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Catholic Vote 2020: How Will Faith be a Factor?

Catholic Vote 2020: How Will Faith be a Factor?

At roughly 23% of the population, Catholics are the second largest religious voting bloc in the U.S. They are particularly relevant because of Biden's Catholic faith and the issues in play with the SCOTUS vacancy. Still, Catholics are too large to consider as a monolithic group and are split on the candidates and the issues. Given these realities, what deeper distinctions can we draw about voters, faith, and politics? 

 
This event was co-sponsored by the Mundelein College Alumnae Association.
 
October 28, 2020
7:00 - 8:30 PM CDT
 
Panelists
Professor Cathleen Kaveny, a scholar who focuses on the relationship of law, religion, and morality, serves as the Darald and Juliet Libby Professor at Boston College, a position that includes appointments in both the department of theology and the law school. She is the first faculty member to hold such a joint appointment. A member of the Massachusetts Bar, Professor Kaveny clerked for the Honorable John T. Noonan Jr. of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and practiced health care law for three years before turning to higher education. She was the 2018-2019 Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History at the Kluge Center of the Library of Congress. Among her books are Prophecy without Contempt: Religious Discourse in the Public Square (Harvard University Press, 2016) and Ethics at the Edges of Law: Christian Moralists and the American Legal Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018).  
  Matthew Sitman is the associate editor of Commonweal. He writes regularly for Dissent, where he also serves on the editorial board, and his work has been published at The New Republic, The Bias, and other publications. He is the co-host of Know Your Enemy, a podcast about American conservatism. Follow him on Twitter @matthewsitman.  
 
Kenneth Woodward served as Religion Editor of Newsweek for 38 years, during which he reported on a wide variety of subjects from seven continents. In addition to some 100 cover stories and 700 other articles for Newsweek, he has published essays, articles and book reviews in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Commonweal and First Things, among other publications. He has contributed authoritative essays to The Encyclopedia of Protestantism and The New Dictionary of the History of Ideas.
 
Among his awards are the National Magazine Award, the Pulitzer Prize of the magazine industry, and the Robert E. Griffin Award for Outstanding Achievements in the Art of Writing from the University of Notre Dame, his alma mater. He holds five honorary degrees.

Mr. Woodward is the author of four books, including his recently published Getting Religion: Faith, Culture and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Ascent of Trump. He has lectured at some 70 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Europe. He has been a Fellow of the National Humanities Center and a Regents Lecturer in Religion at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He currently serves as Writer-in-Residence at the Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago.