Susanne Jennings is an alumna of Cambridge University, where she read Theology. She is also an alumna of the Margaret Beaufort Institute and the Woolf Institute. Postgraduate degree study included doctoral work on former Anglican clergy who had left the Church of England to become RC priests in the years following the ordination of women (Conversion & Change: an analysis of the relationship between the former Anglican clergy and a changing Catholic Church). She also engaged in English Literature and Jewish-Christian studies, which resulted in an interdisciplinary Master’s dissertation entitled Priests & Rabbis: Issues of Identity and Religious Authority in 19th Century English Literature ca 1828-1858. Through close analysis of literary case studies, a common theme emerged in the way Jews and Catholics were pejoratively depicted as objects worthy of national suspicion in the person of the priest and the rabbi.
Susanne has a background in academic librarianship at Cambridge and in teaching. She previously taught courses in London on Judaism and the Abrahamic faiths and was a tutor at Maryvale Pontifical Institute for the BA degree in applied theology. She has also worked for the Roman Catholic Diocese of East Anglia with special responsibility for education, liturgy and interfaith. Current work includes tutoring students from the UK, South Korea and China in English Literature, Theology and Religious Studies.
As the present editor of The Merton Journal, Susanne has a longstanding interest in the thought, work and contemplative practice of the late Trappist monk and writer, Thomas Merton. In 2022, she co-led a Margaret Beaufort Institute study day on Thomas Merton and Abraham Heschel with Dr Melanie-Prejean Sullivan. Research for an article into Merton’s experience as an undergraduate at Clare College, Cambridge led to an interest in the level of pastoral care provision for students in the early 1930s compared with that of the 2020s. Through interviews with Cambridge chaplains aimed at gauging where students currently ‘are’ – along with the challenges they and the chaplains who are called to minister to them face – several recurring themes emerged. Among these was an increase in the numbers of what one chaplain referred to as an ‘unchurched generation’. Susanne intends to further develop her research via an in-depth qualitative case study on Cambridge University student chaplaincy in the 2020s.
Susanne has written numerous articles, book reviews and conference papers which have appeared in British, Irish and Polish publications including Doctrine & Life, the Downside Review, the Tablet, Priests & People and the peer reviewed Studia Nauk Teologiczych (Studies on Theological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences).