for drinks and then enjoyed a lovely catered meal in Rosary Hall, where we enjoyed a brilliant lecture by Dr. Andrew Sealy, former tutor for three decades at Thomas Aquinas College in Santa Paula, Calif., and currently a professor at the Augustine Institute in St. Louis and the president and co-founding director of the Boethius Institute, a fellowship of master teachers of traditional liberal education devoted to continuing and deepening that tradition through teaching, mentoring, speaking, writing, providing resources and collaborating with like-minded institutions.
Needless to say, my heart sings with gratitude to God for what he has done over these past 10 years, and I look forward to where he will lead the institute in the next 10 years. With our two co-patrons of Catholic education, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John Henry Newman, I have no doubt great things are in store!
St. John Henry Newman, pray for us!
St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for us!
