Episode Details

Dr. Jennifer Bryson, Ethics and Public Policy Center Fellow in Catholic Women's Forum presented at the Little Way Café on Thursday April 23, 2026 on the profound insights on the saints and sanctity according to the writings and life of Ida Görres. Bryson is an adult Catholic convert and she shared her own conversion story on The Journey Home. 

https://chnetwork.org/journey-home/jennifer-bryson-former-agnostic/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju7MET-JKSg

Currently, she is translating the works of Ida Friederike Görres (1901-1971) from German to English, and via the Sports Policy Initiative, she researches and advocates for sound sports governance. 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 (2023), John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed (2024), Bread Grows in Winter (2025) with a foreword by Bishop Varden who recently preached to Pope Leo for his 2026 Lenten retreat, and most recently