Aug. 25, 2008
NOTRE DAME, Ind. – The Notre Dame Monogram Club this morning presented University of Notre Dame president Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., with an honorary monogram.
Current Notre Dame Monogram Club president Marc Kelly, Monogram Club first vice president Dick Nussbaum and Monogram Club executive director Jim Fraleigh made the presentation. It came in the Joyce Center Monogram Room following the athletics department’s opening-of-the-school year Mass conducted by Father Jenkins.
Among the approximately 200 recipients of honorary monograms include former Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, former Notre Dame president Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C, and former Irish football coaches Ara Parseghian and Lou Holtz.
Father Jenkins was elected president-elect of the University of Notre Dame by the Board of Trustees on April 30, 2004, and became the University’s 17th president on July 1, 2005. He served the previous four years as vice president and associate provost.
A professor of philosophy at the University, Father Jenkins was religious superior of the Holy Cross priests and brothers at Notre Dame from 1997 to 2000. As religious superior, he was a Fellow and Trustee of the University, but he relinquished those posts to assume his new duties in the provost’s office.
A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1990 and the recipient of a Lilly Teaching Fellowship in 1991-92, Father Jenkins teaches in the areas of ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of “Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas,” published by Cambridge University Press in 1997, and has had scholarly articles published in The Journal of Philosophy, Medieval Philosophy and Theology, and The Journal of Religious Ethics. He delivered the annual Aquinas Lecture at the University of Dallas in January 2000.
Father Jenkins holds two degrees in philosophy from Oxford University, where he earned his B.Phil. in 1987 and his D.Phil. in 1989. While at Oxford he taught as an adjunct professor in Notre Dame’s London program in 1988-89. He earned his master of divinity degree and licentiate in sacred theology from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley in 1988. Prior to joining the Congregation of Holy Cross, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy from Notre Dame in 1976 and ’78, respectively.
Father Jenkins was ordained a priest in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on campus in 1983. He served as director of the Old College program for Notre Dame undergraduate candidates for the Congregation of Holy Cross from 1991 to 1993.
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