You Tube Theology

In the thirty-fifth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Meghan Sullivan, the Wilsey Family College Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame. Sullivan begins by discussing an article she contributed to a recent issue of Comment focused on the future of institutions. While several of the institutions on which contemporary society depends are fraying, Sullivan focuses on the future of the university, the formative aspects of the education it proports to offer, and the threats AI poses to the university if that aspect of the education it offers is not clear and compelling. Sullivan then discusses the formative aspects of her undergraduate education at the University of Virgina, the season she spent at the University of Oxford’s Balliol College as a Rhodes Scholar, and her doctoral education at Rutgers University. In their own unique ways, those experiences contributed to Sullivan’s appreciation for the University of Notre Dame’s Catholic and Holy Cross mission, the opportunities she was offered to teach philosophy, and the discernment process that led her to serve as the director of the Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. She then closes by discussing the virtues philosophers need to cultivate in order to flourish in relation to their callings and ways that the relationship that the Church and the university share contributes to those efforts on behalf of philosophers, faculty across the disciplines, and the students they serve.