The Gibbons Institute’s new mark, and what it asks its readers to see.
This year the James Cardinal Gibbons Institute for Human Ecology took a new name and, with it, a new mark. The name honors the University’s first Chancellor. The mark was made to carry the Institute’s founding conviction in a single image.
At its center is a scallop shell, turned downward as if pouring. The shell stands for nature — not inert matter but gift and sign, a created world meant to be read patiently as a guide to its Creator’s purpose. It is also the ancient shell of baptism, water poured over the newly reborn. Behind it rises the cross, doing two things at once: consecrating the nature beneath it, and shedding the light by which nature can be truly read, since it is only in Christ, as Gaudium et Spes has it, that man is made clear to himself. Together they hold the Institute’s mission in miniature — that man is the center and crown of nature, and that the study of the natural world, illumined by faith, leads not away from God but toward him.
There is a quieter homage in the shell as well. The scallop is the immemorial emblem of Saint James, patron of pilgrims, and so of James Cardinal Gibbons himself, the American churchman who insisted that the Catholic faith and the ordinary working world belong together. Patron, sacrament, and nature resolve into one form.
A mark is also a statement of temperament, and the Institute has come to understand its own in four postures. It is a field naturalist, content to look long and closely at the world before presuming to explain it. It is a curator, keeping what is worth keeping and setting it where it can be seen. It is a convener, gathering scholars and friends to a common table. And it is a correspondent, carrying word home from farther afield. See, keep, gather, reach.
The shell answers to all four. It is a thing found in the field, worth keeping, fit to be passed hand to hand — and, in the pilgrim’s use, carried a long way home.
— The Gibbons Institute
