On November 12, 2021, the Office of Mission & Ministry at Georgetown University hosted a panel discussion in Dahlgren Chapel to celebrate the life and work of John O'Malley, SJ in light of his recently published memoir, The Education of a Historian: A Strange and Wonderful Story (SJU Press, 2021).

Joining Fr. O'Malley in this conversation were Prof. David Collins, SJ (Associate Professor of History, Georgetown University), Prof. Peter Phan (Ellacuria Chair, Georgetown University), and Prof. James Keenan, SJ (Canisius Professor, Boston College).

From the publisher, SJU Press:
"In this autobiographical memoir, John W. O’Malley recounts how his life-story is unintelligible apart from his craft as an historian and from the passion his craft inspired. The narrative is the straightforward story of how a young man of modest background from a small town in Ohio achieved international eminence as a historian of the religious culture of modern Europe. In some detail, therefore, this book tells how four of the twelve monographs that O’Malley published during his career had field-changing influence: Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome (1979), The First Jesuits (1993), Trent and All That (2000), and What Happened at Vatican II (2008). The book is, however, much more than a tedious review of scholarship. It teaches the reader lessons in historical method and lessons in what good history does for us. They are lessons easy to digest because they are taught not by abstract principles, but by following a historian in action as he learns in fits and starts how to interpret the past in ways that do less injustice to it than other ways."