Schmitt Lecture: Yuval Levin on Dec. 7

Mark your calendars for our last public lecture of the semester! Our semi-annual Schmitt Lecture is for the benefit of the Schmitt Fellows, graduate students in Engineering, Technology, and the hard sciences. On Wednesday, December 7 at 4 p.m. in McKenna Hall we will host Yuval Levin for the Schmitt Lecture.

Yuval Levin, Hertog Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, analyst, editor, and journalist, reflects on the tensions between our foundational belief in human equality and our provision for financially burdensome public entitlement programs that become prohibitively expensive to pursuing our other public priorities. He examines the issue in light of the stem cell debate and the current health-care and budget debate. His lecture is entitled "The Primary Good: Prioritizing Health in a Liberal Democracy"

Reception to follow.

Deadline for Edith Stein submissions

Call for Papers:
The Edith Stein Project
Encountering Vulnerability: Courage, Hope, and Trust in the 21st Century
Seventh Annual Conference
February 10-11th, 2012
DEADLINE EXTENDED! New deadline: December 15th, 2011.

The Identity Project of Notre Dame is proud to present the theme for its seventh annual conference, "Encountering Vulnerability: Courage, Hope and Trust in the 21st Century."

The 2012 Edith Stein Project will address the idea of vulnerability and how it affects our identity and relationships as human beings. While vulnerability often carries with it a negative connotation and is associated with abuse, instability, and heartache, perhaps there is another side to vulnerability. In addition to examining ways in which it may be misused, we must also consider its value. If vulnerability is intrinsic to us as human beings, is there a proper place for it in our identity and our relationships?

Through the presentations and panels of this year's Project, we hope to explore this question and accomplish two objectives:

(1) To offer hope and healing to those who have been harmed by the exploitation of their vulnerability
(2) To examine the positive role of vulnerability, particularly within relationships.

 As always, we look to St. Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta) for inspiration. A philosopher and convert who was martyred in Auschwitz in 1942, Edith Stein wrote on questions of human dependency and suffering, particularly pertaining to women.

We hope to provide a balance of academic presentations from various disciplines and personal stories relating to the theme of vulnerability and how it relates to our dignity as human persons. We welcome the submission of abstracts drawing on a wide range of perspectives and academic specialties. Special consideration will be given to submissions of ideas for panel discussions that would bring together several speakers to discuss a focused theme.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

•         The writings of Edith Stein
•         Like a Child: Innocence and its relationship to vulnerability
•         The Vulnerability of God in the Incarnation and Crucifixion
•         Vulnerability in a world of Talk Shows and Reality TV
•         The Effects of Eating Disorders
•         Vulnerability and the Greek loves
•         Vulnerability and the Blessed Virgin Mary
•         The Book of Ruth and/or Book of Judith
•         John Paul II’s Muleris Dignitatem
•         Disability Studies and Vulnerability
•         The Effects of the "Hook-Up" Culture
•         The role of openness and/or trust in friendships
•         Vulnerability and Femininity/Masculinity
•         The Vulnerability of a Faithful Witness to the Faith
•         Women in the Workplace
•         John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae
•         Vulnerability as a binding force within communities
•         Advertising and the Distortion of Beauty
•         Vulnerability and Sexuality
•         Healthy Vulnerability in Relationships: Developing Trust and/or Forgiveness
•         Technology as a means to avoid vulnerability and openness
•         Vulnerability and the spiritual life

One-page abstracts for individual papers should include name, title, affiliation (academic or otherwise), address, and e-mail address. Presentations should be approximately 30 - 45 minutes in length, or, for panel discussions, one hour total. 

The deadline for submissions is December 15th, 2011.  Notification of acceptance will be mailed by January 1st, 2012. Abstracts should be emailed to edith.stein.nd@gmail.com.

More information on the Edith Stein Project, including the full Project Description and Call for Papers can be found on our web site: www.nd.edu/~idnd.  

Integritas Seminar IV

Before Thanksgiving, the Integritas program held its last seminar of the semester. The seminar was led by Randy Smith, the Center's Myser Fellow this year, from the University of St. Thomas Houston. It was called 'Integration of Body and Soul' and was based on Wendell Barry's essay "The Body and the Earth". The seminar explored Christian anthropology in light of the Incarnation. In the Incarnation, Christ revealed the face of God to humankind, but he also taught us the value of the whole created world and embodied existence. The seminar asked: what does it mean to take the Incarnation seriously, in terms of the world, ourselves, and the environment?

Wendell Berry starts from a point of humility, that we humans should treat both our bodies and the earth respectfully, by living within their limits and understanding our place in creation, because we are creatures ourselves and not the Creator. We are totally dependent on the land, no matter how far we try to remove ourselves from it through technology and industrialization.

The modern condition is sadly one of alienation, our souls from our bodies, ourselves from our communities, and our communities from the land that provides our very sustenance. This isolation and alienation leads to widespread depression. Happiness can only be found in a great integration of body with soul, individual with community, community with land. Our happiness lies in this because this is how reality is ordered: we are hylomorphic beings, and a super-spiritualized existence in which the mind plays tyrant leads to destruction as surely as does a decadent existence of sensuous indulgence.

If we want peace, health, wholeness, happiness, and integrity, then we must live within our limits and recognize our dependence on one another and on the earth. Unfortunately, modern universities do not encourage their students to make these connections, but rather fragment existence into disciplines and sub-disciplines, dividing body and soul, giving body over to the hard sciences as merely research into matter, and delivering the spirit to the humanities, to interrogate without reference to the material limits of its bodily existence. With the College of Science existing entirely independently from the College of Arts & Letters, opposing cultures are cultivated.

We were left with a warning from Wendell Berry about where all of this leads: "What this conflict has done, among other things, is to make it extremely difficult to set a proper value on the life of the body in this world--to believe that it is good, howbeit short and imperfect. Until we are able to say this and know what we mean by it, we will not be able to live our lives in the human estate of grief and joy, but repeatedly will be cast outside in violent swings between pride and despair. Desires that cannot be fulfilled in health will keep us hopelessly restless and unsatisfied."

Thanks for a great Conference!

Thank you for your enthusiastic support for the annual Fall Conference! We had record-breaking participation, with over 650 attendees. Closer to Christmas time, look out for the videos of all of our Invited Speaker sessions, and we will post the papers from any of our presenters who wish to submit them. In the meantime, mark your calendars for next year's Fall Conference, Nov. 8-10, 2012.

TONIGHT: Alasdair MacIntyre keynote

Please join us tonight in McKenna Hall at 7:30 p.m. for Prof. Alasdair MacIntyre's keynote address "On Being a Theistic Philosopher in a Secularized Culture."

TONIGHT: Fr. Robert Barron keynote

Please join us tonight at 7:30 p.m. in McKenna Hall for the first event of our annual Fall Conference, Fr. Robert Barron's keynote lecture on "Evangelizing the Secular Culture."

Integritas Seminar III

The Integritas program had its third seminar for the year last Thursday night on the dialogue between faith and reason . The readings for the seminar included excerpts from the encyclical Fides et Ratio, by Pope John Paul II, and St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles. It was led by the program's graduate student mentor, Kristen Drahos, a PhD candidate in Notre Dame's Theology Department.

Kristen started by posing St. Thomas' question of why it is necessary and good that certain truths can be known by faith. The students traced the answer to the problem of the fallibility of human epistemology: knowledge about the greatest truths can only be attained through the laborious work of extensive education, requiring much time and natural aptitude, and even then it is often mixed in with much error and confusion. Therefore the truths of faith should be seen as a gift.

Yet contained in the gift is also a challenge, as the students realized when they began to wrestle with questions such as "What could it possibly mean to say that God is both three and one?" and "How can one person, the Son of God, be both fully divine (unlimited, eternal) and fully human (limited, created)?" and, "If God is infinite love, how can God tell Abraham to kill his only son in sacrifice?" While it is true that the truths of the faith known through Revelation cannot contradict reason, reason often finds that to grasp the truths of faith lies beyond the limits of its powers.

Yet that does not make our faith unreasonable. As Pope John Paul II pointed out in Fides et Ratio, most of what we think we know about the world, we actually accept on faith in other authority figures: the existence of Antarctica, the publishing of the Magna Carta in 1215 A.D., the structure of an atom. It is not possible to undertake the Cartesian project of proving everything for oneself to a satisfying objective standard through the power of scientific reason alone. Faith and a personalist reason are necessary for human epistemology: we entrust ourselves to authority figures, our parents, our community, and our Church to show us the truth. The martyrs and the saints are the greatest authorities in our Faith.

Kristen closed the seminar by encouraging the students to never cease from wrestling with the dynamic relationship between faith and reason, because both faith and reason lose their force when one becomes complacent in inquiry. The tensions must continue to be tested to bear fruit in deeper faith and more convincing reason.

Edith Stein Project: Call for Papers

Call for Papers:
The Edith Stein Project

Encountering Vulnerability: Courage, Hope, and Trust in the 21st Century

Seventh Annual Conference

February 10-11th, 2012

The Identity Project of Notre Dame is proud to present the theme for its seventh annual conference, "Encountering Vulnerability: Courage, Hope and Trust in the 21st Century."

This year we hope to explore what it means to be “vulnerable,” for the idea of vulnerability often carries with it a negative connotation: abuse, instability, heartache. As such, we consider vulnerability as something to eradicate from our lives. Yet, because of our finite human nature, we will necessarily be limited in our abilities and strengths. As Blessed John Paul II said, "No amount of economic, scientific or social progress can eradicate our vulnerability to sin and to death." This gives us good reason to guard ourselves carefully in situations where we could be harmed; however, in trying to protect ourselves, we often come to fear our vulnerability.

But perhaps there is another side to vulnerability: in addition to examining ways in which it may be misused, we must also consider its value. If vulnerability is intrinsic to us as human beings, is there a proper place for it in our identity and our relationships?


Recognizing vulnerability’s positive role, we look to Christ as a model, “For precisely by lowering himself to the point of defenseless vulnerability of love, he shows what his true greatness is indeed” (Blessed John Paul II).  We consider our weakness and our dependence upon God and others to be a strength, because as St. Paul wrote, "It is when I am weak that I am strong."


Moreover, it is "not good for man to be alone," so we must cultivate an ability to share our lives and our hearts with each other.  With this openness comes the risk of being rejected or spurned, yet C.S. Lewis reminds us of the necessity of this risk because "to love at all is to be vulnerable." In this sense, vulnerability breaks down barriers between persons and allows for genuine communication and intimacy; it asks that "the thoughts of our hearts may be laid bare" (Blessed John Paul II).


Through the presentations and panels of the conference, we hope to accomplish two objectives:

(1) To offer hope and healing to those who have been harmed by the exploitation of their vulnerability
(2) To examine the positive role of vulnerability, particularly within relationships.


 As always, we look to St. Edith Stein (Teresa Benedicta) for inspiration. A philosopher and convert who was martyred in Auschwitz in 1942, Edith Stein wrote on questions of human dependency and suffering, particularly pertaining to women.

We hope to provide a balance of academic presentations from various disciplines and personal stories relating to the theme of vulnerability and how it relates to our dignity as human persons. We welcome the submission of abstracts drawing on a wide range of perspectives and academic specialties. Special consideration will be given to submissions of ideas for panel discussions that would bring together several speakers to discuss a focused theme.

Possible topics may include but are not limited to:

·         The writings of Edith Stein
·         Like a Child: Innocence and its relationship to vulnerability
·         The Vulnerability of God in the Incarnation and Crucifixion
·         Vulnerability in a world of Talk Shows and Reality TV
·         The Effects of Eating Disorders
·         Vulnerability and the Greek loves
·         Vulnerability and the Blessed Virgin Mary
·         The Book of Ruth and/or Book of Judith
·         John Paul II’s Muleris Dignitatem
·         Disability Studies and Vulnerability
·         The Effects of the "Hook-Up" Culture
·         The role of openness and/or trust in friendships
·         Vulnerability and Femininity/Masculinity
·         The Vulnerability of a Faithful Witness to the Faith
·         Women in the Workplace
·         John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae
·         Vulnerability as a binding force within communities
·         Advertising and the Distortion of Beauty
·         Vulnerability and Sexuality
·         Healthy Vulnerability in Relationships: Developing Trust and/or Forgiveness
·         Technology as a means to avoid vulnerability and openness
·         Vulnerability and the spiritual life

One-page abstracts for individual papers should include name, title, affiliation (academic or otherwise), address, and e-mail address. Presentations should be approximately 30 - 45 minutes in length, or, for panel discussions, one hour total.

The deadline for submissions is November 15th, 2011.  Notification of acceptance will be mailed by January 1st, 2012. Abstracts should be emailed to edith.stein.nd@gmail.com.

More information on the Edith Stein Project can be found on our web site: www.nd.edu/~idnd.