Meet Our Contributors

Katie Broussard

Katie Broussard is an artist and the illustrator of the award-winning picture books Audacious Ignatius, The Examen Book, I’m a Saint in the Making, and Sorin Starts a School. Katie teaches art and illustration to children and adults. She is also an astronomy enthusiast and completed an artist residency at the Vatican Observatory. Katie received undergraduate degrees in biology and theology from the University of Notre Dame, as well as a Masters in Education as an ACE Teaching Fellow. Katie lives with her family in Tampa and shares her work at katiebroussard.com.

William Gonch

William Gonch is an assistant professor of literature and director of the literature program at Ave Maria University. A scholar of 20th and 21st century American literature, his research addresses the creative exchange - the "translation" - between secular and religious styles and modes of imagination. He holds a Ph.D. in Literature from the University of Maryland and has served as the Cornerstone Fellow in English at The Catholic University of America. His work has appeared in Christianity and Literature, Authorship, The Hedgehog Review, The Claremont Review of Books, Public Discourse, and several other publications.

Sophia Guidici

Sophia M. Giudici is an emerging poet and artist currently living in Washington, D.C. while pursuing her MA/PhD in English literature at the Catholic University of America. Originally from New Jersey, she received her B.A. in English from Fordham University in 2019 and a Masters in Teaching at Montclair State University in 2021. She taught middle school before returning to her studies. She has been published in Vermillion, an online student journal, and Latin@ Literatures, an online journal.

Ellen Jewett

Ellen Jewett is a high school religion and ethics teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds two master’s degrees from Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University, including an advanced master’s in social ethics. Her academic work focuses on intersectional feminist ethics and theology and her current research project examines sexual violence as a form of soical sin. She also is involved in a variety of artistic pursuits, including creative writing, fiber arts, and music.

Lindsay Kennedy

Lindsay Kennedy is a playwright, theatre artist, and an Assistant Professor of Theatre at Benedictine College. She has been honored nationally for her work as a playwright and her work has been produced and developed across the US. Her creative works have been published in Theater in the Time of COVID: 50 Plays of Love, Loss and Hope, Their Own Devices: A Collection of Kansas City Playwrights, and Stage It, Stream It: Plays for Virtual Theatre, among others. She is a proud member of the Dramatists’ Guild and has an MFA in Playwriting from the Catholic University of America and a PhD in Early Modern Drama from Saint Louis University.

Michael P. Murphy

Michael P. Murphy is Director of Loyola’s Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage. His research interests are in Theology and Literature, Sacramental Theology, and the literary/political cultures of Catholicism—but he also thinks and writes about issues in eco-theology, Ignatian pedagogy, and social ethics. Mike’s first book, A Theology of Criticism: Balthasar, Postmodernism, and the Catholic Imagination (Oxford), was named a "Distinguished Publication" in 2008 by the American Academy of Religion. His most recent published work is a co-edited volume (with Melissa Bradshaw), this need to dance/this need to kneel: Denise Levertov and the Poetics of Faith (Wipf and Stock, 2019). He is currently at work on a monograph entitled The Humane Realists: Catholic Fiction, Poetry, and Film 1965-2020.

Rachel Nozicka

Rachel Nozicka completed her PhD in Literature at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in 2024. She specializes in 18th- and 19th-century British literature, aesthetics, and ethics. Her interdisciplinary work considers the way poetry communicates and fosters ethical thought and action.

Michael Petro, S.J.

Michael Petro, S.J. is currently serving as the Project Director of JRS Lebanon's new migrant programs in Beirut. He is a Jesuit in formation from the USA East province and grew up in the Boston area. His ministry as a Jesuit has focused on accompanying forcibly displaced persons, in contexts from migrant shelters and parishes to resettlement work and community centers. Michael holds degrees in Anthropology and Social Philosophy from Brown University and Loyola Chicago. His ongoing scholarship investigates relationships between sensory and subjective formation, forms of state and religious power and care, and the limits of ethical inclusion in humanitarian and border contexts.

Foster J. Pinkney

Foster J. Pinkney is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Chicago and received his Ph.D. in 2023 in the field of Religious Ethics. Working from a Christian humanist perspective, he uses hermeneutic theory, Black theology, and Stoic philosophy to reconceptualize the ethical demands of our social existence. He contends, as a project in Black Theological Ethics, that the uncovering of the Black self and the creative emergence of a Black epistemology hold radical possibilities for our moral conception of the human person. Foster is originally from Columbus, Ohio, and received his MA in Social Ethics from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York.

Jessica Schnepp

Jessica Schnepp earned a Ph.D. in English from the Catholic University of America in 2022 and is currently an assistant professor of literature at Ave Maria University. Her editing experience includes poetry editing for Paraclete Press, nonfiction book editing for authors published by major presses, and nonfiction editing for Magnify, AMU's student literary journal. She also leads online seminars on literature and popular culture for the Hank Center's Reading the Catholic Imagination summer seminar series.

Anh Tran

Anh Tran is theology teacher at Loyola Academy, a co-educational, Jesuit college preparatory high school in Wilmette, IL. He currently teaches Christian Life in Community and Faith & Justice for sophomore, junior high school students. In 2022, he completed his Master of Divinity and MA. in Pastoral Counseling at the Institute of Pastoral Studies from Loyola University Chicago. Growing up in Vietnam and having been living in the United States for 20 years, Anh appreciates his spiritual journey and the intersectionality of race, gender, and religious identities.

Jane Wageman

Jane Wageman is an MFA candidate in fiction writing at Bowling Green State
University and Hank Center Fellow through Loyola University Chicago. She
received an MA in English from the University of Notre Dame (2017) and an
M.Ed. from the University of Portland (2015). She currently works as the
managing editor for Mid-American Review.

Nathan Bradford Williams

Nathan Bradford Williams is a doctoral candidate in theological studies at the University of Toronto, and an affiliate of the Metropolitan Andrei Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies. His research interests include theological aesthetics, theologies of the arts, and Orthodox-Catholic dialogue, as well as the medical humanities in their intersection with pastoral care. He and his wife live in Nashville, Tennessee.

Matthew Zurcher, S.J.

Matthew Zurcher, S.J. is a Jesuit scholastic. He has formerly worked as a choral/orchestral conductor, live-in halfway house manager, school bus driver, nurse’s aide, high school English teacher, and death row chaplain. Matthew holds academic degrees from Carnegie Mellon University (BHA) and Loyola University Chicago (MA) and currently serves at Xavier University in Cincinnati as visiting faculty in the philosophy department and a campus minister in the Dorothy Day Center for Faith and Justice.