Institute for Social Concerns Newsletter | February 2025
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Moral theologian cycles her way into the Institute for Social Concerns
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Suzanne Mulligan, new professor of the practice at the Institute for Social Concerns, is an avid cyclist. She prefers the challenge of the high mountains—usually Alps or Pyrennes. “There is no escaping the brutality of it. Out in the wilderness, it is just you and the mountain. You have to suffer and endure it. It pushes you to the absolute limit.” Living in endlessly flat Indiana is just one of many adjustments in her transition from Ireland to the United States.
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One evening last June, while working on the third floor of Bond Hall, Bridget Filipski noticed a series of ceiling tiles painted by students who traveled to the University from various parts of the world. Perhaps, she thought, there would be a way for her colleagues to tell their stories through art as well. But where at Notre Dame could she turn for such a project? Who would care to tell the stories of her fellow custodial workers?
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| “How do you prove you saved a life?”
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Dr. Donald Zimmer opened the Institute for Social Concerns’ first community-engaged conversation with a somber corrective, “I’m not on the front line, but on the back. In the emergency room, I see the back end. I’m the end of the line, seeing the end results and final destinations of systematic failures.” Zimmer was speaking about his relationship with an endemic injustice here in South Bend, gun violence.
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Edited by Connie Snyder Mick, Poverty & Public Policy (PPP) publishes quality research on poverty, income distribution, and welfare programs from scholars around the globe. In this issue, PPP presents original research articles from scholars in Canada, Spain, Taiwan, the United States, India, and South Africa, exploring the nature and impact of policies related to poverty reduction (including a universal basic income), the COVID-19 pandemic, and food security.
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Pulitzer Prize-winner, journalist,
poet, translator, and contributing writer for The New Yorker will deliver the Institute’s Junior Parents Weekend Lecture. Introduction by Rev. Hugh R. Page, Jr., vice president for institutional transformation.
Friday, Feb. 14, 4pm, Geddes Hall, Andrews Auditorium. Reception and book signing to follow.
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| Webinar: Character and Transformative Leadership
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Nathan Hatch served as the president of Wake Forest University for 16 years and previously served as Provost at the University of Notre Dame. He recently published The Gift of Transformative Leaders. We will discuss this book and his lifelong commitment to making character central in higher education.
Monday, Feb. 17, 2025
noon–1pm, online via Zoom
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The Labor Café convenes the Notre Dame community for casual conversation on contemporary questions about work, workers, and workplaces. Participants choose the concrete topics, all people are welcome, and all opinions are entertained.
Friday, Feb. 21, 5pm, Geddes Hall, Coffee House
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A Series on Catholic
Social Tradition
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Join us on Friday afternoons for lectures by distinguished scholars in the field of Catholic social teaching, who will share their insights and provide critical conversation on matters of justice and the common good.
All lectures will be in Geddes Hall, Andrews Auditorium at 5pm
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Poverty Studies Distinguished Lecture
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Andrea Elliott is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. She has documented the lives of poor Americans, Muslim immigrants and other people on the margins
of power.
Thursday, March 6, at 5 pm, in
Geddes Hall, Andrews Auditorium
Reception & book signing to follow.
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Catholic Social Tradition Conference
| This interdisciplinary conference invites historical, constructive, and comparative approaches as we consider the ecumenical, interfaith, and transdisciplinary challenges of religious nationalism.
All sessions will take place in McKenna Hall.
Registration is free for all Notre Dame, Saint Mary's, and Holy Cross students, faculty, and staff.
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First-year students: Become a
McNeill Fellow
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Apply for this paid, three-year fellowship in an interdisciplinary community of scholars eager to explore how to live an ethical life of meaning, purpose, and impact.
The fellowship includes a $2,000 annual stipend, funding for research, exclusive classes, immersive experiences, and more!
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Summer Labor Fellowships are full-time, paid opportunities for select Notre Dame undergraduates (rising seniors, juniors, and sophomores) to spend the summer of 2025 engaged in labor-focused, project-based work while developing their skills in organizing, research, advocacy, and communications
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Above: Political theologian Anna Rowlands kicked off a new signature lecture series at the institute, Encounter: Conversations in Catholic Social Tradition, with an inspired lecture on Simone Weil, Catholic social teaching, and contemporary society.
Below: Postdoctoral research scholar Samuel Sokolsky-Tifft, left, discusses gun violence with South Bend community members at the first gathering of the new series South Bend: Questions of Justice, hosted by the institute and organized by Regina Williams-Preston, community partnerships program director.
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As an interdisciplinary academic institute, the Institute for Social Concerns leverages research to respond to the complex demands of justice and to serve the common good. This series, ReSearching for the Common Good, highlights some of the scholars in our community.
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Kraig Beyerlein is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society. His primary research interest is the intersection between religion and social movements.
Kraig is a faculty fellow of the Institute for Social Concerns.
What are you researching right now?
I’ve long been interested in how religion mobilizes for the common good, and I’m particularly interested in the role that congregations play in doing so. Right now my specific research question is: How do congregations affect community residents? In other words, do congregations have contextual effects and what are the nature of these effects? Does the number of congregations matter for residents’ wellbeing, access to social services, or civic engagement? Or is it what congregations are doing in the communities that matters more? For example, if you live in a community where a lot of congregations are engaged in social outreach, that may benefit you, even if you’re not personally involved in a congregation. We’re bringing data to bear in answering such questions.
How is the Chicago Congregations Project (CCP) addressing this question?
No good dataset on congregations exists in the city of Chicago. We thus built one using both virtual (e.g., Google Street View) and physical canvassing of neighborhoods, along with a great deal of online sleuthing, to determine active status of congregations and so on. By doing so, we generated the approximate census of congregations in the Windy City. And then, by collecting publicly accessible social media data and surveying a sample of congregations as well as residents in the city of Chicago, we’re able to piece all of this together to investigate some really interesting questions about the effects of religious organizations on communities.
How do you see your work advancing the common good?
Regarding the CCP, I see this in two ways. First, the preexisting data undercounts Chicago congregations, and the undercounting is not random. There’s more undercounting in communities of color and in lower socioeconomic-status communities, so getting the data right is an issue of justice—so that all congregations are included and our research is representative of all Chicago communities.
Second, not all congregations promote the common good. So, identifying the ways in which some congregations impede the common good and understanding how to overcome these impediments are just as important as shining light on congregations that put their faith into action and mobilize for the common good.
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