About

Welcome to the website of Michael J. Iafrate.

I am currently a doctoral student in theology at the University of St. Michael’s College in Toronto, Ontario and currently reside just outside of Morgantown, West Virginia. My master’s degree in theology is from Wheeling Jesuit University. I spent some time as a campus minister at Wheeling Jesuit University and West Virginia University. A basic C.V. can be found here.

In addition to this blog, I contribute to the blog of the Rock and Theology project (sponsored by Liturgical Press) and I was one of the founding members of Vox Nova which David Gibson named one of the ten best Catholic blogs and which was listed as a notable religion blog by The Immanent Frame.

I am also a singer-songwriter who has been performing for about 15 years in various bands such as The Minus Tide, COBRA, and M Iafrate & The Priesthood. An extensive (but probably not complete) discography is here.

My wife Emily and I welcomed our daughter into the world in October 2008 and the three of us share our home with a puppy named Paisley. Our two kittens, Dorothy and Dietrich, are currently living elsewhere.

My academic interests include ecclesiology, political and liberation theologies, religion and social movements, theology and (popular) culture, Appalachian studies, and theological method.

Some of my theological influences include:
(in alphabetical order)
Gregory Baum, Michael Baxter, Tom Beaudoin, Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Leonardo Boff, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Walter Brueggemann, Michael Budde, William Cavanaugh, James Cone, Lee Cormie, Dorothy Day, Enrique Dussel, Henri de Lubac, Ignacio Ellacuría, Neil Elliott, Jacques Ellul, Gustavo Gutierrez, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Horsley, Eugene McCarraher, Johann Baptist Metz, Ched Myers, Margaret O’Gara, Karl Rahner, Oscar Romero, Jon Sobrino, Kathryn Tanner, Mark Lewis Taylor, John Howard Yoder.

LICENSE

The text contained on this website (blog posts and essays) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Under this license, you are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work for non-commercial purposes so long as you attribute the work to Michael J. Iafrate and so long as you do not alter, transform, or build upon the text. View details of the license here.

CONTACT ME THIS WAY:

Facebook: click here
Academia.edu profile: click here
Postcolonial Theology Network profile: click here
Hate mail: imprimatur [at] catholicanarchy [dot] org
Mailing list: click here
Review inquiries: reviews [at] catholicanarchy [dot] org [view some of my book reviews here]

ON THE USE OF THE WORD ‘ANARCHISM’:

I am often asked to write a more elaborate statement of what “Catholic anarchism”—as it seems to me—is all about. Generally, I hesitate to do so as the relationship between the two is not fixed or final, but always moving and flexible. For now, I will point to the words of Dorothy Day who explained the use of the term in the Catholic Worker paper:

“The word anarchist is deliberately and repeatedly used in order to awaken our readers to the necessity of combating the ‘all-encroaching state,’ as our Bishops have termed it, and to shock serious students into looking into the possibility of another society, an order made up of associations, guilds, unions, communes, parishes, voluntary associations of men [sic], on regional vs. national lines, where there is a possibility of liberty and responsibility for all men.”

[Dorothy Day, Catholic Worker, December 1949, cited in Mark and Louise Zwick, The Catholic Worker Movement: Intellectual and Spiritual Origins (New York: Paulist, 2005).]