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Notre Dame Department of History

Erasmus Institute

More about Jim Turner

Final faculty profile

His first book, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind, examined the 19th century animal protection movement in America and Britain, leading him to explore attitudes toward human nature of that time, and to consider the place of pain and suffering – as it changed in the 1800s from being part of the human condition to something best eliminated if possible, with the gradual refinement of anesthetics.

His next book, he says, was "an attempt to answer why, for the first time in Christian history, it became possible for a large number of people in the 19th century to not believe in God, why being agnostic became completely plausible, why many people thought religion was on the way out." Published in 1985, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America became the intellectual historian’s landmark study, earning him serious attention from scholars interested in the role of faith in higher education.

One of these was Notre Dame Provost Nathan Hatch, a fellow historian who has also written about the place of religion in American society. Hatch brought the Harvard-educated Texan to Notre Dame from the University of Michigan in 1995.

Two years later the University established the Erasmus Institute, named for the 16th century Catholic scholar and reformer, to reinvigorate the role of Catholic intellectual traditions in contemporary scholarship. Jim Turner, the unpretentious, easy-going scholar with Texas roots, who says he "writes books to solve problems, to answer questions," became its first director.

Until then, Turner’s pattern had been to take on topics that other scholars had not and then to move, book to book, from one subject to the next. But directing the Erasmus Institute has given the history professor new roles and responsibilities. "On the one hand," he says, "you’ve got a core tradition of being Catholic, developed since antiquity and still developing — doctrine and theology and reflections on matters of faith. And then over here you’ve got what goes on in the world — teaching children, building hospitals, getting a job, bombing Kosovo, putting criminals in jail. And too often what goes on in the inner circles of Catholic tradition is sealed off from what goes on in the everyday world."

The Erasmus Institute, Turner says, is a vehicle for "making connections between Catholic faith traditions and the ideas that govern how we live on a day-to-day basis" as well as with the largely secular world of academe, keeping a "treasure house of 2,000 years of very creative thinking" in dialogue with today’s intellectual currents.

While it is apparent Turner is committed to this enterprise, he is probably happiest buried in the archives, mining the past, then writing about his discoveries. His latest works: The Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton, a biography of the 19th century scholar and cultural critic, and (with co-author Jon H. Roberts) The Sacred and the Secular University, a study of how academic knowledge changed in America when its Christian framework dissolved.

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