Woodstock Report | Father Langan on Board

Father John P. Langan, S.J., a pioneer of the Woodstock Theological Center and its approach to social and theological reflection, has returned as a member of Woodstock's board of directors.

A social ethicist with several positions and appointments at Georgetown University, Father Langan said that part of his focus as a board member will be Woodstock's role in furthering links between "the public world, Catholic social teaching, and the values of Jesuit spirituality."

Beginning in 1975, the Jesuit spent 20 years as a Woodstock senior fellow, including one year (1986-1987) as the Center's acting director. He contributed essays to one of Woodstock's signature works, The Faith that Does Justice, Examining the Christian Sources for Social Change, edited by John C. Haughey, S.J., a senior fellow then and now, and published in 1977 by Paulist Press.

Father Langan also served as co-editor of other Woodstock works, including Human Rights in the Americas: The Struggle for Consensus (Georgetown University Press, 1982), The American Search for Peace: Moral Reasoning, Religious Hope, and National Security (Georgetown, 1991), and Catholic Universities in Church and Society: A Dialogue on Ex Corde Ecclesiae (Georgetown, 1993).

Father Langan holds the Cardinal Bernardin Chair of Catholic Social Thought at Georgetown. A professor of philosophy, he is also on the faculty of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service and is a senior research fellow of the university's Kennedy Institute of Ethics. In June, he took on a new leadership role as rector of the Georgetown Jesuit Community.

In May, Father Langan moderated a Woodstock afternoon of conversation, "Forgiveness and Revenge, in Politics and Business," which served as the basis of an electronic occasional paper issued by Woodstock in September (an account of which appears in this issue).

At the time, he said by way of introduction, "Such essential themes inevitably become part of the theological story. They present ethical problems and they are embedded in Scripture and the whole history of Christianity. So they continue to be of great theological interest and appropriate for a theological center."