Mary Magdalene in the Garden: An Easter Meditation

Breaking Bread, our semi-annual dinner and evening of spiritual discussion for Notre Dame students and faculty, began only four years ago, but it has already secured a place in the hearts of undergraduates and professors alike. Students often share with us that it is rare to find a warm environment that fosters profound theological discussion with their professors. Especially in an age when many feel like the distance between the two groups is continually widening, Breaking Bread gives students the rare chance of talking with professors outside the classroom.

On March 25, 2008, laughter and a lively exchange of opinions followed the spring semester’s thought-provoking reflection on “Mary Magdalene in the Garden: An Easter Meditation,” given by Father Michael Sherwin, OP, a professor of fundamental moral theology at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland and the 2007-2008 Myser Fellow of the Center for Ethics and Culture. In John’s Gospel, Mary Magdalene fails at first to recognize the resurrected Christ in the garden, yet discovers that the “garden-dweller” is in fact Jesus—the bridegroom of Israel. Fr. Sherwin used this biblical analogy to encourage discussion of what Christ means to each of us and how He presents Himself in our lives.

Each participant was given a copy of Morality: The Catholic View by Servais Pinckaers, OP, translated by Fr. Sherwin and with an introduction by Alasdair MacIntyre. The book was published by St. Augustine Press under the auspices of the Center.

23rd Annual Clarke Family Medical Ethics Conference

On March 14-16, 2008, the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, in conjunction with the Notre Dame Alumni Association, hosted the 23rd annual Notre Dame Medical Ethics Conference. The aim of the conference is to allow for discussion regarding some of the complex issues that plague the practice of medicine, in a setting not only where participants can come to a deeper understanding of Catholic teaching on these issues, but where diverse viewpoints can be shared, heard, and appreciated.

The conference opened on Friday afternoon with the annual Clarke Lecture. This year, we were pleased to welcome as our Clarke Lecturer Daniel P. Sulmasy, O.F.M., M.D., Ph.D., a Franciscan friar, the Sisters of Charity Chair in Ethics at St. Vincent’s Manhattan, and Professor of Medicine and Director at the Bioethics Institute of New York Medical College. Dr. Sulmasy delivered his lecture on the topic, “Is Health Care a Spiritual Discipline?” In the first session on Saturday morning, participants discussed a range of cases that involve the concept of futility. A number of participants from Texas have suggested for a number of years that we devote a session to a discussion of the Texas Futile Treatment Law, and we included information about that law in our readings. After the break, participants gathered for a discussion of some of the recent initiatives in reforming the health care system. The topic of health care reform is a hot-button issue in the current political campaign and we invited David Betson, a distinguished economist at Notre Dame, and an expert on proposals for health care reform, to give us a brief presentation on the options now on the table from an economist’s point of view.

After lunch, we returned to our discussion group format to examine a series of cases that raise difficult ethical questions about disease-labeling and possible inappropriate uses of drugs. Participants addressed the question of whether “disease-mongering” is a serious problem in contemporary medicine.

In the final session on Saturday, participants were given a choice among three concurrent break-out sessions. The first session considered ethical issues raised by the merger of a public hospital and a Catholic hospital. Many of our participants have worked in situations where similar mergers have occurred and a lively discussion ensued on this matter. The second break-out session examined Church teaching on the provision of artificial nutrition and hydration.

The third session explored the new medical powers of genetic technologies and the ethical issues raised by them. Saturday concluded with Mass celebrated in Alumni Hall Chapel with Father Bresnahan presiding and Father Young concelebrating. On Sunday morning, participants concluded the conference with our traditional wrap-up session. At this session we put all of our consultants at the front of the room and had an open-mike free-for-all. Last year, at this session, there was an energetic discussion initiated by some medical students in attendance about forming a new medical student association devoted to the integrity of the patient and to a broadly Catholic approach to the vocation of medicine, especially with regard to life issues. There was a general sense that we should take some steps toward forming such an association. To that end, this year, we invited two-dozen current medical students to attend this year’s conference to discuss the formation of such an association. They arrived on Thursday night, before the conference, meeting on Friday morning to explore ideas about the association and then attended the remainder of the conference.

In addition to our many fine resource participants, we were especially fortunate this year to have three distinguished international specialists in medical ethics visiting the university and able to join us. Father Vladimir Littva from the Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia and Father Grzegorz Holub from the University of Kraków were both visitors at the Nanovic Institute for European Studies during the spring semester and joined us as consultants. An old friend of the Center, Prof. Ruiping Fan from the City University of Hong Kong who gave the Clarke Lecture only a few years ago was a visiting Fulbright Scholar in the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture and also served as one of our consultants. Prof. Fan is one of the leading specialists in the world on Confucian approaches to medical ethics.

Taking the Show on the Road to Hollywood

Believing it important to bring a distinctively Catholic philosophical and theological voice into contemporary conversations regarding a variety of issues involving the media and culture, the Center on Saturday afternoon, March 8, 2008, hosted a colloquium at Family Theater Productions on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. Entitled “Filmmaking in an Apocalyptic Time,” the colloquium was moderated by Center associate director Daniel McInerny and Michael P. Foley, assistant professor in the Great Texts Program at Baylor University.

After an opening lunch, some 30 industry professionals and aspirants gathered in the screening room of Family Theater Productions for the first of two colloquium sessions. In the first, “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” Michael Foley used an ingenious elaboration of Plato’s allegory of the cave to help the group explore the particular nature of modernity how it is reflected in contemporary film. After a coffee break, Daniel McInerny led a lively discussion on the various storytelling strategies available to Christian filmmakers looking to address the malaise of modernity.

The day ended with Mass celebrated in the chapel at Family Theater by Fr. Willy Raymond, C.S.C., national director of Family Theater Productions. The Center hopes that this splendid day was only the first of many conversations with entertainment industry professionals in LA.

The Dialogue of Cultures

In his address at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006, Pope Benedict XVI made an argument whose crucial import was obscured by the unproductive media furor that followed his speech. Pope Benedict argued: "While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons…. Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today."

Our world is characterized by a dizzying array of cultural conflicts. The news from Iraq that greets us every morning reminds us of the deep cultural conflicts between the West and the various Islamic cultures of the Middle East . Other cultural conflicts manifest themselves in the various efforts to secure basic human rights across the globe. And then there is the cultural crisis in Europe, where the Church, led by Pope Benedict, attempts to keep Europe from forgetting its Christian roots and sliding ever more deeply into secularization. This is not even to mention the deep cultural divides within our own polity, and even, most regrettably, within the Church Herself.

The solution to such widespread division, Pope Benedict urges us to realize, is a reconciliation of Christian faith and natural human reason that conceives of the latter according to the full capacities of its freedom; that is, as open to a reality that transcends the empirically verifiable. Only with such a conception of reason, Pope Benedict concludes, will human beings become capable “of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today.” The Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, concerned by the deep cultural divides that characterize so much of our world, found inspiration in Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Address, and decided to devote its eighth annual fall conference to the theme: The Dialogue of Cultures. One of the key purposes of this conference was to help restore the richness in the notion of dialogue itself, which too often has devolved into a cultural cliché.

The conference opened on Thursday evening with the first of two conference plenary lectures, given by The Most Reverend Elias Chacour, Archbishop Metropolitan of the Melkite Catholic Diocese of Acco, Haifa, Nazareth and Galilee, and the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of Notre Dame at the 2006 commencement ceremonies. Archbishop Chacour’s lecture was entitled, “The Role of Religions in Promoting Dialogue.” There, he challenged the conference audience to think more deeply about what it means to pursue a meaningful cross-cultural dialogue aimed at a truly Christian peace.

The second plenary session took place on Friday evening, featuring George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., and author of, among many other books,Witness to Hope, the authorized biography of Pope John Paul II. Mr. Weigel’s lecture was entitled, “Reading Regensburg Right.” Other distinguished speakers included Notre Dame professors Alasdair MacIntyre, who delivered a lecture entitled, “How to be a European: Questions for Tariq Ramadam,” and Ralph McInerny who delivered a lecture entitled, “Aristotle and St. Thomas: A Model for the Meeting of Cultures?” We were also proud to host talks by Rev. Samir Khalil Samir, S.J., Professor of Oriental Theology at St. Joseph’s University, Lebanon, and Director of the Center for Arab-Christian Documentation and Research, who spoke on, “Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address: A Project of the Universal Dialogue of Cultures, Especially with Islam,” and Wael Farouq,
Professor of Islamic Sciences, Coptic-Catholic faculty of Sakakini, Cairo, delivered a lecture entitled, “Beard, Neqab and Dialogue: Bridging the Gap between Reason and Reality.”

In a fitting close to the conference, The Most Reverend John M. D’Arcy, Archbishop of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, presided at the Vigil Mass on Saturday evening in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, after which the conference was concluded with a festive banquet. It has become a tradition at this celebratory dinner to close with informal topical remarks by a special guest. This year, Rev. Saad Sirop Hanna, a Chaldean Catholic priest, offered reflections on the importance of a genuine and peaceful dialogue among cultures in his home country of Iraq. On August 15, 2006, Father Hanna, then the head of the theological faculty of Babel College, the Christian University of Religious Studies in Baghdad, was kidnapped after celebrating Mass and held in captivity. Pope Benedict XVI appealed publicly for his release, which occurred on September 11th. Father Hanna’s witness to the possibility and importance of such dialogue was particularly powerful in light of his personal experience with hatred and persecution.

We hope the conference helped many of us to understand more deeply what is required for a genuine dialogue of cultures rooted in truth and aimed at peace. Once again, we would like to express our gratitude to the Maas Family Endowment for Excellence, as well as the Strake Foundation, for making possible this tremendous experience.

Purity of Heart: A Meditation on a Beatitude

Breaking Bread, our semi-annual dinner and evening of spiritual discussion for Notre Dame students and faculty, began only four years ago, but it has already secured a place in the hearts of undergraduates and professors alike. Students often share with us that it is rare to find a warm environment that fosters profound theological discussion with their professors. Especially in an age when many feel like the distance between the two groups is continually widening, Breaking Bread gives students the rare chance of talking with professors outside the classroom. One student said, “It’s nice to have an occasion for us to eat together and talk about what’s really important to our lives.”

At this fall’s Breaking Bread event, on November 13, 2007, Professor Lawrence S. Cunningham, the Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology in Notre Dame’s Department of Theology, gave a stirring reflection entitled “Purity of Heart: A Meditation on a Beatitude.” Professor Cunningham’s reflection first described what it means to be pure in our society today. He then focused on the way in which purity manifests itself in different aspects of our lives. Professor Cunningham’s reflection gave rise to lively discussions between students and faculty members over a delicious dinner. One student remarked, “It was refreshing to enjoy an evening in an atmosphere where I was encouraged to talk openly about my Christian faith with other students and faculty members.” Another student remarked, “The discussion at my table was very interesting because there were students from so many different majors who had unique reactions to Dr. Cunningham’s talk.”

As part of the evening’s events, each attendee received a copy of Professor Cunningham’s book, A Brief History of Saints.

Convenience, Control, and Other Technological Virtues

On November 7, 2007, the fall Schmitt Lecture was delivered by Christine Rosen, a Fellow for the Project on Biotechnology and American Democracy at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a senior editor of The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society. Dr. Rosen’s talk, entitled “Convenience, Control, and Other Technological Virtues,” focused on the ways in which the new media technologies, especially in their ability to serve up content “on demand,” are changing our conceptions of social space.

Shakespeare and Catholicism

The annual Catholic Culture Literature Series originated in the Center’s desire to expose the Notre Dame community to the richness of the Catholic literary heritage. Through this series of lectures, we seek to promote writers known for the quality of their works and the uniquely Catholic dimension of their literary perspectives. In past semesters, we have focused on such major figures as Flannery O’Connor, G.K. Chesterton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Walker Percy, and J.R.R. Tolkien. The mission of this year’s Catholic Culture Series was to try to decipher the enigma and controversy surrounding Shakespeare’s Catholicism. We invited four renowned Shakespeare scholars to shed some light on the subject:

1. Joseph Pearce, Writer in Residence and associate professor of literature at Ave Maria University and internationally acclaimed author of numerous books, whetted the audience’s appetite with a lecture entitled, “Will the Real Shakespeare Please Stand Up? Evidence for the Bard’s Catholicism”;

2. Peter Holland, then-Acting Dean of the Graduate School, McMeel Family Professor in Shakespeare Studies and Chair of the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre, focused on Shakespeare’s hidden symbols in a talk entitled, “Cracking the Shakespeare Code”;

3. John Finnis, the Biolchini Family Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School and lecturer, reader and a chaired professor in law at Oxford University, gave an in-depth analysis of several of the Bard’s works in a talk called “The Audacity of Shakespeare’s Non-Recusant Catholicism”;

4. Clare Asquith, independent scholar & author of Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare, focused on the necessity of relating Shakespeare studies back to 16th century history in a lecture entitled “Shakespeare’s Dark Matter.” William Shakespeare is clearly one of—if not the—most recognized and revered figures in literary history; yet it is precisely because of this that we often study his plays and sonnets in certain established ways, leaving little room for originality to emerge. Through a thorough and multi-faceted discussion of different fascinating aspects of Shakespeare, these lecturers provided the audience with a fresh perspective through which to view his work. If we continue to read Shakespeare within the context of a broader scope, we will, as Clare Asquith said, “in 20 years have a much richer Shakespeare.”

Students Confront Contemporary Issues in Medical Ethics

The Practicing Medical Ethics course is our one-unit, day-long introduction into the interesting yet thorny field of medical ethics. The course is intended to familiarize students with some of the central issues in medical ethics and provide an opportunity for thoughtful and stimulating discussion about some of the hotly debated issues that dominate the public square.

In the first session this fall, students discussed the issues involved in the just distribution of medical resources. The first two cases asked whether alcoholics should be eligible for liver transplants and whether death-row inmates should be eligible for organ transplants. The third case came from recent headlines and dealt with the case of Dr. Anna Pou, who was accused of murdering nine patients at Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, though a grand jury recently declined to indict her.

In this second session inspired by another recent tragedy, the Virginia Tech killings, students explored the issue of doctor-patient confidentiality. With the Virginia Tech tragedy, the question of how to balance doctor-patient confidentiality with public safety has resurfaced. The students read three different cases, two of which dealt with the issue of medical confidentiality and the university, and the third involving how much evidence is needed to constitute a “duty to warn.”

On August 1, 2007, the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a response to questions concerning artificial nutrition and hydration, thereby reiterating Pope John Paul II’s affirmation that artificial nutrition and hydration should be considered basic care. In the third session, the students discussed this highly controversial issue.

Harry Potter and the King's Cross

Inspired by the release of the final installment of the wildly popular Harry Potter series, the Center held a panel discussion on September 12, 2007, entitled “Harry Potter and the King’s Cross.” The panel consisted of John O’Callaghan, professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, Rebecca DeYoung, professor of philosophy at Calvin College, and Emerson Spartz, a Notre Dame undergraduate and the founder of www.mugglenet.com, the most popular Harry Potter fan site.

Professor DeYoung opened the discussion with a brief talk entitled “Love Bears All Things: Harry Potter, Thomas Aquinas, and the Virtue of Courage.” In this talk, Professor DeYoung compared three different models of courage: the American Action Hero, Lord Voldemort, and Harry Potter. In the end, Professor DeYoung determined that Harry Potter was the figure which most embodied Aquinas’ view of courage because his courage comes from his love for others rather than his desire for self-preservation.

Professor John O’Callaghan followed this talk with a presentation entitled “Harry Potter and the Cross of Christ,” in which he argued that, despite protestations to the contrary, Harry Potter is a distinctly Christian work. He primarily focused on the use of medieval symbols in the Harry Potter series, and showed the way in which these symbols give the Harry Potter stories a deeply Christian meaning.

Next, Emerson Spartz related a series of anecdotes abouthis experiences with Harry Potter fans and his interview with J.K. Rowling, the books’ author.

The presentations were followed by a lively question and answer segment, and a streaming video of the evening’s panel discussion is available on the Center’s website.

The Way of a Pilgrim

At this spring’s Breaking Bread event, our semi-annual dinner and evening of spiritual discussion held in the Notre Dame Press Box for Notre Dame students and faculty, Dr. Timothy George, Professor of Divinity and Dean of Beeson Divinity School at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama provided a delightful reflection on “The Way of a Pilgrim.”

Using biblical models of pilgrimage, such as Abraham and Sarah, Dr. George reflected on the theme of Christian unity, as we are all called to be pilgrims together in the journey of faith. One of the faculty members who attended the event summarized the evening in this way: “It was really a lovely occasion: a beautiful evening in a beautiful place, with a fine, leisurely meal, good conversation, and a really excellent and inspiring talk by Timothy George to lead it off. The students at my table were really great, and we seemed to have a unified, largely serious and largely theological conversation without any effort. I thought it accomplished just the kind of thing that I understand these meals to be for. So I would say: try to keep it going, and keep taking the time and trouble to do it right. I thought Timothy George struck just the right note, of being intellectually nourishing without being overly abstract, and being inspiring without being preachy. The theme was concrete and imaginative enough to get people thinking and exchanging ideas. And the group of students there was nicely inclusive of different ages and interests: at my table we had a master’s student, an engineer, a theology major, a philosophy major - a couple of trombonists, a woman who runs track, and so on. Thanks again, so much, for inviting me to be part of a splendid occasion. We need more of this kind of thing at Notre Dame.”

As part of the evening’s events, each attendee received a copy of Sacred Travels: Recovering the Ancient Practice of Pilgrimage, by Dr. George’s son, Christian George. This spring’s Breaking Bread event was administered by the Center’s undergraduate assistants, Kate Wilson, Stephen Freddoso, and Greer Hannan. The Center once again thanks Mr. Fran McGowen, of Malvern, Pennsylvania, for his generosity in sponsoring this event. Next semester, Breaking Bread will take place on November 13th, and we are pleased to announce that Professor Lawrence S. Cunningham, the Rev. John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology in Notre Dame’s Department of Theology, will provide the evening’s reflection.