Integritas Forum with Fr Dominic Legge, O.P.

hi friends thanks so much for joining us tonight as we continue this spring semester series of integritas forums these interview style conversations are intended to provide you our soaring fellows opportunities to hear from and engage with successful professionals from a wide range of sectors be it healthcare engineering the non-profit space even vowed religious about their experiences and reflections on maintaining personal and ethical integrity across their professional familial and faith lives these conversations range from considerations on work-life balance growing in the faith after college vocational discernment and family life and even practical insight into professional development the inspiration for this recurring event is really twofold first in all that we do through the soren fellows program we seek to elevate the relational character of your formation and resist the reductively transactional paradigm so characteristic of modern university education these conversations are intended to allow you to get to know and learn from someone rather than learn something or some abstract set of ideas apart from personal narrative and second as you well know that the nicholas center is proudly a scholarly center at a research university but we also recognize and embrace that the majority of students we engage through the soren fellows program will not have careers bound to academia or the university but rather will be scattered across a variety of public and private enterprises whether through finance medicine research law engineering and the like many of you will also be moms or dads husbands or wives good friends and counselors community leaders clergy or religious in the relational spirit of the center we hope these conversations provide you opportunities to glean practical advice and enduring insights from persons who display virtues of truly integral formation whether they work in the field you hope to enter have a similar vocational path or not now of course under normal circumstances these conversations would best take place in person over lacroix and rocco's pizza which we plan on moving forward once our shared life together regains some normalcy but in the interim we will host these online which will allow you to access and revisit this content at your own leisure whether in your dorm room or on a walk around campus the format of these conversations will be as follows i'll interview our guest father dominic legge for about 35 minutes or so covering topics from professional advice to personal discernment and everything in between then we'll be joined live by father like so he can feel questions from soaring fellows that arose out of that conversation and that'll last for about 20 minutes or so with that said it's my pleasure to briefly introduce our guest this evening father dominic legge is the director of the domestic institute and assistant professor in systematic theology at the pontifical faculty of the immaculate conception in washington d.c he holds a j.d from yale law school a license in philosophy from the school of philosophy at the catholic university of america and a doctorate in sacred theology from the university of freeburg in switzerland he entered the order of preachers in 2001 after having practiced constitutional law for several years as a trial attorney for the u.s department of justice he is also taught at the catholic university of america law school as well as at providence college he is the author of the trinitarian christology of saint thomas aquinas which was published out of oxford university press in 2016. father legg also oversees the domestic institute's junior fellows program of which soar and fellow alumni have taken part he also spearheaded a new catholic studies study abroad program through the thystic institute in partnership with the angelicum in rome thus this semester-long program focuses on rome as the intersection of great traditions of east and west through the study of ancient medieval history philosophy art and religion and while examining these diverse elements in their primary source as a common thread is also their reception in the thought of saint thomas aquinas you can find further information on this program on the thystic institute's website domesticinstitute.org father dominic is a dear friend valued partner and contributor to the nikola center for ethics and culture and many others here at notre dame not the least of whom are friends in the program of constitutional studies and the tocqueville program here on campus as many of us know through experience to be characteristic of the order of preachers father leg's clarity of thought and charity and presentation gave such great life to our conversation and i certainly walked away enriched challenged and renewed and i anticipate the same for all of you who have joined us as a reminder father leg will join us for a live q a immediately following so please type your questions into the chat function via zoom throughout the conversation and we'll get to as many as we can well father dominic thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule and i'm sure a busy time in the academic year to to share a bit with our soaring fellows tonight yeah it's great to be with you awesome fantastic well to get us started can you just share a little bit about about yourself um you know some of your story where where are you from uh where are you now what is some of the good work that that you're doing uh well so i'm originally from seattle um i grew up uh in a you know kind of average catholic family um in a part of the country that's not very not very catholic not very church-going in general and um but i had a really strong experience of a catholic parish growing up that you know as i've reflected back on my life uh that is one of the notable things i went to a parish school and our family was pretty involved in the parish even though i wouldn't have described us as you know super duper devout catholic family we we went to mass on sundays we said grace before meals but we didn't like pray the rosary uh as a family in the evening or something like that we it was unusual to go to a daily mass um you know kind of that would have been an unusual week but um certainly would never miss a sunday mass and the the family's social life really revolved around the school and the parish so um that gave me a i think a pretty strong sense of what it means to belong to uh the catholic church and later in life you know when i went off so i went catholic grade school catholic high school i don't feel like i got really a very good formation in the faith in terms of the catechesis the intellectual formation i didn't really understand the faith there were a lot of things that i thought were i associated you know religion um the way it was taught to me as being the least serious subject in school and so i i thought it was kind of a joke subject and i didn't take it seriously um which was really a shame um you know because that's not true but uh but the way it was taught to me and or at least the way his eye as a you know a junior high student or a high school student you know being an idiot uh the way i the way i assimilated that was was pretty defective so um and i'm sure a lot of the fault is on my side uh so then when i went off to college i really kind of dropped out uh for a while um not that i ever would have gone to another church or certainly not another you know another religious tradition anything like that i i can't i couldn't really ever imagine myself being anything but catholic i imagine that's probably also true for a lot of the students at notre dame you know it's not like they would become something else but they might not take their catholicism so seriously or you know it might just remain like a kind of an intellectual commitment but not so much like a commitment of the whole person and um or maybe it's something that you do with your family but um you know or maybe you sometimes go to mass on your own but otherwise you're kind of you know like kind of dropping out um and that's sort of what happened to me so uh you know i'm not too proud of that of that fact but um thankfully uh you know god's grace is wonderful it's he's very merciful and um so after college actually i started uh kind of asking some questions and making my way back but before i before i say something about that i should say that um in high school you may know this pete but um one of my good high school friends was uh now dr philip munoz who teaches uh you know is the director of the top field program and uh teaches there at notre dame so phil and i were locker partners in high school um we uh we you know we went to the depeche mode concert together you know um things like that uh we uh we tried to go to the michael jackson concert together but it got canceled he got a cold or something you know so uh we had all those kinds of experiences together and then we we actually ended up going to the same college although we didn't really plan that in concert so we both were at claremont mckenna college which is a small liberal arts college in california and and were roommates there for a couple years so um he kind of uh you know was a witness to also what what i went through in those years um that friendship has been one of the most important and rewarding you know for me um he's really a very dear friend and it's been an enormous gift to me to to have a friend with whom i share so much yeah absolutely yeah thank you for sharing that father i uh especially appreciate your the distinction that that you draw or at least the way in which you phrased it to kind of um checking out or the the the faith not really being operative within undergraduate years or something that is siloed to the side as as the least serious or the least real thing that one does maybe perhaps it infuses some moral meaning from time to time as it's helpful but but it isn't necessarily part of an integrated view of who you are as a as a human person um and particularly um resonant with what we do here at the center and with our soaring fellows um is this idea of the relational character of human formation uh particularly with respect to our formation in in virtue um and so your your reference to uh professor munoz uh strikes a chord with me could you kind of flush that a little bit more as you kind of think back and reflect back of the role that particular friendships had with respect to widening your imagination not just with respect to your own kind of moral constitution but just with the role that the role that the faith has or that catholicism could have going forward in your life yeah actually i think the the person that i would uh single out the most actually was when it was a high school teacher of mine um i had two really important high school teachers both of them were coaches um one of them was the uh he was the track and cross country coach and the other was the debate coach so i was i did um speech and debate in high school and um he also so the debate coach had been a seminarian and he'd left the seminary and came to teach at our high school she was a younger uh younger teacher and um he really was extremely generous with his time and he also was the most you might say the most intellectually sophisticated catholic that i'd ever met uh up to that point so he had a you know he had an understanding of church history and also of philosophy and theology and like the great ideas of western civilization you might say and um so that was my first exposure to to shakespeare to dante to uh to aquinas and also to you know other great you know great figures saint augustine um thomas merton you know i remember being recommended to me by by him um and so uh years later when i was uh in law school so i went straight from college to law school and wasn't you know i i um i had studied abraham lincoln a lot in undergrad and then for uh in law school we had kind of like a master's thesis that we had to write so i was working on that master's thesis on abraham lincoln and spending most of my days just reading the collective works of lincoln and at one point i realized and this was a kind of moment of grace that i knew more about lincoln and i cared more about lincoln than i knew or cared about jesus and that was a wake-up call to me i mean it was a kind of shocking realization i thought that's not good um i'm sure that that i should care more about jesus so i uh i called this teacher of mine and asked him you know like well what what should i do what should i like what book should i go get and he said well go get the catechism and you know buy a bible so i i you know i may have already had the idea to get the catechism but he advised me on the the edition of the bible to buy and um uh that was great i started reading the catechism i realized okay well i guess i better like go to confession confession was not a regular part of my life since basically my first confession i mean probably gone to confession a total of four times or something you know in my life at that point uh maybe maybe six um but uh it was not a regular thing at all which i think is a terrible a terrible uh crisis for the contemporary church that um that that regular practice of going to confession has dropped out of you so i would encourage any any of the soaring fellows to to give some thought to that if you're not regularly going to confession that that is a really really huge help for your life um very important anyway i went to confession i went to the dominican church to go to confession and uh it was like um you know just got great advice in the confessional i went to the to the mass at that same church and i don't know if you've ever had the experience of um being at a mass where you feel like the homily is being preached directly to you uh so that's what it was like um and uh so i was really impressed by the dominicans and um i wasn't ready to become a dominican far from it but um i began to take my faith seriously and really for the first time in my life began to appreciate what what the eucharist is and i remember distinctly thinking that sunday mornings were the best best part of my week and i couldn't really put together why that was but now of course looking back on it well of course it was the day i was receiving the eucharist um and uh so that that was the beginning of a priestly vocation really yeah absolutely thank you for for sharing that with us um yeah it it resonates with with me personally too i i think so much of your story is is is one that that is shared by a lot of young young catholics and even those who have become even more serious about their faith about owning their faith perhaps if that's the right phrase perhaps it's not um in in their undergraduate years and and identifying sources of joy um in the proximity to the sacraments that perhaps earlier in their life um for one reason or another were actually sources of just feeling like you had yet an obligation to go to mass that it wasn't necessarily a source of joy but it was just a sensible this is what we do as a family rather than having some operative sense in one's own formation um and so that has personal resonance with me and i'm sure with with other fellows so so thank you um i wanted to follow up on something so you you went from undergrad to law school um and there are a lot of students right now who are who are putting in deposits uh undergrads who are putting in deposits to go to law school xy or z notre dame michigan hopefully notre dame um could you share with us a little bit of you know as you look back as your discernment and your thoughtfulness with respect to the faith increase throughout those years how that affected in any way the way in which you thought about about law school and the and the discernment to pursue that as opposed to a myriad of other opportunities after undergrad yeah you know i regularly hear from uh students you know i do a lot of work with college students because of the domestic institute so uh i regularly talk to students who are thinking about law school or maybe have uh gotten into law school and are trying to make up their minds so you know if any of the sworn fellows want to reach out if they're thinking about law school you know i'd be happy to talk to you on the phone um but uh my you know the advice that i often give is uh you know i loved law school i loved being a lawyer it's a great it's a great um you know path if that's what you want to do from from when i was in like you know fourth grade i wanted to be a lawyer uh and i got that from watching tv shows i mean basically perry mason i don't know if you remember perry mason is an old 1950s tv show uh or 1960 tv show about a a lawyer who is like a crusade and you know it's kind of a predecessor to law and order um and uh so i just thought that was really cool and that was i was pretty single-mindedly focused on that all through college and um you know then went straight into law school so if you want to go to law school if you want to be a lawyer then you should go to law school um if you uh you know you study stuff that's interesting if you want to be a lawyer like civil procedure or the rules of evidence um if you don't want to practice law then i would advise like think twice about going to law school because it's a very specialized education and it really is a vocational formation in order to practice law so you will spend a lot of your life studying the rules of civil procedure there is no reason to do that if you don't want to if you don't want to practice law now i understand you know there's lots of people who see law school as a great kind of uh opportunity to level up without committing you to necessarily one track you can take a law degree and do lots of different things but the advice that one of my professors gave me in college uh was really good because i was the kind of person who wanted to keep my keep all the doors open and he said listen you have to stop playing defense you you are doing a really good job at keeping the other team from scoring a goal you need to score a goal but that means like you need to to change the metaphor you need to like walk through these doors and you got to pick which door you're going to walk through and then keep going but if you try to keep all your doors open you're never going to go anywhere which is true and i think that's especially true now uh you know my sense is that um a lot of university university age students they are concerned about like making the right choice and um you have lots of options i mean in a way that's in affliction you have so many possible options that figuring out which one you want to take can be daunting um but the truth is you're not really going to figure it out unless you start going forward so the best thing to do is to do the best you can and then you have to go forward so uh you know law school uh just for the sake of keeping your options open not a good choice if you want to be a lawyer go for it that's what i would say love it absolutely yeah thank you and i i think that is uh you've identified exactly the kind of um the ethos in which university age students operate right now that there's a constellation of opportunities out there and that's that can be cripplizing particularly for someone who wants to make make good of their of their life to to do good and who thinks even in terms of these doors in terms of vocation and where where do my gifts and talents meet the world's needs through through the eyes of the church and through the eyes of my my faith and and even then um you know as a highly successful student there may be a myriad of options for for someone and so the question of true desire is is one that really needs to be elevated um well speaking of um various doors to perhaps walk through though it may not be the same discernment process as law school itself or something to do after undergrad could you share with us a little bit and you've been carving out this narrative here a bit but um if you'd be able to and willing to could you share with us a little bit about what what moved the needle eventually for you to kind of uh consider and and pursue a vocation through the dominicans yeah so i mean i'd already met the dominicans uh while i was in law school and i was impressed by them but i mean really more as like a parishioner i never spoke to them actually i was too intimidated to go up and talk to one of the dominicans because i thought like i don't even know do you call him father do you call him brother do you call him prior i didn't know so i didn't want to make a mistake so i just didn't i didn't talk to them which looking back you know i laugh and also i'm kind of you know disappointed in myself for so you know it's okay you can we we understand you don't know what to call us just talk to us um so that's the first thing father you know you can you start with father that's usually fine um uh but um so i came to washington dc i was working as a lawyer here in washington and uh i loved i loved my job i was also dating someone rather seriously and thinking seriously about marriage and um i had always imagined that that's the direction my life would go in so marriage family being a father i wanted that um but uh i was also growing steadily in my faith and um in that relationship we we were you know there was i could see that this was headed towards marriage and at the same time there were some things that weren't quite lining up and one of them actually was a serious conversation that um my then girlfriend and i had about uh the issue of contraception which i had just kind of you know i've never really thought about um and you know she was basically of the view yeah you know like we're definitely gonna contracept i don't wanna have more than two or maybe three kids and i i thought gosh well i don't think catholics are supposed to do that um but i don't understand the church's teaching so my answer in that conversation was well yeah i guess i could go along with that and um i went home that night and my conscience was really bothering me and i thought you know i need to figure out what the church really teaches about this so uh this was you know when the internet was in its infancy you couldn't just look up you know the church's teaching on the on the internet so i went to a catholic bookstore and i bought a copy of humane vitae which was uh pope paul the sixth encyclical on contraception and i read that and i listened to that an audio tape kind of explaining it and i listened to that i read the encyclical and i thought oh man i think this is true uh which i took as bad news because it meant i had to go back to my girlfriend and and say hey i don't think i can do this so which is what i did um and that provoked a crisis so um i didn't know what to do and i decided to go on retreat so i knew that you could go to like a monastery uh to just make a private retreat so i called a benedictine monastery here in washington dc and just went for the weekend and just to kind of pray have a little time away to process this think through so um on the saturday night that i was there uh the monks prayed compliment in a very you know is beautifully sung and then they did a procession to a shrine of our lady where they prayed the the litany to the blessed virgin mary and then a prayer for vocations to the priesthood and i was just moved to tears by this i and i didn't know why so i went back to the chapel and knelt down um by myself now you know the chapel was empty dark and all of a sudden it was like getting hit with this realization that the terrible realization it's the same kind of realization like when you um sit down to take a test and you realize that you didn't study for any of the material it was like literally my head was spinning when i realized my whole life i have gone to god to ask him to give me what i want and here i am again asking for him to give me what i want that somehow this relationship would work out and i've never once asked him what he wants me to do and that was a terrifying realization because on the one hand i knew that it was wrong for me not to ask that and on the other hand i thought well i can't ask that because what if he says i want you to be a priest like that would be the end of my life like uh my career my this relationship my plans for a family all of that would you know i've worked so hard for this how could how could he possibly ask me that and yet i could not like i knew that i needed to ask so after about 20 minutes of real agony uh on my knees i said okay lord i i give up you know if well what was important was i realized that i would i would get up from the from the chapel having asked that question or not having asked and then if i if i didn't ask i would effectively be saying to jesus i don't wanna know what you want i'm gonna do what i want i'm gonna hope that's okay with you and uh but but i knew that on some level that would be turning my back on him and i knew i did not want to turn my back on him so i was not the best catholic but i had received enough enough grace to know that i didn't want to do that oh wow all right i give up i'll i'll do whatever you want and that was a that was a major moment of conversion and uh you know all of the fear and anxiety that i was experiencing at that moment just disappeared and i became filled with joy and i walked out of the chapel like three feet off the ground um and uh bumped into a priest in the corridor who asked me what i was doing with my life and i said you know i think maybe i should become a priest i mean it was surreal something i never would have said an hour before um so that didn't that wasn't the end of the story there was a lot more work that i had to do but that was the major event for sure wow that's so powerful thank you so much for for sharing that i it's it's so moving um and i think perhaps we we all may get to a point or or do get to a point in in our life where where we do have to ask and i think in the context of a university education that's very formative um at that particular stage of life you know students and and others are are are moved to ask like what you know am i going to give the blank check to the lord you know and and no longer project uh or no longer have a negotiation a spiritual negotiation where you put in some of your chips and you see who meets you halfway but rather um the the prayer of surrender so to say like no lord it is it is truly you are the one who is going to invite me to to something to really be even more fully alive than what i can imagine in my own manipulative ways in which i i kind of have anticipated my life to play out whether it's with respect to maybe a of a vocational path like married life or the priest or maybe even for those who are considering you know different professional paths of is it is it you know med school or is it is it service or is it law school and so the witness of your story is so powerful because i think it resonates with with anyone no matter if they're discerning a vocation to religious life or or not so thank you for for sharing that um can i transition a bit to the work that you get to do now as a dominican and and and some of the great work that the the mystic institute is doing um could you share with us a little bit about kind of the the origins of where that comes out of um both with respect to um a dominican charism uh and also recognizing a need within modern secular universities and and popular culture at large for the intellectual tradition and the intellectual riches of the church to be shared in an accessible way yeah i mean well the big picture or you know origins uh go back to the beginnings of the dominican order you know so saint dominic himself who was the founder of the dominican order sent the early priors to the universities to the medieval universities which were just getting started and uh he wanted a religious order that would be an order of preachers which would therefore be intellectually formed and able to respond to the challenges of the culture which required an intellectual response so um the dominican order from the very beginning has been at the university now not exclusively it's not all the dominicans do but that was always an important thing and uh then in the next generation the kind of well you know saint dominic uh founded the order in in 1216 and then in you know in the 1250s you have thomas aquinas so 35 years later um and uh thomas aquinas of course is one of the great intellects you know in the history of christianity um so philosopher theologian uh dominican friar so that is the the tradition you might say that dominicans have inherited and that we have a special we consider ourselves to have a special relationship to that to mystic intellectual tradition and also a certain responsibility in the church for um carrying on that mode of intellectual inquiry especially in philosophy and theology so there's a kind of two mystic school or dominican dominican domestic uh tradition and here at the dominican house of studies in washington dc we take that seriously we we uh most of our formation is it's an open system so it's open to lots of other engagements you know engaging lots of other schools of thought and lots of contemporary questions but by being formed in in this mode of thought it really is very powerful it's the traditional backbone of the catholic intellectual life really um and uh so that's a great that's a great heritage so the the mission of the mystic institute is to make that better known and to make it a little uh well to kind of take it from our faculty here in washington out to other places and help other people encounter it make it um to be uh you know kind of a coordinator of a lot of people in a lot of different places who want to be engaged in this kind of high-level intellectual conversation but uh we initially were doing that with you know professors and scholars and we realized that there was a lot of interest from students first graduate students but then undergraduate students who wanted to be a part of this and wanted to see more of this on their on their campus and not every campus is like notre dame with you know the kind of wealth of catholic intellectuals that you have there uh a lot of schools don't really have much access to this and certainly you know um non-non-religious schools public schools for example don't have these kinds of scholars uh there and so we created this program to have chapters of students domestic institute student chapters at schools around the country now we have about 65 of them um and that's just grown extremely fast uh so um and it's all been the student the student interest that has driven it yeah so my job as the director is to um you know manage our our team we have a growing team of of people we have um ben sutter who i think you know notre dame grad last year uh who came uh for as one of our junior fellows and and is working for us for a year also taking classes with us um so uh we are happy to have him here and we're hoping that that notre dame connection will continue into the future we'd love to have more notre dame students uh in our summer programs and um uh so you know that's that's just been great um but that's that's basically my my work so i do a lot of speaking i'm still teaching theology i'm writing writing books and articles uh but i'm also like trying to keep the to mystic institute you know running and moving forward so yeah absolutely yeah thank you for for sharing that father it's it's interesting that there's been such a profound response across a variety of institutions with with young people can you you know as you just kind of react to that can you can you put your finger on on what need is being met um what is being met for these undergraduate students or graduate students at these public schools um that suggests that there is a kind of formation that they are not experiencing necessarily through their curriculum through the pedagogy of their respective schools but that is like intrinsic to the human person that the human heart desires this kind of not just knowledge but these kind of considerations uh can you can you flesh that out a little bit for us i mean in your opinion what what need how how is the mystic institute meeting that need and what does the strong response say about the human condition that that it yearns for that kind of conversation that kind of intellectual engagement i think a lot of students and and by the way not just students but certainly students feel it others do too uh feel unmoored like they don't really have um deep roots they don't really know their own heritage or their own tradition um and that they are just in a um uh you're sort of in a situation of of flux there's lots of lots of individual things that you can specialize in and you can you can learn about um but especially when you go off to uh you know to college you know you may be taking a literature class over here in a history class and a sociology class and you're taking your neuroscience class whatever and your french class and uh you just continue to develop these individual lines of expertise but no one ever like sits down and tells you what it all means or how it fits together and in fact maybe it doesn't all fit together uh so um and and in fact there are some profoundly uh conflicting you might say um presuppositions embedded in some of these different fields of thought so um that's kind of disorienting and the university is not meant to be that way so uh there should be some way to kind of get a grip on what it all means and i think thomas aquinas is one of the best ways to do that so aquinas does not give you the answer to every question but what aquinas does is he provides a kind of skeletal structure to organize uh your intellectual life and especially as a catholic it integrates the truths of faith with the truths known accessible by by the light of human reason that's both truths of philosophy but also truths that science contemporary science can uncover and really every human discipline wherever the truth can be found aquinas has a kind of framework to fit it in so it's like a skeleton it needs to be fleshed out but um that's very very powerful and i think students are really interested in that that's the first thing the second thing is i think people are interested in learning more about the catholic tradition and the the riches of the catholic intellectual tradition so this is our heritage i mean i uh went through law school basically totally ignorant of that and had to start reading books on my own to figure it out because no one told me about it um it was as if we were embarrassed about our own tradition and so we're trying to just tell people what the tradition like there is unbelievable profound intellectual riches and depth to our tradition and uh it's worth spending time uh delving into it and it will enrich your life the the last thing i would say the third thing that i think has been really important for the domestic institute's growth is we really wanted it to be student focused which means like we try to help the students become the protagonists on their campus so the students really do run the chapters we don't like tell the students what to do we we coach them and we give them the resources to do it themselves and then it's up to them to figure out like what are the topics that my campus would be interested in hearing about and that's actually really exciting because believe it or not what happens is the students cease to become just recipients they themselves become like the ones who who are themselves going out and delivering the message to other students and that's just tremendous yeah oh that's fantastic there's so much to to unpack there i i'll start from from the the third point that that you made um yeah that the students themselves become the evangelists and become participants in the um in the intellectual tradition itself and are able to meet the the needs both kind of in the intellectual curiosity of their campus whatever topics are most appropriate they can become themselves the evangelists on on their campuses and so just in the spirit of the new evangelization and and kind of um you know the the kind of uh perpetual call particularly for for those who are young and and curious and intellectually engaged to to go out and and make disciples of of those who are their neighbor um is just so moving and enriching it and it reminds me of st paul um and then with respect to the the first uh point that that you made when you uh talked about the the scaffolding or the or the skeletal structure that aquinas provides it it moves me and with particular respect to the university and the kind of current um [Music] tensions you know but people might even call like a multiversity instead of a university in the eclipse of theology and this kind of being pulled like gumby in a lot of different directions but not having a particular end to which students are are working toward that that resonates so much i think even quite frankly on catholic campuses as well where there is a hyper specialization within disciplines but the questions of how it all fits together um are are kind of eclipsed um and the division say of john henry newman uh in the way in which he envisioned theology working on as a synthetic discipline to give coherence to the sociologies and uh the anthropologies and the histories or whatnot um and it does place students in a precarious position because then they're kind of floating and and there is no there is no end to which they're they're pursuing and and so the idea of making the the thought of aquinas and and perhaps newman more more present on campuses serves such a it's not just a an intellectual exercise it serves a very functional end for for students with respect to their formation and so um thank you for for the work that you're you're doing with the domestic institute and and frankly i feel as though all of us here at the nicholas center and soren fellows have have something to to learn from from your success successor thank you for your your witness well you know i should add that uh tony and christie nicola were the very first like they were among the very very first benefactors of the two mystic institute so we owe our start to them oh absolutely well there's there's so much good good work going on and we're so grateful for for their support um i'll close it out with with one last question and then i'll i'll throw in a bonus question at the end that i that i um i pose to folks um at the end of these conversations but but the last one that i want to end on kind of turns back to this question of discernment a bit um so soren fellows whether they're a freshman undergrad or they're a doc student these are people who are mission driven people who have identified that their faith commitments are something integral to their self-understanding both with respect to the way in which they discern personal vocations with respect to marriage life or religious life um and also just with the way in which they think about how their passions their gifts and talents might meet the world's needs through the eyes of the church however like and this gets back at what we just said you know there are vagaries with you know discernment particularly in undergrad when the horizon of opportunities is almost limitless um so what what advice might you have to give to a a soaring fellow who knows that he or she wants their faith needs their faith to be a part of who they who they are how they live their life but it's just unclear to them what tangibly that that looks like uh what what advice even even spiritual advice would would you give these students yeah i mean the first thing is subscribe to aquinas 101 okay and then like we'd love to hire some sworn fellows you know at the time but that's that's not spiritual advice but it would be good for you um okay uh but what uh what other advice would i give i think the first and most important thing is start with the fundamentals you know the fundamentals of the spiritual life so you're not gonna make progress by um you know uh mystical experiences first of all or um uh you know like series of introspective psychological you know um uh depth work or something like that where you're you you need the help of god's grace and that's actually it's not complicated it's very simple it's just not necessarily always easy but it's it's actually very straightforward and very simple so that means like have a regular prayer life regularly go to confession regularly receive the eucharist in the state of grace you know if you're not in the state of grace don't receive the eucharist but if you're in the state of grace receive the eucharist um so uh that's very important you know so developing just starting with that and then you know if you're in the state of grace you have divinely infused the theological virtues of faith hope and love so but uh you have that as a as a habitus so atomist would say what is a habitus it's a virtue it's a stable disposition to engage in those kinds of acts but just because you have the habitus of faith or the habitus the virtue of charity does not mean that you are actually making acts of faith and charity the goal is to not just have the capacity to make those acts but to make those acts and to do it more and more so i think the first step is to try to exercise the virtues of faith hope and charity more and uh you know that means being more stable in your prayer life taking advantage of the sacraments and living a a life of christian virtue if you do that you things will start to come into focus for you and uh i think that's that's like 90 of the battle um there are often people who feel like they cannot figure their lives out but often it's because there's like some obstacle there like maybe it's a habitual sin they just can't really uh overcome and that's gonna be an obstacle until you like work it out god's grace is more powerful than any sin he'll he'll help you remove it but once you get that worked out then uh your your vision will become clearer um once you've done that though then i think this is the the second level of discernment you might say uh it's it's coming to know actually what you really love above all and and that will also be you know not just generic but particular um so what i mean is um you know it's it's like acquiring a taste for a new food uh or a taste for like fine french wine or something like that you know you the first time you taste it you may not really appreciate it but the more you taste it the more the more you begin to understand what it is and the more you begin to desire it um and aquinas has a beautiful thing to say about that i don't want to go on for too long but uh he says that unlike you know with with material desires like you're hungry you're thirsty you desire what you don't have and um when you get it you no longer want it like when you've eaten too much you don't want to eat more but with spiritual desires it's the opposite when you don't have it you don't desire it and as you begin to receive it you begin to desire it more that's curious and interesting so what that means is like you actually have to begin living that spiritual life and maybe trying out these different forms of life like go visit a monastery uh come to visit you know come on a vocation weekend that have been a good house of studies something like that um and and you will begin to taste that life and then you may discover that actually that's what you really love i mean that that's what happened to me fantastic thank you father for for sharing that that is um so resonant with with what we're about here with the soren fellows program these what i would call habits of thinking acting and and praying in in a way that nourishes the spiritual life that you know i i compare it when i interview soren fellows i say well what what good is your intellectual formation or your professional resume or even your social capital if if uh your spiritual backbone is is broken your your limbs of your intellect your limbs of your professional capacities not only can't function but but will function against you um if if that vertebrae is is not is not in intact so um so thank you for for offering that and as you speak it i i receive it very gratefully as well um so i'll i'll throw one last bonus question which is not going to be nearly as substantive or deep or profound as anything that we've talked about so far but it's much more practical and perhaps it gets at the acquired tastes that you were mentioning um so um you're at a nicola center for ethics and culture tailgate on a crisp october weekend god willing next year and and you have the opportunity to have a lacroix or perhaps an alternative adult beverage with with anyone who's ever lived who are you cracking open a cold one with and and why well i can tell you that in fact when i've been to that i've only been to tailgates uh but it was uh you know it was carter snead philip munoz and tony and chrissy the nicola that was and that was an awesome group like i'm gonna do that again um so you don't know how good you have it there i mean first thing i'd say um but uh uh if i could pick a historical person i mean i think i'd have to say somebody like thomas aquinas that's not really a hard one um thomas aquinas had some uh just amazing amazing insights uh but there are some parts of his texts that are ambiguous or where like there are famous questions that uh tomists have been puzzling over and i would love to you know if i had an hour to sit down with aquinas and just like talk through some of those things that would be that would be amazing um yeah fantastic fantastic well um i don't know if we'll be able to pull pull that off we have some pretty good thomas here on campus and not that they're stand-ins for thomas himself but uh but thank you so much father for for joining us today and and for sharing so much of of your your work and your story um thank you for the witness in in all that you do and all that the dominican order does and i'll look forward to um reconnecting for a live question and answer where i'm sure our students will have much more rigorous questions than than i did but thank you so much and i'll look forward to chatting further all right thank you all right friends welcome father dominic thank you so much for for joining us tonight hey it's great to be with you awesome fantastic well the questions have been coming in uh from students and the interest of time i i'd like to get right to them if that sounds okay with you yeah fantastic um so someone asked you've recommended the aquinas 101 series for students um but might you also have some recommendations of some of your favorite talks from the mystic institute that maybe soren fellows would be particularly interested in does something stand out for you of the work that uh that ti has has done hmm yeah there's uh there's some great um pucks can off the top of my head can i can i catalog them this is a dangerous question of course because a lot of the people who are giving these talks from my friends so you know how can i by name one then i don't name another but i and i'm doing this without any advanced reflection um father thomas joseph white has a really great talk on beauty and i think the title of the talk is can beauty save the world and it's kind of funny because i don't know if you know anything about the the kind of interesting to mystic debates over whether beauty is a transcendental um but uh so you know father thomas joseph doesn't uh directly maybe take that on but in the end uh he gives an answer which is kind of amusingly dominican which is can beauty save the world uh yes the beauty of a true idea [Laughter] fantastic uh you guys resolves it but it's a really interesting talk and um uh it kind of takes a subject that um you know often uh you don't think about that rigorously like what is beauty from from a domestic perspective and so that's that's great um uh there's a um uh really some really interesting talks about um uh neuroscience and the soul one of our more popular talks um is on the subject of neuroscience on the soul like does neuroscience show that you don't have a you don't have a soul um and of course the answer is no you know but sometimes you might think otherwise depending on what your neuroscience professor is saying um dr james madden has given a lot of those talks for us uh but you'd find a number of talks on our soundcloud page um let's see maybe i can throw out a couple more one talk that i maybe other people will not find this interesting at all but i found it completely fascinating we have a conference every summer where we bring together serious scientists these are you know professors of experimental sciences um at major universities along with serious philosophers and then some grad students in science or philosophy and uh so these talks are you know usually at a rather high level but dr karen oberg who is a astrophysicist at harvard um she specializes in planet formation and space ice okay so she gave a talk on what is water and it's really interesting she now from a scientific perspective but also informed by some domestic philosophy she says you know most people would say water is h2o and she basically says um no it's not um it's very interesting so if you want to know more about what is water i recommend that talk to you um let's just just a few uh a few good examples uh i could certainly list many many more but oh no that that's a great start and i i feel as though once students get rolling on the sound cloud then they'll kind of go down the rabbit hole yeah so this this primes it just just right so thank you very much we have some more questions um coming in one of them comes from one of our seniors who will be entering law school next year um he says as someone who will be attending law school in the fall i was wondering if you have any advice for finding a meaningful career path in the law that contributes to the common good so a meaningful career path in the law that contributes to common good um did i don't remember if we talked about this in the recorded the pre-recorded part um so stop me if if i just said this no please but uh you know should someone go to law school and i think it depends on whether you want to practice law i think we did talk about that didn't we that's right that's right okay so what what are good so i i practice law at the department of justice and um the department of justice is a great place because you you have really expert people it's like high-level people uh get those jobs and so it's great collegial environment i found and you are very quickly entrusted with a lot of responsibility um and depending on the section that you're in you can do something where you really can feel very good about what you're doing so for my in my case i worked for a section in the torch branch called the constitutional torts section and that meant that we defended federal officials when they got sued for allegedly violating sued in civil court for money damages for allegedly violating somebody's constitutional rights so a lot of these cases the most typical cases were coming out of a federal law enforcement action where you know somebody uh you know gets arrested and they say it was an unlawful uh arrest or it was an unlawful search and seizure so fourth amendment claims and then they sue the the police officer some of those were pretty routine cases but um uh some of them were extremely interesting cases so some um lethal you know use of lethal force force cases uh some first amendment cases where like uh i had a case where the forest service arrested some environmental protesters who were blocking roads and chaining themselves to things and you know and so can can the forest service do that that was interesting but um uh we always did a kind of pre-screen of the case to determine is this in the interest of the united states to defend uh the the person you know the federal official in this case the reason for that is the united states does not defend unconstitutional conduct like the department of justice is about prosecuting unconstitutional conduct not defending it so um so we would you as the lawyer did that pre-screening process yourself and then presented the findings to the supervisor who made the final decision but um that was really cool to be a lawyer who really kind of investigated your own client before you accepted them um it's not like that in the private sector where basically you have a paying client and you you know you accept the paying client um i know a lot of lawyers who do work uh in the pro-life sector and uh probably the nikola center for ethics and culture you know is pretty connected to those kinds of people too and that is uh something very needed and very edifying you know um i think right now uh we need a lot more like i'm i'm to be perfectly honest a little bit nervous a little bit worried about the pro-life movement right now um so i think there's you know it's a little demoralized uh even though it shouldn't be i mean with the uh you know the appointments that are recently made to the supreme court into the federal courts i think in a certain way we're in a better position than than ever before but things may not be happening as fast as as we want them to there's internal disagreements um uh and then you know there's lots of new challenges uh i just read a paper today about uh the vaccine um you know people having moral qualms about the vaccines given that there are cells derived from abortion that are being used somehow in the process of manufacturing the vaccines or at least in testing them and that varies from vaccine to vaccine it seems but uh and even though the conclusion is it's morally licit to take the vaccine it's not morally licit to be involved in the use of those cell lines to like do further experiments because you're uh you're much more necessarily involved and that's you know then you've got the the recent news that we've had about people doing cloning between animals and and um humans that's just horrific absolutely horrific so there's a lot of work to be done on that and i think that's a great place for people to devote their energy absolutely thank you very much father for that absolute echo that even from the perspective here at the nicola center for ethics and culture we need so many more boots on the ground um i'm going to do a 180 here and and questions come in about the discernment of religious life in the context of studies so a soaring fellow asks how would you encourage students discerning religious life to continue to be diligent in their studies while desiring a life beyond school well that's a that's a great question um now you're asking that question of a dominican so a dominican would would naturally say uh your religious life is going to involve your mind you know because everything you do needs to also involve your mind and be guided by your mind you know so the the and and hopefully you don't think about your studies as just a hoop to jump through or um you know some little qualification that has to get checked off so you can move on to the next stage now of course there could be classes that you take that strike you that way and that's unfortunate but the real spirit and purpose of the university education is to form your mind and seek the truth with your mind and in religious life that is above all what we are doing we are trying to be consecrated in the truth so how can you be a contemplative according to aquinas what it means to be a contemplative is simply to to gaze on the truth to know the truth and of course the truth who is a person um ultimately you know so to to know and gaze on the face of christ uh so you do that with your mind and uh in fact um that's one of the most important ways that you can pray i mean prayer for aquinas is nothing other than the raising of the mind to god so of course in prayer there should be there should be a real dialogue you speak to god you listen but you can also incorporate into your prayer the very serious work of purifying the ideas you have in your mind of god that's the work of theology is important to do that because we can create idols uh which are not god but which on which we project all of like maybe our hidden desires um and that's that's not good we want to seek god and god as he really is in himself and that requires a lot of purification of the mind so i think there's uh there's a lot of good that can be done with the mind there let me just make one final point which is um right now i've just finished teaching the course on grace at the dominican house of studies and it's one of my favorite subjects it's a very difficult subject and i always find it very challenging to teach this course i rewrite my notes every year um but uh i was meditating uh more recently on the the claim of saint thomas about grace that grace uh affects first the highest part of the soul which is the highest part of the mind so that's interesting if you begin to really think about it um because often we can think about our spiritual lives as mostly about our feelings um or our maybe our psychological experiences you know you can you could start with your emotions and then maybe you work your way up to a mat your imagination and your your psychological experiences but according to aquinas that's not really where grace is above all operative so god of course god can move your emotions he can he can put images into your mind that kind of thing um but above all grace works by starting at the very top like the highest part of your mind so elevating the light of reason to share in the supernatural light of faith and to give your will which is not just your emotions but your your rational appetite to give your will a new orientation towards god and sometimes in our spiritual lives we have to ask act against our feelings uh and god can help us do that because you know our feelings are not always reliable guides to what is right or wrong as you know very well okay no that's absolutely thank you no thank you so much and i think i think on the on the eve of final exams when you know the the intellect is being challenged and challenged and and the will is present alongside that those are those are wise words and words and sage advice for our undergraduate fellows and graduate fellows to take into account um i i'm sensitive to the time it was such a robust discussion that that we had recorded that i i think we've run out of time but it looks like we've gotten through most of the questions there's one half serious question that came in which is why is there not a ti chapter at notre dame uh uh but uh i i think uh john o'callaghan has a has a good monopoly on the mystic thought absolutely absolutely the long and the short answer is that the um uh the original function of these ti chapters was to go to secular campuses so not to catholic catholic campuses and uh we we mainly so you know the vast majority of ti campuses are um are secular schools or non-catholic schools uh there are some rare cases where we've developed a collaborative relationship with an entity at a catholic school but then it's always a collaboration uh and that's very important to us because we want to work with the good people on these catholic campuses who are you know we're pushing the ball forward absolutely absolutely well this is a great start so father thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us tonight and to share with me in our conversation and we'll look forward so much to having you on campus uh hopefully this fall at a tailgate at least so thank you so that's awesome look forward to it all right father all right thank you so much god bless take care bye you

Channel: de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture ndethics

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Length: 64min 27sec (3867 seconds)

Published: Tue May 04 2021