By Anthony Barich
CAMPION College in Toongabbie, NSW will award a $5,000 Visiting Fellowship to encourage research in specialised collections of its library that delve into the intellectual life of a key but little-known figure in Australian Catholic history.
The Fellowship is part of Campion College gearing up for the launch of its Centre for the Study of Western Tradition in August with initiatives to boost engagement in Christianity’s intellectual heritage and liberal arts.
The Fellowship will facilitate scholarship in a figure whose intellectual engagement with his faith is “of immense value to Australian Catholic history” – Rev Dr Austin Woodbury SM (1899-1979).
Woodbury, who has been described as a “combative personality”, founded the Aquinas Academy in Sydney, a school of philosophy aimed mainly at lay people teaching a strictly scholastic philosophy based on the teaching of Dominican Doctor of the Church St Thomas Aquinas.
The Fellowship will also delve into Reformation figure St Edmund Campion, who was martyred for rejecting Anglicanism and refusing to renounce his Catholic faith.
The Fellowship grant for travel and accommodation over six to eight weeks next year will result in a seminar/conference paper being published. The recipient will also be expected to give a seminar at Campion and a guest lecture to undergraduate students. The deadline for applications is 1 September.
The St Edmund Campion Collection covers scholarship in the history of Catholicism in the British Isles from Henry VIII to the mid-19th century, including 16th century martyrs John Fisher, Thomas More, Edmund Campion and Margaret Clitherow.
It also includes the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 and the restoration of English hierarchy in 1850, including the works of Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, the first Archbishop of Westminster.
Campion’s library has a separate collection of recently beatified Cardinal John Henry Newman, a convert from Anglicanism, which includes a substantial range of primary sources.
The Austin Woodbury Collection, the only one of its kind in Australia, consists of uncatalogued notes, lecture material and unpublished works by Woodbury and also includes his private collection of Thomistic theology and philosophy.
The Centre will also offer an annual $2,000 sponsorship to support a conference, symposium or workshop relevant to the Centre’s research strands: Christianity in Australia, the Emergence of the Mediaeval World View through the Scholarly Examination of Primary Sources in the Original Language, Liberal Education in the 21st Century, the Development of European Scientific Thought and the Conceptualisation of Democracy and Freedom in the West.
The College also convened a workshop, gathering some of Sydney’s sharpest minds from several universities on 10 December to discuss the notion that virtues like wisdom and the ability to think critically should form the foundation of broad-based undergraduate degrees.
This concept, key to Campion as Australia’s only Liberal Arts college, has been supported recently by Vice Chancellors including Glyn Davis of Melbourne University, Australian Catholic University’s Greg Craven, Ed Byrne of Monash University and Steven Schwartz of Macquarie University.
The speakers lamented the decline in university curricula of the humane studies that underpin the tradition of liberal arts and the vocationally-oriented courses that they instead offer.
A variety of views were also voiced regarding the direction that tertiary institutions should take: that liberal arts certainly are valuable to a well-rounded education and the fostering of intelligent and productive citizens, but their implementation outside of private institutions, such as Campion College, and in Australia’s public universities, is increasingly becoming less likely.
The workshop included Gregory Melleuish (University of Wollongong), Geoffrey Sherington (University of Sydney), Bruce Marshall (Macquarie University) and John Gascoigne (University of NSW) who are familiar with changes in universities in recent years.
Another project fostering students’ appreciation of one of Western history’s most important philosophical works, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, has also proven successful, with over 20 second and third year students already signed up for a reading group run by the Centre facilitated by Campion Philosophy lecturer Dr Amitavo Islam over the next few months.
The programme aims to provide upper-level undergraduate students with an opportunity to reflect in depth, in a scholarly manner and in front of an audience, on Aristotle’s work.
The reading group and workshop will take place yearly and will focus on a different text each year.
For info about the Fellowship of the Centre for the Study of Western Tradition email its director, Dr Luciano Boschiero, on l.boschiero@campion.edu.au.