“The Lived Religion of Faith Communities” ft. the University of Scranton’s Michelle González Maldonado I Saturdays at Seven – Season Two, Episode Four

In the fourth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Michelle González Maldonado, Professor of Theology and Religious Studies and the Provost at the University of Scranton. Maldonado opens by discussing the history and theological significance of La Caridad del Cobre (or Our Lady of Charity) to the Cuban Catholic community. Embodied by a statue found floating in Cuba’s Bay of Nipe, La Caridad del Cobre initially came to represent the devotion of the island nation’s slave population. In time, she would become a national symbol and even a revolutionary symbol as Cuba fought for its independence against Spain. Maldonado discusses how her family’s own statue of La Caridad del Cobre was one of the few items her maternal grandmother brought with her when immigrating from Cuba to the United States in the 1970s. That statue would eventually pass to Maldonado’s mother and now to Maldonado where she proudly displays it in her home. Maldonado and Ream then talk about the role La Caridad del Cobre played in Maldonado’s own formation as a theologian as she made her way through graduate school, began her career on the faculty at Loyola Marymount University, and served as the theologian in residence at Guatemala’s San Lucas Mission. Maldonado then unpacks the years she spent at the University of Miami, the books she authored and edited, the origins of her calling to administrative service, and her growing desire to serve the Church through the Society of Jesus’s (or Jesuit’s) commitment to higher education. Maldonado closes by sharing how her understanding of the academic vocation developed over time and the ways she hopes the Jesuit charisms inform how the academic vocation is exercised at the University of Scranton.