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In today’s episode, I talk with Elissa Cutter of Georgian Court University in Lakewood, NJ. I first met Elissa when we were undergrads at Georgetown University in Fr. Walsh’s Hebrew Scriptures seminar. In this conversation, we talk about her early interest in politics, stemming from growing up in a political family; her experience studying theology in France after the 9/11 attacks, and her work on feminist historical theology. Dr. Elissa Cutter is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Georgian Court University in Lakewood, NJ. She earned her BA in French and Theology at Georgetown University, her MA in Theology from the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, and her PhD in Theological Studies from Saint Louis University. Her research focuses on Mother Angelique Arnauld, the 17th century abbess and reformer at the convent of Port-Royal, as well as the wider Jansenist movement in France. She is also an editor at Women In Theology. I apologize that I didn’t have this episode out last month, but I was beset by illness that I’ve only recently come out of. I’m planning to release three episodes over the next two months to make up for the gap, so look forward to those.You can also see the full transcript for this episode below.Thanks as always to Matt Hines of the band Eastern Sea for providing the music for the Daily Theology Podcast.Transcript of Episode #52 - Elissa Cutter[Opening Music]Stephen Okey: Welcome to the Daily Theology Podcast, a podcast on the craft and vocation of theology.I'm your host, Stephen Okey.In today's episode, I talk with Elissa Cutter of Georgian Court University in Lakewood, New Jersey. I first met Elissa when we were undergrads at Georgetown University in Father Walsh's Hebrew Scriptures seminar.In this conversation, we talk about her early interest in politics stemming, from growing up in a political family; her experience studying theology in France after the 9/11 attacks; and her work on feminist historical theology.I apologize that I didn't have this episode out last month, but I was beset by illness that I am still coming out of, which you can perhaps hear in my voice. I'm planning to release three episodes over the next two months to make up for the gap. So look forward to those.I hope you enjoy the episode and thank you for listening.[Music Transition]Stephen Okey: Today for the Daily Theology Podcast, I'm talking with my friend, Elissa Cutter, from Georgian Court University in New Jersey. Elissa, thank you for being here.Elissa Cutter: Yeah. Thank you so much for inviting me.Stephen Okey: I like to begin by asking, how did you get into studying theology?Elissa Cutter: Yeah, thank you. Gosh, I feel like my story is, is very convoluted. And it is, you know, like so many others it was not my intention to study theology initially. I think I should start with a little bit of background, which is that my family was actually very involved in politics in Massachusetts.So, the closest person to me in this, as a kind of role model in this was my grandfather, and he had been Attorney General of Massachusetts, and he also ran against Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination for Senate.Stephen Okey: Wow.Elissa Cutter: And lost.Stephen Okey: Yeah, yeah, I figured.Elissa Cutter: Um, but that, that was actually a big thing, like, in the debate, he, there was this line, and I, I'm probably going to misquote it, but he basically said to him, if your name were Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, your candidacy would be a joke.And, yeah, so people felt bad for Kennedy, apparently. And, so, yeah, my grandfather lost. But it, so he wasn't just, I should note, my grandfather was also running a little bit on his name as well. His, um, uncle at the time was Speaker of the House of Representatives. So, like my family had been involved in politics for a while in Massachusetts.Stephen Okey: And these were the McCormacks?Elissa Cutter: Yes, these are the McCormacks. John W. McCormacks was Speaker of the House under Kennedy. And my grandfather's name was Edward. And I basically decided that I, I wanted to be the first female senator from Massachusetts. So shout out to Elizabeth Warren, who was the first female senator from Massachusetts.Um, but that was what I wanted to do, and so I decided to go to Georgetown. I wanted to be in DC, and I also went in as a French major because I was interested in kind of international stuff and I had been studying French for so long and I wanted to keep doing that, so those are, that's kind of the background.The very first semester I was at Georgetown, I was taking, the United States political systems class, which was the required class for the government major. And at the same time taking the kind of gen ed requirement of Problem of God, with, Father King. And the U.S. Political systems class, just bored me out of my mind.I very quickly decided that that was not going to be my path. And at the same time, I was so fascinated by, by Father King's class and the ideas that he was putting out in front of us. And I, I just, I wanted more of that. So initially I decided to do a theology minor along with my French major. But what happened was I, as a French major was planning to go abroad in my junior year, and one of the things that French major or language majors at Georgetown have to do is you have to reach a certain level in a second language as well.So I had been taking Brazilian Portuguese, because why not? And when I went to discuss studying abroad with my advisor, they basically said, Don't take language while you're abroad. So I had taken my sophomore year, I had done a year of Brazilian Portuguese. They were like, don't take language while you're abroad because, First of all, it's going to be the wrong kind of Portuguese.You're going to be doing Portugal Portuguese in France, and you don't want to be doing that. It'll kind of mess you up, but also, it'll be, you know, extra hard to take another language through, you know, something that's already a second language. Except that in order to graduate, I would have to pick up exactly where I left off when I came back.So, I was kind of freaking out with my roommates, like, I'm not going to be able to graduate because there's no way that I can do this, this is totally unreasonable of them. And one of my roommates said, why don't you just do a theology major? So, like, quite literally, this was like super practical considerations that actually made me a theology major.Stephen Okey: I don't hear that very often.Elissa Cutter: But I remember that moment though, weirdly enough, like she said that, and I just kind of like stopped my rant in the middle of our apartment. And it was like, yeah, like that makes sense. So I do feel like in some ways there was this like, providential hand guiding me along the way, and, you know, leading me to make all of these decisions.So, anyway, I ended up not going abroad for a whole year, as you know, because we were in classes together, because of 9/11. So I was actually originally supposed to fly out of Boston to go to France, like the Friday after 9/11, and at the time, the Boston airport was not going to be open, and it was not sure when it was going to be open, so there was no sense of, like, when I would actually be able to get to France.Stephen Okey: I mean, I think people forget that, like, all airspace was shut down for, like, four days after 9/11, and then, I mean, in D. C., it was several weeks, because I, I remember being on the lawn in front of Healy the first time we saw a plane fly over after 9/11, and you just saw everybody just stop and look, at what had previously been a very normal occurrence, like, you just learned to stop conversing with people when the planes flew over.Elissa Cutter: I know it was, it was such a wild experience. So Georgetown gave us the option of either waiting and going abroad whenever we could get there or coming back to campus. And I actually opted to come back to campus and then just go abroad for the spring semester.So, I mean, that was a, that was a huge effect, but I ended up coming back and taking a bunch of, you know, theology classes, which I think I was in with all of them with you at that time, and then I went abroad to France and in France as well I was also mostly taking theology classes.So there's actually an interesting thing I should add in here. So I was studying in Strasbourg, which is the only public university in France, which has a faculty of theology. The reason is that when France got rid of theology in all of their universities, Strasbourg was part of Germany, so, uh, you know, all of that weird history and back and forth of that area between Germany and France, it's now French, but, they still have a faculty of Catholic theology and a faculty of Protestant theology there.Stephen Okey: What was it like studying theology in France? I mean, even in Strasbourg, like, I imagine there was still some amount of, you know, the sense of laïcité and religious resistance and so forth.Elissa Cutter: Yeah, I mean I had classes with monks and nuns at the time, you know. So I had an ethics class that I took there, a class in the history of the liturgy, which was very hard to do through another language, I will say. Actually the class that inspired me most and this one's kind of interesting because it's what really led me on my path was not one of my theology classes, but I took a class in 16th and 17th century French literature. And in that class it was three hours every week, and the first hour was lecture, and then the second and third hours were like discussion section.And in the discussion section, we read Pascal's Pensées. And that was the only book that we read the whole semester. And, but here's, I know, but here's the interesting thing about that. So. It wasn't so much what kind of the teacher was teaching us about how to read the Pensées, but what I had learned about how to interpret texts from our Old Testament professor, Father Walsh.So he was super into language and like word choice and analyzing the meaning of words and I applied that to the Pensées and it just like opened it up for me. And I got really, really into that. And then basically when I came back from studying abroad, you know, I had had this experience of kind of only doing theology or practically only doing theology.And I was like, this is what I want to do all of a sudden. I just like the light went on and I decided, no, I don't want to do whatever else I had envisioned myself doing at that point. I don't even rememberStephen Okey: You had by this point long given up being the first female Senator from Massachusetts. Yeah.Elissa Cutter: Yeah. So I didn't want to go into politics anymore.I mean, this was also like, after, you know, the 2000 election. And I remember waiting up with people in Leavey watching the election results all night because it didn't end. So yeah, it was definitely a disillusionment point at some point in that whole process.But yeah, I, and then I went on and now I, I grew through Pascal, but weird other twists and turns that I don't need to go into necessarily. Now I study Jansenism and the Port Royal nuns, so.Stephen Okey: So beyond the lights coming on moment of encountering Pascal, what was it that made you, as someone coming out of, you know, a Jesuit University, and eventually, I mean, you went to St. Louis University for your doctorate program, also a Jesuit school, what was it that drew you to studying the Jansenists?Elissa Cutter: Well, it was definitely Pascal. I mean, that was the initial, the initial impetus. You know, it's, it's hard to remember, because I did my master's thesis on Antoine Arnault's early writings. And I, I don't entirely remember how I got onto that specific topic. I do remember reading, this is going to be a weird thing, but I, I read Dale Van Kley's book on the religious origins of the French Revolution.And there is this footnote that I've since pointed out to people that just really bothered me. And it's, it's funny cause it's just a footnote. But when he's discussing, some of the 18th century ideas, and he's saying that these ideas are Jansenist ideas, and there's this footnote that basically says, these may be more Gallican ideas than Jansenist, but at the time, Jansenism had been so radicalized that it's the same thing, or something like that.And I was like, no, it's not, those are two different things that were both present in France. But they're not the same. So you can't point to Gallican ideas. So I feel like I should explain what Gallicanism, okay. Yeah.Stephen Okey: And Jansenism for that matter.Elissa Cutter: Yeah. Okay. Well, so Gallicanism is this like particular view of the church in France, especially in early modern France, but kind of throughout French history, where it's not the Pope, it's the French Church that's in charge of the French Church. And there's different types of this, depending on who exactly you think has that responsibility, whether it would have been the king, the parliament, the bishops, there was also kind of a theological version of this as well, but that's basically the idea of Gallicanism.Jansenism is a little bit also more complicated, and I think that there's two things to distinguish. Which is, the movement and the theology. In terms of Jansenism, I define Jansenism according to basically three to five characteristics. I think I'm landing on five right now. These are, first, an Augustinian theology of grace.Second, a rigorist view of the sacraments, so especially in terms of kind of confession and being truly sorry for your sins and before you can take the Eucharist, so kind of abstaining from the Eucharist, because of that.And then conflict between the Jesuits and the Jansenists.Stephen Okey: So number one is Augustinian view of grace. Number two is a rigorist view of the sacraments.Elissa Cutter: Three is the hatred of the Jesuits. So but these also lead into other things, which is why I'm, I'm up to five characteristics now.So the combination of the Jansenist view of grace and the rigorist view of the sacraments led to a tendency for people to withdraw from the world, whether that was formally like the Port-Royal nuns into religious life, or like the, what were known as the Solitaires, which were the men who lived next to Port-Royal and kind of withdrew from their government service, which kind of pissed a lot of people off, who live semi-monastic life next to the convent in Port-Royal. So this tendency to withdraw from the world is a Jansenist characteristic.And then the fifth one is related to the Augustine aspect of it, which is the tendency to see the ideal of Christianity in the early church, or the example of the early church.Stephen Okey: That one sounds in particular why I think people sometimes see Jansenism as akin to some elements of the Protestant Reformation, which often had this very idealized or, or rose colored vision of the early church and the structure of the early church and the sense that that had just simply been, you know, corrupted by centuries of Rome and the papacy and, and, and councils as well.Elissa Cutter: Yeah, and the, the, I mean, there's other kind of complicated aspects related to that, and which is the, you know, the influence of Augustine was also another thing that is connected to, you know, people accuse them of being crypto Calvinist for their views that they took from Augustine, but also there's this complication with the Arnauld family that half of their relatives were actually Protestants.So the family at the center of the controversy, like, had that tangen…
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