de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 0:00 This is Episode 33 of ethics and culture cast from the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 0:17 Welcome to Episode 33 of ethics and culture cast. I'm Ken Hallenius, the communication specialist at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame. In this episode, we chat with Margaret Cabaniss, the scholarly research and publications Program Manager at the center. Among her many responsibilities, she is the main organizer of the Notre Dame Fall Conference, which has been the signature annual event of the de Nicola Center since its foundation 20 years ago. Let's head into the Marion Short ethics library for this fascinating conversation. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 1:05 Margaret, welcome to the podcast. Margaret Cabaniss 1:07 Thank you for having me. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 1:08 So tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? Where'd you do your studies? How'd you come to Notre Dame? Those sorts of things? Margaret Cabaniss 1:14 Yeah. So I am from North Carolina originally and had no connection to Notre Dame whatsoever. Nobody in my family went, I actually went to an Episcopal school in Tennessee, University of the South Yay, Sewanee's right! And I studied English literature there. They had a fantastic humanities program. And I really just fell in love with the professors and the campus. And that's where, you know, my love for authors like Flannery O'Connor and Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, you know, that was really cultivated and, you know, begun there. So after my undergraduate studies, I went to Washington, DC, as an intern for Crisis Magazine, which you may know, was a Catholic, political and cultural magazine actually started, co-founded by Ralph McInerney, professor of philosophy here at Notre Dame. So that was my sort of first very tenuous connection to this place. And it was a great experience. I edited his back page column, you know, he wrote every month and I corresponded with his assistant, Alice Osberger, every, you know, just every month going over his pieces, which, of course, I was never going to edit. But, yeah, it was a great introduction to the field of like publications and journalism. So I ended up staying on at Crisis Magazine for a number of years working on the print magazine, ended up as managing editor there, and then transitioned with the magazine when it went online for a while. And then after that, I did some freelance editing and still on the East Coast, no connections to Notre Dame until my sister married a professor here, Philip Muñoz in the political science department. And I had come up to visit them when they had had their second child and Philip said, you know, you should really meet Carter Snead, the director here at the center. So it was through Philip that I got to know Carter better. And through Carter that I ended up at the center. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 3:00 Well, now the center has grown considerably since you've arrived. And your responsibilities, of course, have changed over the years. What did you first do when you arrived? And then what kind of programs or initiatives did you help start or manage prior to your current job? Margaret Cabaniss 3:15 I came on here with the idea that I would help with the publications at the at the center. So I mean, the the center in its 20 year history has just amassed this great pile of amazing, you know, presentations and unique research. And I think Carter was really thinking we've got to get this out there somehow, how could we do this, and at the time, the thinking was, maybe we can publish it. And with my background in publishing, he thought maybe this would be a good opportunity for me to come in and sort of sift through these, these, these ideas, see what might be possible. But you know, the center, it's a small staff now, it was a smaller staff then. So everybody, it was kind of all hands on deck for everything that we were doing, everybody was very involved in everybody else's work (in a good way!). But we all, we were all sort of pitching in. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:01 Yeah. Margaret Cabaniss 4:02 So I got to do things like help out with the fall conference and, you know, work with the students, get to know them a little bit more. See what it was like hosting some of these lectures and events on campus and have more input there. It really ended up being a little bit of everything, which was great. I loved being exposed to all the different activities that the center puts on. I mean, my first, the first thing I did when I came here was attend the Vita Institute as a participant, which was great. So I've now done it five times. And it's, you know, just as good every time. Helping out at the fall conference, like I said, was really kind of amazing, just to see what an academic conference could be. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 4:39 Yeah. Margaret Cabaniss 4:40 One of the things that I'm maybe most proud of, or most honored to have been a part of, is helping to get the Sorin Fellows Program rolling. You know, as you know, Pete Hlabse, the the manager of our student programming, has talked about this at length. We had these, these undergraduate students who were sort of loosely affiliated with the center, but you could see that they wanted to be more involved and to have more opportunities to attend these events to get to know the speakers. And we saw that there was a real opportunity here to sort of help them in their development to integrate these different strands of their life. And so that's when we started the Sorin Fellows Program. And at the time, it was, you know, 15 students, and we're, you know, just hanging around, we couldn't get rid of them. They kept coming around the office, so we thought we'd give them a title. But yeah, it was just it was such a pleasure and such an honor to watch them blossom. And it's funny. The first class of Sorin Fellows were freshmen, the first year that I was here at Notre Dame. And so I sort of feel like we grew up together. Yeah, exactly. So getting to see that transformation from their freshman to their senior year, they, you know, just graduated last year. It's really something and I can see, you know, Pete is just doing wonderful things with the program. And the students themselves are so amazing. So it's been really great to see how that's grown in ways that we did not even expect four years ago. So. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 5:59 Awesome. So you mentioned a bit about this already. But having worked in magazine and online publishing before coming to Notre Dame, you now oversee the various book series that the center publishes in collaboration with our friends at the University of Notre Dame Press. So what are some highlights of the publications programs here at the center that you oversee? Margaret Cabaniss 6:20 Yeah, so the center has, we have three active series right now: Catholic Ideas for a Secular World, which we started a couple of years ago; the Solzhenitsyn series, featuring untranslated works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, as well as some commentary on his writings; and the Medical Ethics series, which had been in existence, you know, before I came. So there was kind of a transition period or a period of dormancy between when David Solomon was the director, and then through a period when the Press itself was hiring a new director. But the director now Steve Wrinn, is just a dynamo. And he's been such a delight to work with. And he immediately was super excited and enthusiastic about helping the center develop these series that we had started and take all of these connections that we had, and really funnel them into some excellent series. Margaret Cabaniss 7:10 So that's where Catholic Ideas for a Secular World came from, we really wanted to have a series that allowed some of these Catholic scholars and non-Catholic scholars, but people who are engaging seriously with these ideas and in the Church's tradition, and how those can be brought to bear in the public square, how they interact with pressing issues today. So the first book in the series is a book by Gil Meilaender on the beauty of adoption. And you know, as we joke, Gil is not a Catholic, though we like to claim him anyway. But, but no, but his work is just, it's so beautiful and such a wonderful meditation on what adoption means both in a cultural sense, but also in a spiritual sense. So that was just a great volume to kick off the series with because it really had this sort of interested, very various different crossroads. So since then, in that series, we've published Father Julián Carrón, who is the leader of the Communion and Liberation movement, David Schindler, we've just published a volume by Rémi Brague, emeritus professor at the Sorbonne, Pierre Manent will be appearing before too long. Jean Bethke Elshtain. So really just some, you know, lions in the Catholic intellectual tradition. So we're really, really pleased with how that series has been shaping up. Margaret Cabaniss 8:30 And then of course, the Solzhenitsyn series. That was a fun project to work on with Carter, we remember Steve Wrinn called Carter one day and said, how would you like to publish the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? And we kind of thought it was a joke. Because who expects something like that to you know, sort of fall into your lap? Well, so the Solzhenitsyn family was investigating various academic presses as potential future homes for their work. And, you know, I think that they were just really impressed with the center's commitment to their father's vision, that we really did believe what his father had to say about that tension between, you know, progress and tradition and the sense of what is the center of our lives. What is the connection between us and higher powers, and being somewhat critical of the, you know, unbridled sense of Western progress and, you know, total autonomy. So I think they were really they were really struck by our commitment to, you know, what their father was, you know, writing about all those years. So they were, they were really excited to partner with us as we were to partner with them. Margaret Cabaniss 9:40 So last year was the hundredth anniversary of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's birth. And we released the first volume in his memoir of his time in exile in the West, Between Two Millstones. Never before published in English, a lot of translations of his work, well, I should say a lot of volumes of his work were never translated. And you know, I find that astonishing as somebody you know, who remembers reading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in high school, and now seeing that college students don't even know who Solzhenitsyn is, there's been a real drop off in the cultural understanding of who he is and why he was so important in the 20th century. So I'm really thrilled that we get to sort of bring him back to prominence. So that's what this series is doing. And we've just got some amazing stuff coming down the pipeline in that series as well. So it's interesting to see the the wide spread that we can cover in the series. And it's just been really exciting to get to pull, again, some of these threads from our various conferences or visiting fellows and bring all these people together and publish their works for a wider audience. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 10:47 Yeah. Is there more to the Solzhenitsyn series than just, than just publishing the works? I mean, does the Center do more than that? Margaret Cabaniss 10:55 Yeah, absolutely. No, we are actively soliciting submissions from people who are commenting on his writing, we've had submissions in the forms of biographies of Solzhenitsyn and commentaries on some of his works from, you know, a particular vantage point. So we're really excited about publishing, not just his works, but commentaries that help elucidate his work and perhaps putting together a smaller Solzhenitsyn reader to introduce college students, maybe even high school students, any reader really who's interested in these, in the history of important ideas to give them this introduction to Solzhenitsyn, and his writing. So... de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 11:35 Awesome! Well, this coming November, you're going to be managing the dCEC'ss 20th annual Fall Conference, the largest interdisciplinary academic event at Notre Dame. Now, we had a great conversation with the Center's founding director, Professor David Solomon, about how the conference came about and what it meant in the early years. But from your perspective, what had been some of the highlights of the Fall Conference during your time? Margaret Cabaniss 11:59 Yeah, so the Fall Conference was definitely the first event that I participated in at the center where I was really kind of blown away, in a sense of, wow, this is really something and nothing like anything else I've encountered. I think it was Rusty Reno, who called the fall conference, "Catholic Woodstock, but with less nudity." As Carter likes to point out, not no nudity, just less. But there is this really kind of wild, organic feel to it almost that it's, it's much more than the sum of its parts that you know, in, in planning the fall conference, it's, you know, it's a seven headed Hydra to try to pin this stuff down with 100 speakers and 800 guests trying to corral it all and make it all happen. But once it happens, it really is just the most amazing gathering of interested and interesting people. Umm, and not just academics, which is what I really love about it is that as academics across the disciplines, but undergraduate students, graduate students, people in the community, religious, it's, it runs the gamut. So it's been really wonderful seeing, you know, both our undergraduate students, as well as our, you know, most esteemed fellows, to the retirees living in South Bend, who love to come participate, and they all walk away with something, you know, new and interesting. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 13:20 So for those maybe who haven't been to the fall conference, what what happens? Margaret Cabaniss 13:25 Sure, yeah, yeah. So it's two and a half days of presentations, mostly in panel format. But we do have some plenary, you know, keynote addresses, where people are grappling with one large question from the perspective of all the disciplines. So, you know, every year, it'll be something like we've done conferences on freedom, beauty, good and evil. Last year, we did one on man and the state. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 13:53 So these are all small topics. Margaret Cabaniss 13:54 Yeah, you know, just your yeah, very niche subjects. No, it's great, because they, it seems so broad, but then you realize that opening that door allows people again, and in all disciplines and walks of life to be able to bring their particular expertise to bear on the subject. And then you see these great connections that happen between economics and art history, or philosophy, and, you know, theology that just come together in really new interesting ways that couldn't happen in a sort of more traditional conference. So, you know, and again, we have panels for rising scholars, graduate students, people who are just beginning their career, all the way to Emeritus professors, who now have sort of the time and the luxury to ruminate on things again, maybe outside of their usual wheelhouse, which is one of my favorite things is seeing the sort of cross-pollination again of what they're able to do when you just give them a full head of steam and and let them go. So yeah... de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 14:50 Some of the highlights for you? Margaret Cabaniss 14:52 Highlights for me. Yeah. Well, to that last point, the year that we did the beauty conference, I think that was 2016. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:02 My first year here. Margaret Cabaniss 15:03 Oh, that's right. Yeah. Now that was a good one to start on. The the opening keynote was Etsuro Sotoo, who is the lead architect of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, and to hear him talk about how Gaudi's art and thought influenced his own design and thinking and ultimately led him to the faith is just, was really profound and beautiful. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:27 It was a totally nonlinear presentation, like only an artist can do. Margaret Cabaniss 15:30 Oh gosh, it was wild! It was so what he's, he's an artist. He's Japanese, but he was presenting in Spanish. And we were trying to sort of translate. There were pictures. It was very, it was an immersive experience. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:44 Without video, I mean, it was... Margaret Cabaniss 15:45 Yeah, yeah. No, but it just it really brought to life that sort of, I don't know if you've ever been to Sagrada Familia. It's been a number of years for me, but it really is a sort of disorienting experience in its own right. So it just seemed perfectly in keeping with the subject matter. It was really beautiful. But I also loved that year, we had Mary Ann Glendon, you know, noted scholar of law at Harvard Law School, speaking about Wallace Stevens, which is again, that crossover that she had the opportunity to speak outside of her normal wheelhouse, right, and do something totally offbeat, and we loved it. It was amazing. And then to have her daughter speak the night before Elizabeth Lev the art historian based in Rome, having her speak about the Vatican Museum. So I just loved it de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 16:27 On a topic she's now turning into a book. Margaret Cabaniss 16:29 Yes. I mean, yes, that that presentation just blew me away. And both of them are such lovely people. And yeah, so that it kind of, that whole thing just encapsulates what is so great about the fall conference, that it's this family affair, and that it's people working outside their their usual wheelhouse, and you're definitely getting something a little different. So... de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 16:50 Yeah, that's fun. What about this fall? What's the, I mean, not to spill the beans, although honestly, if you've looked at our website, you know, what's the topic for this fall? Margaret Cabaniss 17:00 This year the topic is friendship. It's the 20th anniversary of the fall conference, so we could think of no better topic, really. So the title is "I Have Called You Friends." And we really wanted to look at that classical understanding of friendship, you know, they're viewing it as a virtue and sort of the highest good. And that's, that's often very different from how you hear friendship talked about today. And, you know, what does that mean? What does it mean to make the good of another, your own good? And what are the implications for that in public life, and art, and philosophy, political theory. So, again, I think I think it's another great theme that invites people to submit from all disciplines and walks of life. I've already gotten some great feedback from folks who are submitting for the call for papers, which by the way, deadline is July 15. So make sure you get those abstracts in. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 17:53 What's the website where somebody can actually submit an abstract? Margaret Cabaniss 17:55 Yeah, so it's on our website, ethicscenter.nd.edu/fc2019. All right. And you'll see there the form for uploading your abstracts, and we should have registration open sometime in August. The dates this year, it's important to know, November 7th to the 9th. Wonderful, so Thursday to Saturday here on South Bend's campus right before the snow starts, so come on down. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 18:19 Hopefully, yeah. Awesome. Well, you also get to work with the visiting scholars that the center hosts on campus, both the endowed fellows and our and researchers who are here to take advantage of the resources here on campus. So tell us a bit about working with visiting scholars. Margaret Cabaniss 18:37 Yeah, that's been a really fun part of the job being connected with the fellows that we have from literally all over the world. So we've had folks from Chile, Italy, Spain, France, Colombia, the UK, I mean, they come from all over and, of course, all over the United States as well. Some of them on sabbatical for a year, doing some research. Some scholars are early in their career, you know, maybe they have to publish that first book, to get tenure at their home institution. Some of them late in their career very well established, but again, want that space to really stretch their legs and see what they can do with some dedicated time off. And it's been, it's been just a wonderful experience. I think what I'm struck by most is how excited all of them are to be at Notre Dame. We've had folks you know, from Harvard, who come for a semester, and just the feeling of, "I can get off the wheel for a minute and connect with so many other scholars who are interested in my field," but also, you know, working in their own disciplines, they, they see the Center as a hub where they can meet other interesting people talking about interesting things, and they really want to be a part of it. And it's great to see how that's been flourishing and encouraging more and more people to sort of come through the Center. So... de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 19:54 Awesome. Margaret Cabaniss 19:54 I should also say, it's been wonderful that some of them not only come for a semester, but a lot of them, you know, bring their families for the year and then they become part of the Center family. And it's great to have their kids you know, in town for the year and go to school with kids of our, you know, faculty and staff and they just they all become part of the Notre Dame family once they once they leave. So... de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 20:18 What have been some of the highlights for you of working here at Notre Dame. Not having any previous relationship to... Margaret Cabaniss 20:24 Well, all the lovely co workers of course! No, working at Notre Dame has been wonderful. It's been an amazing experience, I really did not understand the Notre Dame experience from the outside. I didn't understand what people loved about it so much. I am not a product of Catholic schooling myself and didn't really see firsthand what a great Catholic education could be or do for a person until I sort of came here and was on campus and then I got to see it up close. And then I realized "Yeah, there's something really special happening here!" Just being part of a community that takes its faith commitment seriously, takes the Church's amazing intellectual tradition seriously. The students being a part of their lives watching them grapple with these issues, helping them sort of grapple with these issues. Watching them grow. Yeah, the Masses every day, the Grotto and the Basilica... Again, it's you know, you don't really appreciate what you have until somebody comes from the outside and you know can see the difference that it makes and it really, is it really is a wonderful place. Like all places it has its its ups and downs but it there really is something special here. So... de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 21:43 Well, thank you very much for your time. Margaret Cabaniss 21:45 It's been a pleasure! de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 21:52 Thank you to Margaret Cabiness for the excellent conversation. Find links to the Fall Conference paper submission form, and information about the the Center's various book series with Notre Dame Press in the show notes. Subscribe to Ethics and Culture Cast so that you can always get the latest episodes by visiting ethicscenter.nd.edu/podcast. We would love your feedback. Please give us a review wherever you get your podcasts and email your suggestions to cecpodcast@nd.edu. Our theme music is "I dunno" by grapes, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. We'll see you next time on Ethics and Culture Cast. Until then, make good decisions Transcribed by https://otter.ai