Recently-appointed dCEC director reflects on ethics, culture, and their relationship
The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture (dCEC) began its 25th year at Notre Dame with a lecture by its recently-appointed director, Jennifer Newsome Martin. The talk, titled “What is Catholic Culture?” was delivered to a packed audience of over 200 faculty and students and served as a retrospective on the dCEC’s work: ethics, culture, and their interdependence.
In an interview with the Rover, Martin said she was motivated “to give this really generous picture of Catholic culture,” with its countless manifestations all “ultimately oriented around the question of the good.”
Martin opened her lecture by exploring the breadth of Catholic culture in its myriad forms, both geographically and culturally. She explained how Catholic culture reaches beyond explicit Catholicism to include the likes of Homer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, C. S. Lewis, and countless others who reflect the essence of Catholic culture without being Catholic themselves.
Catholic culture, she argued, possesses a “radically open disposition,” a “discerning yes” that critiques, transforms, and thereby integrates all wisdom, while also rejecting the “counterfeit generosities of eclecticism, relativism, [and] shallow pluralism.”
Tracing “culture” back to the Latin colere—meaning “to till”—Martin continued by developing an analogy of Catholic culture as agriculture in four principles.
First, just as agriculture is concerned with what is natural, so too must Catholic culture embrace nature and the body—the dirt of life—through the incarnation of Christ. Second, similar to the way that soil “has the capacity to take in and transform,” Martin argued that Catholic culture is “enormously hospitable” in its ability to transform, joining varied people and perspectives into the organic whole. Third, she explained Catholic culture is not a “monoculture,” but rather is “enormously diverse.” Finally, because of this “radical diversity,” Catholic culture, like good soil, is “teeming with life. … It is literally a culture of life.”
After articulating this agricultural vision of Catholic culture, Martin then grounded her conception in ethics, stating, “the very anima—or soul—of culture is none other than human perfection, that is, our God-given grace and capacity to be perfected in our desire for the Good.” Martin continued, “The culmination of perfection is union with the God who is Goodness itself.”
Echoing Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, Martin argued that worship of God animates culture. Unlike the culture of “total work,” Catholic culture is one of “worship, which takes place in festivity, feast, leisure, celebration” and entails a “posture of receptivity rather than activity.”
She closed her talk by reflecting on leisure’s relationship with love. “Leisure,” she quoted from Pieper, “lives on affirmation.” She concluded, “Is this fundamental affirmation not at the very root of Catholic culture? To praise the praiseworthy things, to love the lovable things, to elevate the good things of nature, art, literature, education, and ordinary life for the intrinsic goodness they have merely in virtue of their existence.”
Audience members reflected positively on Martin’s lecture.
Sophomore Annabel Wehrle told the Rover, “I loved her emphasis on how a Catholic culture embraces diversity, even encompassing things that aren’t necessarily associated directly with Catholicism, but it embraces the good in all things regardless of discipline.”
Wehrle continued, “It truly affirms the beauty of every person and every piece of good art that seeks the truth. I thought that was just beautifully said and really animates the mission of the dCEC as a whole.”
Chuck Lamphier, Executive Director of the Office of Mission Engagement and Church Affairs, expressed similar sentiments to the Rover: “I was particularly heartened—though not surprised—by Professor Martin’s capacious and generous perspective on Catholic culture, and her reminder that ‘no genuine search for the truth in the human or the cosmic order is alien to the life of faith.’”
Martin expounded on this point during her interview with the Rover, stating such a posture requires “acting in counter-cultural ways … not … at Notre Dame but in America, in the world.”
She then connected this wider vision to the experience of Notre Dame students by praising their high academic achievements, while also arguing for the need to sanctify this drive for success: “I also think that Catholic practices like adoration are a good way of chastening this idea that we have to economize every hour and every minute of our time.”
Martin began her tenure as director of the dCEC on July 1, 2024, following the retirement of her predecessor, O. Carter Snead. Aside from her work at the dCEC, she is an associate professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and theology. According to her faculty page, Martin’s research focuses on 19th and 20th century Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox thought, Theological Aesthetics, Trinitarian Theology, Religion and Literature, Ressourcement Theology, and French Feminisms.
Darius Colangelo is a sophomore majoring in honors mathematics and the Program of Liberal Studies. He can be reached at dcolange@nd.edu.
Photo Credit: de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture
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