Romero Days 2025: The Future of Romero Studies

We stand at an exciting time in the study and reception of the witness of Óscar Romero. In the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of the 2000s, biographies, personal reflections, theological essays, devotionals, and collections of primary texts made Romero’s witness more accessible around the world. In the 2010s, we saw in increasing number of books that take Romero ever-more seriously as both bishop and a deep theological thinker: as someone, who in both life and word, offered a corpus worthy of critical engagement and creative reception, as someone who continues—if we would listen—to speak into the challenges we face today. All of this has set a foundation for the generative and open-ended time in which we find ourselves. Romero Days 2025 will gather leading scholars from around the world to discuss the most urgent needs and the field of Romero Studies going forward. What parts of his legacy remained underexplored by scholars? How can his vision of peace, justice, and Christian life speak into the problems we face today? What does it look like to move forward as a genuine community of scholars and practitioners? 

 

Cosponsored by the Cushwa Center and Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame

Sunday, March 23

Arrivals and welcome dinner for conference presenters


Monday, March 24

8:00-8:45am: Light Breakfast

9:00-9:10am  Welcome and Introduction –Todd Walatka

9:10-10:30am: Romero in Context

  • Carlos Colorado: "A Prophet In His Own Country: Reception of Romero’s Sainthood in El Salvador"
  • Laurel Potter: "'Los sin voz': recuentos eclesiológicos de las Comunidades Eclesiales de Base de El Salvador"
     

10:40am-12:00pm: Romero: History and Hope

  • Ramón Lara (Spanish): "Conocer a Romero como sacerdote para comprenderlo como obispo. Pistas para una martiropraxis"
  • Rodolfo Cardenal (Spanish): "Mons. Romero: el desafío de practicar la esperanza"


12:00-1:30pm: Lunch open to all attendees

1:30-2:50pm: Spirituality and Preaching 

  • Alma Tinoco Ruiz: "Oscar Romero’s Empathetic Witness: Demonstrating the Intertwining of the Pastoral and Prophetic in His Homilies"
  • Matt Ashley: "'No one can quench the life that Christ has resurrected':Oscar Romero's resurrection spirituality"


3:15-4:30pm: Book Launch Session: Óscar Romero and Catholic Social Teaching

  • Meghan Clark, José Henríquez, and Kevin Coleman 


5:15-6:15pm: Romero Martyrdom Anniversary Mass
All Saints Chapel, Jenkins Nanovic Halls

6:30-8:30pm: Invited Dinner


Tuesday, March 25

8:00-8:45am: Light Breakfast

9:00-10:30am: Receiving Romero Today

  • Liz Gandolfo: "Monseñor Romero and Maternal Affliction: Beyond a Spirituality of Martyrdom"
  • Michael Lee: Romero and Synodality
     

10:40am-12:00pm: Romero and Revolutionary Politics/Theology

  • David Lantigua: "Romero and the Question of Revolution, Then and Now"
  • Matthew Whelan: "Romero among the Liberation Theologians"
     

12:00-1:30pm: Lunch open to all attendees

1:30-2:50pm: Romero in Conversation

  • Kathryn Muensterman: "Vocation, Contemplation, and Action: Romero and the Christian Mystical Tradition"
  • Robert Hernández: "The Reciprocal Duality of Extremes in Óscar Romero’s Ecclesial Thought"
  • Emmanuel Ojeifo: "Óscar Romero and the Theology of Land in Africa Today"
     

3:15-4:30pm: Reflecting Together on the Witness of Romero

  • Led by Leo Guardado and Todd Walatka 


6:00-8:30pm: Reception and Dinner open to all

Speaker Bios

(more to come)
 

 

Rodolfo Cardenal, SJ
Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas

Rodolfo Cardenal, SJ, a Salvadoran born in Nicaragua, is the director of the Centro Monseñor Romero at the Universidad Centroamericana José Simeón Cañas in San Salvador, where he has held various administrative positions. A Jesuit priest, Cardenal is a professor of history and theology who has authored numerous books and articles on Rutilio Grande, Óscar Romero, the martyrs of El Salvador, the history of Central America, and the history of the Catholic Church.
 

 

Meghan Clark
St John’s University (New York)

Meghan J. Clark is a professor of moral theology at St John’s University, New York. Active as a public theologian, she is an expert in Catholic Social Teaching and has published extensively on the principle of solidarity. She is author of The Vision of Catholic Social Thought: the Virtue of Solidarity and the Praxis of Human Rights (Fortress Press, 2014) and co-editor of Public Theology and the Global Common Good: The Contribution of David Hollenbach (Orbis, 2106). In 2022, she was assistant coordinator for North America for the global theology project “Doing Theology from the Existential Peripheries,” a project of the Migrant & Refugee Section of the Holy See’s Dicastery for the Promotion of Integral Human Development.  A senior fellow at St. John’s Vincentian Center for Church and Society, Clark also serves as a faculty expert for the Holy See’s Mission to the United Nations.

Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo
Wake Forest University

Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo is the Earley Associate Professor of Catholic and Latin American Studies and associate dean for academic affairs at Wake Forest University School of Divinity. A constructive feminist theologian rooted in the Catholic tradition, her teaching and research places Christian theology in conversation with human resilience and resistance to vulnerability and violence, especially in contexts of social injustice and ecological degradation. Gandolfo’s most recent publications include Ecomartyrdom in the Americas: Living and Dying for Our Common Home (Orbis, 2023) and the co-authored book Re-membering the Reign of God: The Decolonial Witness of El Salvador’s Church of the Poor (Lexington, 2022, with Laurel Marshall Potter).

 

David Lantigua
University of Notre Dame

David Lantigua is associate professor of moral theology and christian ethics at the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in late scholastic moral and political thought and its place within the broader Catholic social tradition. He has two books related to this research: a monograph on early modern Spanish theological contributions to international legal thought and the other a documentary reader with new translations of writings from Dominican friar and advocate of indigenous peoples, Bartolomé de las Casas. His work also considers the ongoing Latin American critical theological engagement with global human rights discourse.

 

Ramón Lara
Escuela Teológica de la Universidad Don Bosco

Ramón Obdulio Lara Palma is a professor at the Theological School of the Escuela Teológica de la Universidad Don Bosco (San Salvador) and at the Seminario Mayor San Óscar Arnulfo Romero (Santiago de María). A native of El Salvador and ordained a diocesan priest in 2001, he has been parish vicar at San Carlos Borromeo and parish priest at San Alejo, both located in La Unión in eastern El Salvador. He studied dogmatic theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University (Rome) and holds a PhD from Catholic University of Louvain. His work appears in such publications as Salmanticensis (Salamanca, Spain), Teoría y Praxis (San Salvador), Latin American Journal of Theology (San Salvador).

 

Laurel Marshall Potter
University of St. Thomas (Minnesota)

Laurel Marshall Potter is assistant professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota. Working between systematic and constructive theology, she studies the contemporary development of NuestrAmerican liberation theologies toward intercultural, interreligious, and decolonial horizons, with a current focus on the extraordinary liturgical expressions of Ecclesial Base Communities in El Salvador today. Potter's work has appeared in several academic and public-facing publications, including the co-authored book Re-membering the Reign of God: The Decolonial Witness of El Salvador's Church of the Poor (Lexington Books, 2022, with Elizabeth O'Donnell Gandolfo).