DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

Michelle Molina (PhD, University of Chicago, 2004) studies globalization in the early modern period through the lens of a missionary order, the Society of Jesus. Throughout her career, the Society of Jesus has been very “good to think” about the ways in which a globalizing Catholicism shaped early modern lives, institutions, and concepts. She has explored Jesuit spirituality in an effort to understand how individuals – both elite and commoner -- approached and experienced religious transformation. In her first book, To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and the Spirit of Global Expansion (University of California Press, 2013) she examined the impact of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises – a meditative retreat geared toward self-reform – on early modern global expansion. Here she studied the impact of this Jesuit program of radical self-reflexivity on the formation of early modern selves in Europe and New Spain.  The book offers a novel retelling of the emergence of the Western concept of a “modern self” by demonstrating how the struggle to forge and overcome selves was enmeshed in early modern Catholic missionary expansion.

Having studied Jesuit global expansion, Molina next turned her attention to a period of “contraction” for Catholic missionary evangelicalism.  Her next book, titled Inventories of Ruin: The Demise of the Mexican Jesuits, in Three Acts (Fordham University Press, 2026) treats the expulsion of the Jesuits from Mexico in 1767. To tell the story of the arrest, migration, and ultimate dissolution of this powerful organization of missionary men, she juxtaposes three sets of “inventories.” The first list is composed by a notary, who marks the books and things found in the rooms of the Jesuits at a college in Puebla de Los Angeles when they were arrested at dawn on June 25, 1767. The second is a conversion narrative or an “inventory of the self” composed by a Swedish convert who encounters the Mexican Jesuit refugees while shipboard on the Mediterranean Sea. The last is an inventory of the dead written by an exiled ex-Jesuit in Bologna, Italy, whose necrology memorializes the life and death of each of his brethren from the now defunct Mexican Province. The Society of Jesus has been dismantled, but an idealized Mexican Province is held together in the pages of this manuscript. Two narrative arcs drive Inventories of Ruin. The first emphasizes the story of the complete ruination of the Mexican Jesuits.  In a “before-and-after” argument, she describes the breadth and depth of Jesuit power in New Spain to make vivid how their world disintegrates as they move across space and through time in the Atlantic world in the years 1767 to 1815.  This is an argument about the disappearance of Jesuit ways of being.  A second tightly related but separate narrative arc pertains to how this story of ruination appears in the archives.  

Molina thinks not only about the history of globalization, but also how including Catholicism in the story changes how we ought to theorize globalization.  She has anchored her research in the history of colonialism and the history of religion because these subfields license the kind of deep interdisciplinarity combining history, philosophy, theology, and critical theory that has become a hallmark of her scholarship and that also underwrites her approach to teaching. 

Her latest research focuses on Catholic materiality. The study of Jesuit material remains offers new insights about colonial silver altarware and is a good example of the theoretical engagements that animate her current work (namely, theopolitics, material relationality, sacramental logics, and mobility). In sum, her intellectual queries are grounded in a deep historical understanding of Latin America’s place in the early modern global world, yet she brings that to bear upon a modern understanding of how mobile religious actors continue to shape an interconnected Global South. 

Occasionally, Molina emerges from the early modern period to bear witness to events in her own era. Molina has observed that it is best to situate the recent Jesuit pope, Francis, in relation to the modes of self-formation found in the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and, importantly, that this Catholic imperative to “know thyself” indicates that Pope Francis was well versed in what has been termed “philosophy as a way of life.” 

In her teaching, she offers a graduate seminar on embodiment, materiality and affect.  For undergraduates, her courses include a research seminar on refugees, migration, and exile; an introduction to religious studies theories and methods; the study of the problems of race and religion in Latin America; as well as a course on religion and existentialism in mid-20th century film.