This event will bring together members of the Notre Dame and local communities to consider our roles in building the Beloved Community and supporting a collective vision of establishing love as the measure of success for all of our endeavors. While the sessions are open to all, registration is requested. Please register hereSessions:9 to 10:30 a.m. – Catholic Social Teaching and Building the Beloved Community (Decio Theatre, DeBartolo Performing Arts Center)Conversation led by David Lantigua, associate professor of theology, and Deacon Mel Tardy, associate advising professor, Center for University Advising11:45 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. –  Love, Bridge Building, and Pathways to theBeloved Community (Legends of Notre Dame)Lunch and discussion led by Rev. Hugh R. Page, Jr., vice president for institutional transformation and advisor to the president, professor of theology and Africana studies1:45 to 3:15 p.m. – Laying the Foundation for the Beloved Community: A Local Expression in South Bend (Decio Theatre, DeBartolo Performing Arts Center)Community panel session featuring Darryl Heller, director, Indiana University South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center; Joseph Luten, CEO and president, Importin’ Joe’s Ethiopian Coffee; Sam Diggins, South Bend Police Department; Regina Williams-Preston, community partnerships program director, Center for Social Concerns3:30 to 5 p.m. – Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove: Building the Beloved Community at Notre Dame (Decio Theatre, DeBartolo Performing Arts Center)Keynote Session featuring Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, assistant director for partnerships and fellowships at Yale University’s Center for Public Theology and Public Policy5 to 6 p.m. – Post-event reception and networking (Decio Theatre, DeBartolo Performing Arts Center)Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove will be signing free copies of his book (co-written with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II), White Poverty: How Exposing Myths about Race and Class can Reconstruct American Democracy, at the reception on a first-come, first-served basis.Sponsored by the Office of the Provost, Office of Institutional Transformation, and the Charles and Margaret Hall Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism. Originally published at diversity.nd.edu.

The Social Concerns Fair is open to students, faculty, and staff looking to engage more deeply with the city of South Bend. Meet representatives from community organizations addressing a range of issues, including education, housing, health care, disability, food security, immigration, and human rights. Booths will be set up throughout Geddes Hall. Find more info at socialconcerns.nd.edu/fair.

Candy Gunther Brown (Indiana University, Bloomington) will deliver the 2024–25 Cushwa Center Lecture. Brown received a Research Travel Grant from the Cushwa Center in 2023 for a biography of Francis MacNutt, to be published in the Eerdmans Library of Religious Biography series. More recently, she secured a Louisville Institute Sabbatical Grant for Researchers in support of the book. The Cushwa Center recently interviewed Brown about her research on MacNutt and the dramatic growth of charismatic Christianity over the past half century. This event is free and open to all. About the speaker Candy Gunther Brown is professor of religious studies at Indiana University Bloomington. A historian and ethnographer of religion and culture, her research and writing have dealt with evangelical print culture and U.S. evangelicalism; global Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, science, medicine, and religion; and religious practices related to alternative healing, including yoga and mindfulness. Past projects have received support from, among other sources, the John Templeton Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.Image: Candy Gunther Brown, left; Francis MacNutt, right, at Notre Dame Stadium on June 14, 1974 (courtesy of Notre Dame Archives). Originally published at cushwa.nd.edu.

Hayden Kirwan, a senior majoring in history and minoring in poverty studies, will facilitate a discussion about workers and the 2024 election — jobs, immigration, unions, taxes, tariffs, and more. Kirwan is a Just Wage Research Lab fellow at the Center for Social Concerns. The Labor Café at the Center for Social Concerns convenes the Notre Dame community for casual conversation on contemporary questions about work, workers, and workplaces. What rights and protections should those who work for others have? What’s the proper role for government in the economy? How should we address enduring problems of inequality, poverty, and lack of opportunity? And what does Catholic social tradition have to say about these labor questions? Participants choose the concrete topics, all people are welcome, and all opinions are entertained. Visit socialconcerns.nd.edu/labor-cafe for more information.

Emily Conroy-Krutz (Michigan State University) will discuss her book Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell, 2024) at the Cushwa Center's fall 2024 Jay P. Dolan Seminar in American Religion. Commentators for this seminar are Heather Curtis (Tufts University) and Amy S. Greenberg (Penn State). From the publisher Missionary Diplomacy illuminates the crucial place of religion in 19th-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Missionaries served as consuls, translators, and occasional trouble-makers who forced the State Department to take actions it otherwise would have avoided. Yet as decades passed, more Americans began to question the propriety of missionaries' power. Were missionaries serving the interests of American diplomacy? Or were they creating unnecessary problems? As Emily Conroy-Krutz demonstrates, they were doing both. Across the century, missionaries forced the government to articulate new conceptions of the rights of U.S. citizens abroad and of the role of the United States as an engine of humanitarianism and religious freedom. By the time the United States entered the First World War, missionary diplomacy had for nearly a century created the conditions for some Americans to embrace a vision of their country as an internationally engaged world power. Missionary Diplomacy exposes the longstanding influence of evangelical missions on the shape of American foreign relations.Inaugurated in 1980 and named in 2023 to honor the Cushwa Center’s founding director, the Jay P. Dolan Seminar in American Religion convenes each semester at the University of Notre Dame to discuss a notable book recently published in the field. Along with faculty and graduate students from Notre Dame, scholars from throughout the Midwest travel to campus to attend as invited guests of the Cushwa Center. The featured author engages with two invited commentators as well as the larger group. The Saturday morning seminar is free and open to all. Originally published at cushwa.nd.edu.

Register here  The Center for Social Concerns hopes you will join it each month for the Virtues & Vocations lunchtime webinar series, Conversations on Character & the Common Good. There is always time for audience questions. Helene D. Gayle, M.D., M.P.H., began serving as the 11th president of Spelman College on July 1, 2022. A pediatrician and public health physician with expertise in economic development, humanitarian, and health issues, she previously worked in leadership roles at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and was the president and CEO of the international humanitarian organization, CARE and the Chicago Community Trust. We will have a conversation about her work at Spelman and how higher education can promote democracy and the common good. Virtues & Vocations is a national forum for scholars and practitioners across disciplines to consider how best to cultivate character in pre-professional and professional education. Virtues & Vocations hosts faculty workshops, an annual conference, and monthly webinars, and engages issues of character, professional identity, and moral purpose through our publications.