R. Scott Appleby, the John M. Regan Jr. Director of the Kroc Institute, gave the commencement address and received an honorary doctor of laws degree May 14 at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota.

In awarding the degree, university officials specifically cited Appleby’s leadership at the Kroc Institute. They praised his “persistent voice for the role of religious understanding in building peace among peoples divided by religious and ethnic conflict.” The award also lauded Appleby’s work with Martin E. Marty on the five-volume Fundamentalism Project, a comprehensive resource on fundamentalism in major religious traditions.

A professor of history and member of the University of Notre Dame faculty since 1994, Appleby is a 1978 Notre Dame graduate and holds master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation and Church and Age Unite! The Modernist Impulse in American Catholicism, and coauthor of Transforming Parish Ministry: The Changing Roles of Clergy, Laity, and Women Religious. He also is editor of Spokesmen for the Despised: Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East and coeditor of Being Right: Conservative Catholics in America.