Center for Ethics and Culture Conference at the University of Notre Dame: 11/12-14/09

Wow.

That is basically all I can say. This weekend, the New Tractarians, with many other members of the Notre Dame community and people from across the country and around the world gathered on Notre Dame's Campus for a Conference on the Common Good entitled "The Summons of Freedom: Virtue, Sacrifice and the Common Good." We went to a number of talks by speakers ranging from the extremely well known Alice Von Hildebrand to the "lowly" graduate students here at ND. Here is a list of the talks that we went to:

• A Summons Unmet: Presidential Triumph and Institutional failure at Notre Dame, May 17, 2009 1) True for us, But not True for You: the Dictatorship of Relativism and the President's Honorary Doctorate 2) Apologia for an Institution and a President: Notre Dame and President Obama give Accounts of Themselves 3) Better Late than Never: Truth and Dialogue at Notre Dame
• Freedom, Goods, and Persons: Christian Responsibility in a Post-Christian Age
• Misconceptions about the Common Good
• Vicious Circles, Virtuous Circles and Getting from One to the Other
• Religious Freedom and the Modern Liberal State 1) Religious Freedom and Its Virtue: The Legacy and Limits of John Courtney Murray 2) Pius XII and John XXIII on Religious Freedom and the Common Good: Re-reading John Courtney Murray's The Problem of Religious Freedom 3) The Modern Political Drama of Man and State: Maritain and the Common Good
• The Demands of Virtue 1) The Capital Sin of Avarice and the Need for a New Asceticism 2) The Call of Duty: Saints, Heroes, and Self-Sacrifice 3) Contribution of Older Women Religious to the Common Good
• Thomistic Themes 1) The Two Ends of Marriage and the Common Good according to Thomas Aquinas 2) A Thomistic Consideration of the Eucharist and the Common Good 3) The Common Good as the Defining Element of Christian Love in the Greek Fathers and Thomas Aquinas
• Divorce as Fracture of the Common Good: Ingmar Bergman on Guilt, Art, and Confession
• Pope Benedict on Modernity 1) The Middle Way: How Caritas in Veritate Illuminates Catholic Social Teaching 2) A Worldview in Three Acts: Pope Benedict's ministry to Advanced Modernity in his Encyclicals 3) Pope Benedict XVI's Critique of Modernity
• Education and Moral Formation 1) Henry Adams and John Henry Newman on Liberal Education 2) Library as Temple: J.P. Morgan on the Reordering of Modern Culture 3) Education as Soulcraft: Exemplary Intellectual Practice and the Cardinal Virtues
• Man and Woman: A Divine Intervention
• Religious Freedom in America Today: "Freedom from", "Freedom of", or "Freedom for"
• God, Notre Dame, Country: Rethinking the Mission of Catholic Higher Education in the United States
• Spacial and Temporal Aspects of the Common Good 1) Easter in the "Meantime": Faith in the Crossfire 2) The Wheel and The Wasteland: Eliot's Celebration of Christian Space in Modern Time 3) Human Happiness and the Built Environment
• Front Porch Republic: The Places of Virtue
• Family, Sex, and a Free Society 1) Chastity, the Foundational Virtue of a Free Society 2) Chastity and the Common Good: True Freedom in Being Bound to Another

And did I mention that there was Mass both Friday and Saturday nights (Mass of Anticipation)? Well, there was. And the Bishop Designate of the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese was there and we met him.

This weekend is a lot to process and we probably won't be done for a long time, but it is also much food for thought in our Tractarian line of work, so hopefully the fruits show soon.