Professor Mary Katherine Tillman, RIP

While I learned of Father Ian Ker's death on the very day, I just found out about the death of another Newman Scholar, Professor Emerita Mary Katherine Tillman of the University of Notre Dame. She died on October 21 of complications associated with esophageal cancer and her funeral Mass was celebrated at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame on Friday, October 28. Her obituary, posted by the University of Notre Dame is found here. The South Bend Tribune obituary adds the detail that she married another Professor Emeritus just 12 years ago and that she and her husband, Phillip Sloan, resided in Holy Cross Village at Notre Dame, a senior living community sponsored by the Holy Cross Brothers. 

The Notre Dame obituary highlights her study of Newman:

Tillman was a scholar of St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, writing a book and several extended commentaries on the works of the 19th-century English priest, as well as the history and philosophy of liberal education.

She published widely in scholarly journals and gave lectures throughout the U.S. and Europe, and in 2019 received the Gailliot Award for Lifetime Achievement in Newman Studies from the National Institute for Newman Studies.

According to my records, she visited Wichita twice to give presentations on Newman, focusing on university education and the relationship between faith and reason. In 1995 at the Newman School of Catholic Thought at the Newman Center at WSU, she provided a comprehensive explanation of the works Newman wrote during his "campaign in Ireland" to establish the Catholic University in Dublin, describing how they help us see how he realized his notional ideas of university education, thus demonstrating the "unity of idea and image" in his reflections on education. Tillman provided an overview of Newman's Idea of a University, and the Rise and Progress of Universities, the first presenting the idea, the second the image through descriptions of places of universal knowledge in Athens, Paris, and Oxford, among others. She also spoke on Faith and Reason at that 1995 Newman School of Catholic Thought, in which she compared Newman's Grammar of Assent and Fifteen University Sermons, noting of the latter that they sowed "the seeds of all Newman's future writings".

And she wrote the introductions for critical editions of the Fifteen Sermons and the Rise and Progress of Universities.

In 1998, she presented a lecture at Newman University on "Catholic Higher Education at the Millennium". I know that I attended that lecture but I have no surviving notes from it.

And in 2015, Marquette University Press published a collection of her works on Newman titled John Henry Newman: Man of Letters.

In this collection of essays spanning thirty years of her work in Newman Studies, Tillman elaborates the broad reach of Newman's philosophical, educational, historical and classical acumen. Attentive to his philosophical methodologies and to recent Newman scholarship, she compares Newman's views on a wide range of issues with those of other thinkers, classical and modern. Included in the essays are such topics as Newman's meaning of 'views', of relations between faith and reason, of imagination, on the college in relation to the university, on research, on whether virtue can be taught, on the development of ideas, on prepredicative experience and on phronesis, on 'the gentleman' in relation to the Oratorian, on human nature, and on worldly wisdom in relation to holy wisdom. Newman, Man of Letters, is seen as unique in his prolific and wide-ranging genius.

Eternal rest grant unto her O Lord and may her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in peace. And may she rest in peace.