Jennifer Bryson

Fellow

Jennifer Bryson, Ph.D., is a Fellow in EPPC’s Catholic Women’s Forum. Currently, she is translating the works of Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) from German to English. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

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Jennifer Bryson, Ph.D., is a Fellow in EPPC’s Catholic Women’s Forum. Currently, she is translating the works of Ida Friederike Görres (1901-1971) from German to English. She lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Dr. Bryson grew up in California. She has studied and worked in Egypt and Yemen, been an intelligence agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency, including two years as an interrogator at Guantanamo, and worked at several research institutes, including the Witherspoon Institute and Religious Freedom Institute. Dr. Bryson has written extensively on foreign affairs, sex, marriage, and other issues. Her articles are at jenniferbryson.net.

Dr. Bryson earned her B.A. from Stanford in Political Science, her M.A. in medieval European intellectual History from Yale, and her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Yale, with a focus on Greco-Arabic and Islamic studies. She learned German in high school in Austria and while studying Marxism-Leninism for a year in former East Germany as an undergraduate. Bryson was an Earhart Fellow, a Richard M. Weaver Fellow of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and a Fulbright Scholar. Her Ph.D. work included the study of translation theory.

From 2021–2023 she was a Visiting Researcher at the Pope Benedict XVI Philosophical-Theological Institute, known as Hochschule Heiligenkreuz, in Austria, while translating several works by Ida Görres. Her translations include the German government’s report, “Anti-Semitism among Islamists in Germany,” Görres’ 1970 lecture “Trusting the Church,” and Görres’ book The Church in the Flesh.

Bryson is an adult Catholic convert.

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Christ’s wounds, our wounds, and the possibility of flourishing

Jennifer Bryson

“Since God displays himself to us wounded,” writes Bishop Erik Varden, OCist, in Healing Wounds: The 2025 Lent Book, “we dare to come before him with our wounds.”

Articles

The Catholic World Report / February 27, 2025

John Henry Newman, Ida Görres, and the Power of Hagiography: An Interview with Jennifer Bryson

Jennifer Bryson

The book’s importance goes beyond the perennial value of Newman; Görres penetrates deeply into the heart of Newman’s character and life. In doing so, she reveals what made him holy, and holiness is of perennial value.

Articles, Interviews

The Public Discourse / January 16, 2025

Discovering an Unpublished Manuscript on Newman in Munich: An Interview with Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz

Jennifer Bryson

In 2004, German Catholic scholar Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz edited and published a posthumous edition of Ida Görres’ book on Newman, Der Geopferte:…

Interviews

Newman Review / January 9, 2025

’55 and ’69 Liturgical Reforms Uprooting Oral Custom

Jennifer Bryson

When the twentieth-century liturgical reformers shuffled, eliminated, and renamed Catholic feast days, they weakened the already increasingly frail connection between…

Articles

OnePeterFive / December 17, 2024

Three Ways Trump Can Fight Wokeness in Sports

Jennifer Bryson

Editor’s Note A cold civil war is fought not just in the political realm but in the trenches of culture…

Articles

Thomas D. Klingenstein / December 5, 2024

Discussion Guide: John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed

Jennifer Bryson

Ida Friederike Görres / October 18, 2024

Reintroducing Secularized Catholics to the Angels

Jennifer Bryson

Me and the Angels      My spiritual background is an example of how much our secular culture and our ailing Church…

Articles

OnePeterFive / October 2, 2024

Newman and the Work of Ida Friederike Görres

Jennifer Bryson

In Munich in the 1990s, a previously unknown manuscript of an unpublished book about John Henry Newman written fifty years…

Articles

Newman Review / September 30, 2024

Why the 2024 Nebraska Pro-Life Ballot Initiative Matters for the Whole Country

Jennifer Bryson

This November voters in Nebraska will be in the unprecedented position of being able to choose between a pro-life and a pro-abortion constitutional amendment.

Articles

Crisis Magazine / July 31, 2024

The “Perfect!” Missal and the Future of the TLM

Jennifer Bryson

There will be a future.

Articles

OnePeterFive / July 15, 2024

Through Lent with the Stations of the Cross

Jennifer Bryson

This book is not about helping Catholics compete in some sort of Lenten Olympics, in which the gold medal goes to the person who can tallying up the most laps around the Lenten track.

Articles

OnePeterFive / February 20, 2024

Ida Friederike Görres: A Forgotten Catholic Rediscovered

Jennifer Bryson

Ida Friederike who??

OnePeterFive / October 24, 2023