Augustine J. Curley, O.S.B.
Adjunct Professor of Theology
School of Theology
I am a Benedictine monk of Newark Abbey who serves the community as prior and archivist. I also teach in our high school, St. Benedict's Prep.
I received my Ph.D. in philosophy at Boston College, writing my dissertation on Augustine of Hippo's Contra Academicos.
I have always had an interest in local history, and lately I have been researching and writing on the history of the Catholic Church in New Jersey, as well as on the Irish community of Essex County, focusing on the community in Belleville, where my earliest maternal ancestors settled in the 1820s. I am currently writing a history of St. Mary's Church at Newark Abbey, the parish that launched three monasteries (St. Mary's Abbey, Morristown; Newark Abbey, Newark; and St. Anselm Abbey, Manchester, New Hampshire) and that played a significant role in representing the Catholic Church in Newark over the years, particularly during the tumultuous period of the 1960s and 1970s.
I have been a member of the New Jersey Catholic Historical Commission for more than 25 years.
Education
- Ph.D., Boston College
- M.A., Seton Hall University
- B.A., Assumption College
Scholarship
“The Community and the community: The Newark Benedictines and the Changing Relationship to African Americans.” U.S. Catholic Historian, 35:4 (Fall 2017), 133-61.
“The Responses of Three Catholic Communities in Early New Jersey to the Lack of Priests,” in Carl Ganz, ed., Essays on New Jersey Catholic History: In Commemoration of the 350th Anniversary of the founding of the New Jersey Colony. [South Orange: New Jersey Catholic Historical Commission], c2016.
Augustine's Critique of Skepticism: A Study of Contra Academicos (New York: Peter Lang, 1996).
New Jersey Catholicism: An Annotated Bibliography. South Orange, NJ: New Jersey Catholic Historical Records Commission, 1999. (Published
with a grant from the New Jersey Historical Commission.)
Ten articles in Maxine Lurie and Marc Mappen, eds., The Encyclopedia of New Jersey (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004).
“The 1854 Attack on Saint Mary’s Church, Newark: A Typical Know-Nothing Incident,”
American Benedictine Review, 64:1, December 2010, pp. 387-406.
“Nativists in Newark: Radical Protestant Reaction to the Appointment of a Catholic
Bishop,” New Jersey History [online journal], 127:1 (2012).
“The Irish in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark,” in Marta Deyrup and Maura
Grace Harrington, eds., The Irish American Experience in New Jersey and Metropolitan New York: Cultural Identity,
Hybridity, and Commemoration (New York: Lexington Books, 2013).