TIM MULDOON
Research
My research focuses on two strands: philosophy of community and spiritual exercise.
Philosophy of community
From 2017 to 2020 (the pandemic year) I worked in the nonprofit world, dropping to part-time teaching while using the opportunity to learn about the ways that faith communities on the margins of US society leaned on their faith traditions and one another. During that work I encountered Mack McCarter, the founder and coordinator of Community Renewal International (CRI) in Shreveport, Louisiana. I led a team that was doing due diligence for our organization's annual award-- which Mack and CRI ultimately won. I was profoundly moved by the ways that CRI was transforming the social fabric of the city, overcoming years of discrimination, racism, and fragmentation through deliberate, sustained acts of caring friendship. I underwent what Lonergan calls an intellectual conversion.
​
I later reached out to Mack and asked who was writing the book about what CRI was doing, and said that if no one was doing it I would! The result was How to Remake the World Neighborhood by Neighborhood. I think of the book as a blueprint for social renewal based in systematic caring.
​
After that intellectual conversion, I've returned to some of my early training in the work of Bernard Lonergan, the philosopher-theologian whose life work was about social progress--what he described in an early paper as a Summa Sociologica. His biographer described his corpus as a two-volume organon, calling to mind the audacious re-visioning of human understanding wrought by Francis Bacon during the formative period that yielded modern science. I study the work of Lonergan today because I believe it gives us a way of explaining the profound promise of social change that our world desperately needs today.
​
In recent months I've presented at conferences and colloquia several draft papers centered around themes of social change, the healing minority, conversion and racism, and a spirituality of community. I consider these papers as sketches for a longer book-length treatment of a philosophy of community through reversal of decline and the possibility of social progress.
Spiritual Exercise
I first encountered spiritual exercises as an undergraduate student. Campion Hall, Oxford, offered the opportunity to meet with a spiritual director during Lent and to practice the exercises--meditations on texts from the Bible. I found the entire experience eye-opening. Not only were the meditations themselves profound experiences of self-knowledge and of opening oneself to the possibility of encountering God's grace; the conversations with a spiritual director, too, were unlike any other I'd previously experienced. The experience of being carefully listened to was moving and transformative.
​
About a decade later I published an adaptation of Saint Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises called The Ignatian Workout. It was--and is--an invitation to spiritual exercise, much like I experienced. Over the following two decades, I've had the great privilege to address many groups: lectures, retreats, and days of reflection for students, faculty, parents, social ministers, leadership teams, and many others. I continue my research on spiritual exercise, both as philosophical practice and as an opening of oneself to the possibility of grace "from elsewhere," as Jean-Luc Marion (my favorite guest at Fenway Park, great story) describes it.
More info
Please visit my Academia page, my PhilPeople page, my ORCID page, and my ResearchGate page for journal articles, and my books page for, well, books.