Right to Life Spring Lecture Series

Notre Dame's Right to Life Club kicks off its spring lecture series this week on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Co-Mo Lounge. Dr. Patricia White-Flatley presents, "Rethinking Down Syndrome: Revolutionary Research Advances”...Learn how Down Syndrome might save YOUR life and how YOU can make a difference! Free Pizza!


Mark your calendars for the rest of the series:

Tuesday, March 29th. 7 PM Geddes Auditorium, free pizza! (no food allowed in auditorium, so come get food at 6:15) 1st Annual "BRING IT ON!!"Night Come ready to debate/ ask questions of an excellent faculty panel on any pro-life issue. Topics may include but are not limited to stem cell research, abortion, healthcare policy, voting, and conscience protection. Panel includes Dr. Maureen Condic (University of Utah), David Solomon (Director of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture), Carter Snead (Notre Dame Law School), and Ryan T. Anderson (The Public Discourse; University of Notre Dame)

Friday, April 8th. 4:30 PM McKenna Auditorium. Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M., Cap. (Archdiocese of Denver) will deliver the Keynote Address.

Please contact Gabby Speach (gspeach19@gmail.com) or Kelly Jones at (kjones14@nd.edu) with any questions.

Presentation on The Religious Sense tomorrow

What Are We Really Made For?
A presentation of The Religious Sense, a book by Msgr. Luigi Giussani
Tuesday, March 22, 2011• 7:15 pm
Andrews Auditorium, Geddes Hall

With Fr. Antonio Lopez, FSCB, Dean of the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at the Catholic University of America and Dr. John C. Cavadini, Director of the Institute for Church Life and Associate Professor of Theology

"What Monsignor Giussani teaches us is to rise above the smallness of our own minds and open ourselves up to the core spiritual experience of what it means to be human. This is a book for all faiths and no faith."
—Rabbi Michael Shevack, speech to the United Nations in 1997

Sponsored by Communion and Liberation at Notre Dame • clu@nd.edu

Sacred Art lecture today

On Monday, March 21st at 5 p.m. in the Bond Hall Auditorium, artist and sculptor, Dony MacManus, will speak about the new Sacred Art School in Florence, which he founded and currently directs. A native of Dublin, MacManus received both his Bachelor of Design and Higher Diploma in Art and Design Teaching at the National College of Art and Design in Ireland. He completed a Master of Fine Art at the New York Academy of Art and has since been commissioned to do a variety of work around the world. Please visit his website for more information: http://www.donymacmanusstudios.com/

TODAY: Clarke Lecture in Medical Ethics

Today at 4 p.m., Thomas Cavanaugh will lecture on "Asclepius' Snake and Hippocrates' Oath: The Birth of a Medical Ethic" in McKenna Hall Auditorium as part of our annual medical ethics conference. Reception to follow. Free and open to the public.

New videos posted from past conferences

We have just posted the videos from our Fall Conferences in 2006 and 2007, Modernity: Yearning for the Infinite and The Dialogue of Cultures. Check them out!

Adoration in Malloy Hall Chapel

If you are on our side of campus, consider spending some time in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament on Thursday mornings in Malloy Hall's Chapel, Our Lady Seat of Wisdom. From now until the end of the semester, adoration will be open from 9 a.m. until noon, in time for the regular noon lunchtime Mass. All are welcome for this new weekly prayer opportunity.

Integritas retreat to Gethsemani

Integritas was on the road again this week, this time traveling to Gethsemani, Kentucky for a weekend retreat at the Trappist monastery there. After about seven hours on the bus, we arrived at Gethsemani (about an hour south of Louisville) on Friday night, in time to join the monks for Compline, their last prayer of the day. We knelt in the balcony of their cavernous church, which was in darkness except for the light of the tabernacle and candles lit in front of the icon of Our Lady, Gethsemani's patroness. The monks chanted their last psalms of the day, and when the service concluded, all were welcomed forward to be sprinkled with holy water before going to their beds. This might seem awfully early to college students for a bedtime, but the community rises every morning at 3:15 a.m. for vigils, their first prayers of the day, so turning in early is essential for a long day of work and prayer, lived according to the rhythm of the Liturgy of the Hours.

The monks' life, structured as it is by seven periods of communal prayer each day and Mass, along with work in the fields or making cheese, fruitcakes and fudge, and marked most of all by silence, excluding all idle talk, is radically different from the life of a college student. College is chaotic, spontaneous, unstructured, saturated with information and constant noise: smart phones, mp3 players, and all the distractions of constant internet access. It's not that life on a college campus is busy purely for the sake of being busy: students are pursuing their goals and ideals in the name of education. "God, Country, Notre Dame," read the slogan on the T-shirt of one retreatant. How different from the sign that emblazons the entrance to the cloister of Gethsemani: "God Alone." Waking up at three every morning, praying and working without ceasing, is done at Gethsemani for the sake of God alone: to consecrate every hour of every day to God, intentionally and explicitly. Trappist asceticism strips everything away: sleep, rich food, even church decoration. The simplicity of the church, where they spend most of their waking hours, was striking: bare, white walls, exposed beams, no decoration whatsoever. The stations of the cross were simply small, dark crosses hung up high at intervals along the wall. Even the tabernacle was a plain, black box suspended below the single candle. Their chanting was similarly simple: no harmonizing, no polyphonic parts, just the antiphonal recitation of the psalms, hour after hour.

Gethsemani is a serene and beautiful place; a place where far away from the world's distractions, it is easier to listen to what God is saying and to see how He is working. It invites visitors to give up for a few days their struggle to be individual, to be productive, to be in charge of their own lives, and instead to enter into the ancient tradition of the Liturgy of the Hours: Vigils at 3:15 a.m., Lauds at 5:45 a.m., Eucharist at 6:15 a.m., Terce at 7:30 a.m., Sext at 12:15 p.m., None at 2:15 p.m., Vespers at 5:30 p.m., and Compline at 7:30 p.m. If you stay for two weeks, you will have chanted all 150 psalms. Meals are taken in silence; work is done in silence, so that they pray without ceasing.

God speaks to each of us differently in the silence of our hearts, so I can't say what each student took away from our retreat there. But I can say that I was moved to see them creeping in through the door of the dark chapel at three in the morning, an hour by which they ordinarily would not yet have even gone to bed, to pray the psalms and listen to the Lord, coming to pray in the darkness, before the light of the tabernacle, at every hour of the day and night.

Deadline for pro-life student research grants approaching

Summer Research Grant Opportunity - Deadline Approaching!

The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (I.S.L.A.) announces a special track for U.R.O.P. applications from all majors within the College of Arts and Letters who propose to conduct original research on life-related topics across the spectrum of study in the liberal arts.

Such proposals are especially welcome from juniors who wish to write senior theses in the 2011-2012 academic year based on research conducted during the summer of 2011.  Students may apply for one, two, or three months of funding at $1,500.00 per month.  A regular faculty member must endorse a proposal and supervise the project.  For more information, see http://isla.nd.edu/for-undergraduate-students/special-summer-urop-on-life-related-topics/.

Deadline for submissions is March 11, 2011, at 4:00 P.M., in 101 O’Shaughnessy Hall

Lecture on Neuroscience and Moral Responsibility

There will be a public lecture by Prof. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong entitled “Does Neuroscience Undermine Free Will and Moral Responsibility?” on Thursday, March 3 at 4:00 p.m. in Geddes Hall Auditorium (B001).

Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is the Chauncy Stillman Professor of Practical Ethics in the Department of Philosophy and the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University.   Professor Sinnott-Armstrong’s work explores the interface of morality, biology and the brain sciences and the uses of neuroscience in the legal system. 
He has also written on the philosophy of law , informal logic, moral skepticism and the relationship between morality and theism.  Professor Sinnot-Armstrong’s most recent book is called “Conscious Will and Responsibility” (Oxford Series on Neuroscience, Law and Philosophy) which he co-edited with Lynn Nadel.

TODAY: Ronald Knox and Sherlock Holmes

Join us today, March 1 at 7:30 p.m. in the Hesburgh Center Auditorium of the Kroc Institute for Prof. Michael Crowe's lecture on "Ronald Knox and Sherlock Holmes: The Origin of Sherlockian Studies." He will examine the genesis of the popular movement that treats Sherlock Holmes as a figure worthy of historical and not just literary study, which Ronald Knox launched. Prof. Crowe has recently edited and published a book of essays on the subject. A reception will follows the lecture.

Copies of Professor Crowe's book, Ronald Knox and Sherlock Holmes: The Origin of Sherlockian Studies, are available for purchase and autographing after the lecture.

Gasogene Books, the publisher, explains the background of Sherlockian Studies:

A popular pastime among followers of Sherlock Holmes is to treat his adventures as though they were real. Unique in all literature, this pursuit is known as the "Grand Game," an intellectual exercise played in order to discover a deeper knowledge of the tales by examining clues in the stories themselves, or by correlating the Sherlockian Canon with historical fact. It's an unprecedented phenomenon that began with one man—Monsignor Ronald Knox—and his 1912 essay "Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes."

But this wasn't Ronald Knox's only written work about Sherlock Holmes. Here you will find all five ground-breaking Sherlockian pieces by Ronald Knox. These classic works are sure to enhance the reader's enjoyment and understanding of The Great Detective. By providing documented (and sometimes surprising) answers to a perceptive series of questions, Michael Crowe reintroduces us to the very origin of "The Great Game" of Sherlockian Studies, a game that, as he says "brought the great detective back from the non-living."

About Knox on Holmes:

"I cannot help writing to you to tell you of the amusement—and also the amazement—with which I read your article on Sherlock Holmes. That anyone should spend such pains on such material was what surprised me."
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
   From a letter to Ronald Knox

"A special place of honor as the cornerstone work in any collection of Sherlockiana must certainly go to Father, later Monsignor, Ronald A. Knox for his 'Studies in the Literature of Sherlock Holmes.'"