Experience Father Hesburgh's life story in his own words in God, Country, Notre Dame.

As an adviser to presidents, special envoy to popes, theologian, author, educator, and activist, Father Hesburgh was considered the most influential priest in America for decades. His autobiography brings his phenomenal accomplishments to readers with his own voice and personal perspective. Father Hesburgh recounts his family history, describing the people who helped make him the man he became, as well as his own childhood and adolescence. He tells stories of his time at Notre Dame all the way to his retirement. This is essentially a memory book, he explains in the acknowledgements, and there is no better way to get to know the incredible man he was and the legacy he created.

Experience Father Hesburgh's life story in his own words in God, Country, Notre Dame.

As an adviser to presidents, special envoy to popes, theologian, author, educator, and activist, Father Hesburgh was considered the most influential priest in America for decades. His autobiography brings his phenomenal accomplishments to readers with his own voice and personal perspective. Father Hesburgh recounts his family history, describing the people who helped make him the man he became, as well as his own childhood and adolescence. He tells stories of his time at Notre Dame all the way to his retirement. This is essentially a memory book, he explains in the acknowledgements, and there is no better way to get to know the incredible man he was and the legacy he created.

The warm and moving story of one of the greatest religious and secular leaders of our time.

...the riveting story of an incredible man who made an enormous impact on history and lived his dream. --Ann Landers

What we read in the newspapers each day and what we consider to be world trends in the last decade do not leave much room for enthusiasm or hopefulness. It is easy for Americans--idealists and realists alike--to fall into despairing attitudes of cynicism, hopelessness, and laissez-faire. Father Hesburgh is a living antidote to this failure of spirit, through the work of his own busy and effective life--one devoted to improving the conditions under which we all live. In this book he offers an agenda of hope and maps out the areas in which belief and action might unite and bring about a better world.

Beginning with an apologia for the active life in the Catholic faith, Father Hesburgh moves on to matters of world religion, stating a strong case for world ecumenism. He faces the promises and challenges of bringing human dignity and civil rights from formula to actuality and shows that a humane life in the next millennium requires solutions to problems of population growth, food, overcrowding, and world education. He then sketches a new world alignment which would place the great powers in cooperation with each other and would make them recognize the importance of the underdeveloped half of the planet--the southern hemisphere.

The book ends with a ringing exhortation to world citizenship. Father Hesburgh has the broadest possible vision of what it is to be a person in this world, and what is required of all toe create in the new century a unified life for each person and a truly united world. Everyone who reads this book will come away with a deepened and humanized perspective on life today and in the future.

Contemporary Catholic higher education finds itself at a crucial crossroad. The issues are many and complex. How is the Catholic character of the university to be preserved and fostered while avoiding secularization on the one hand and insular sectarianism on the other? Must a majority of the faculty in a college or department be Catholic? How is Catholic to be defined in terms of culture, belief, or practice? What is the level of commitment to intellectual inquiry and the possibility of dissent that must be present on a Catholic campus? These are some of the issues that prompted Fr. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C., to write a position paper and invite 29 distinguished members of the faculty and administration at the University of Notre Dame to address as they strive to envision and create a great Catholic university. The contributors explore these issues from a wide variety of religious and academic perspectives, and although their backgrounds and fields of study differ widely, they agree on a number of points. First, a great Catholic university must begin by being a great university that is also Catholic. Second, the catholicity, or universality, of a Catholic university fosters the centrality of philosophy and particularly theology as legitimate intellectual concerns, especially as they challenge the disintegration and turmoil of our modern predicament. Finally, how a Catholic university is seen as a community of service is also examined in both its intellectual and practical applications. Throughout, these essays describe a university community where reason and faith intersect and reinforce each other as they grapple with all the problems that face the transmission and growth of knowledge and the multiplication of new and complex moral problems.