When ordained Lutheran pastor Craig Satterlee ’98M.A., ’00Ph.D.was waiting for his first call to parish ministry, he was told that people with sight impairments were meant to be ministered to, not to be ministers.
A parish did extend a call, but at a reduced salary. “That was the only way they could justify having a pastor who couldn’t see,” Satterlee says.…
It is the new millennium. Full employment, material abundance and social harmony characterize an age that can truly be described as golden. Monumental architecture defines the great cities, universal healthcare has created a disease-free world and electronic broadcasting has become a pervasive, yet wholly beneficial tool.…
Sci-fi prophets of the past predicted a future we now explore.
By Walton R. Collins ’51
My favorite postmodern media moment comes exactly 57½ minutes into Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Flung back from the 23rd century into the late 20th (never mind how), the Enterprise crew is on a mission to save planet Earth by saving the whales. Scotty, the spaceship’s engineer whose specialty is casually working technological miracles, finds himself in front of a PC in contemporary San Francisco.…
Despite an abundance of “talking heads,” a nation in need of wisdom finds the public intellectual missing from action.
By Robert Schmuhl ’70
After a decade when “the egghead” was constantly ridiculed for contributing little more than hot air to Cold War America, the historian Richard Hofstadter identified “resentment and suspicion of the life of the mind” as a deeply rooted national trait in his 1963 book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life…
What you thought was true may not be. But that’s no longer an excuse.
By Andrew H. Malcolm
One of my regular assignments as a rookie reporter in New York City in the late 1960s was to stand backstage in the NBC Studios at Rockefeller Center during the late afternoon taping of the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Whenever a scheduled guest like Mayor Lindsay carried the potential for making non-show-business news, there I’d be, hidden by the curtain, directly behind the seated guests as they chatted with Johnny about their recent travels, their new movie or the things Americans find soothingly profound at bedtime. Like viewers at home several hours later, I was amazed at how quickly Johnny spouted his comic comments.…
The first time I backpacked with Don Nelson I got mad at him. He would lag back on the trail, falling so far behind the rest of us that he’d disappear from sight. Periodically I would sit and wait for him.
The sexual abuse scandal that has rocked the church has left Catholics with questions of faith, morals and accountability.
By John C. Cavadini
“Scandals are bound to arise, but woe to him by whom they do arise! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung round his neck and he were cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin” (Luke…
The rules have changed for college athletes who represent their schools on fields of play.
By Michael Oriard ’70
I played football at Notre Dame in the late 1960s without making a single academic sacrifice. My daily schedule during the season was a spartan one — classes, practice, dinner and game film, several hours in the library, sleep — but it was manageable. It also, I should confess, was aided by my lack of any social life in the all-male environment of ND in those years.…
The University wants national championships in athletics and international prestige in academics.
By Richard Conklin ’59M.A.
In the Joyce Center’s Sports Heritage Hall, surrounded by souvenirs of a revered athletic past and framed by photographs of football glory, is a small showcase reminding the visitor of a tension running through intercollegiate athletics. In it are fine-grained wooden trophies won by Notre Dame for graduating the most football players. They are less imposing than others in the concourse marking national championships and bowl triumphs, and some observers are starting to wonder whether the two types of trophies are even compatible anymore.…
In the early 1950s, near the end of the Frank Leahy era in Notre Dame football, the University’s new young president, Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, had just been interviewed by a reporter when a photographer tossed a football to the priest and asked him to pose with it. Perhaps, it was suggested, you could pretend to be hiking the ball. Hesburgh bristled; he would have none of it. His dream was for Notre Dame to earn its place among the nation’s finest universities, and such foolishness would only perpetuate the perception of Notre Dame as a football school.…
Notre Dame offered several new courses and restructured others spring semester to examine issues related to September 11. Here are some of them:
— Homefronts During War (American Studies) looked at the ways Americans responded at home to war and threats of war during the 20th century. The final two weeks were left open to focus on developments in the war on terrorism. Taught by Heidi Ardizzone, assistant professor of American studies.…
While everyone was still talking about the collapse of Enron Corporation, Notre Dame was teaching about it.
Thomas Frecka, Lizzadro Professor of Accountancy, taught a five-week symposium spring semester on the business and accounting issues associated with the collapse of the giant energy-trading company. Topics included accounting disclosures, off-balance-sheet financing, audit services, and legal and ethical issues.…
Long before Notre Dame’s football team was known as the Fighting Irish, the University had proof of Irish pluckiness on the field — the battlefield.
Since 1896, the University has owned and intermittently displayed the colors of the 63rd Regiment New York Volunteers, part of the Union’s famed Irish Brigade during the Civil War. The bright green flag, not seen in recent years because of its deteriorating condition, was recently restored by University Archives.…
The number of teams going for laughs instead of victories in Bookstore Basketball seems to grow each year. Here are some of the more entertaining entries from this past year:
Punky Brewster — Five overdressed sophomores from women’s dorm Pasquerilla East shed one article of clothing for every basket they scored. Their optimistic male opponents played less than stellar defense. By design the young women didn’t get any further than a bikini.…
The Leprechaun Legion debuted at men’s basketball games this past season, hurling precision insults in hopes of distracting opposing players and coaches.
Founded by senior Rob Pazornik and numbering about 200 students, the Legion would put in hours of advance work checking websites and message boards for information about opponents. They also gathered material from friends in enemy camps (other Big East schools), who would tip them off to players’ misdeeds. Before each game the accumulated dirt would then be compiled into “jeer cards,” sheets of paper handed out to the student section. The sheets listed phrases to be barked in unison in specific situations. Sometimes these were accompanied by gestures.…
Considering he’s been a priest for 37 years and considering all he’s accomplished as head of the Center for Social Concerns, it’s startling to hear Father Don McNeill, CSC, ’58 say that at times he questioned his worthiness to continue being a priest.
This summer McNeill, 66, will step down as executive director the Center for Social Concerns, which he helped found in 1983. The Holy Cross order has granted him a year’s sabbatical to travel, relax and study, after which he plans to work in an inner-city Latino neighborhood in Chicago.…
Hall Portrait: Walsh
Year Built: 1909
Named For: Father Thomas Walsh, CSC (1853-1893), president of the University from 1881 to 1893. Handpicked by Sorin, Walsh was only 28 when he became ND’s sixth president — the same age Sorin was when he founded Notre Dame. Walsh pushed the University to expand its curriculum and raise its standards, but he died of a kidney disease at age 40.…
“It’s not often you have a chance to meet and talk with people who share the same background and the same values,” Tim Russert told nearly 11,000 graduates, friends and family packed into the Joyce Center arena for the University’s 157th commencement exercises May 19, 2002.…
New alcohol policies aim to curb abusive drinking, especially in the residence halls. But many students say the changes will only dampen hall spirit and drive people, and the problem, off campus.
By Ed Cohen
There’s never been an e-mail come through the Notre Dame server with the impact of the one Father Mark Poorman, CSC…
Students upset with the tighter alcohol policies announced in March by Vice President of Student Affairs Mark Poorman, CSC, had to be surprised when they received an e-mail from him in May announcing the changes had been rescinded.
It was a hoax and a fairly convincing one.
The subject line of the e-mail read RE: IMPORTANT…
JAMES T. CUSHING, a physicist and philosopher of science who was among the world’s leading experts on the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics, was found dead at his home in late March. An illness forced him to discontinue teaching in the middle of spring semester, and he had announced he was retiring at the end of the term. He was 65 and had taught at Notre Dame for 36 years. Cushing’s grandfather, John T. Cushing, funded the building of the Cushing Hall of Engineering out of gratitude to the University. The elder Cushing didn’t have enough money to pay for tuition senior year, but the president at the time allowed him to enroll anyway and graduate in 1906. His grandson’s successful early career focused on a particular theory of nuclear particle scattering, but when that area faded from popularity in the 1970s he turned most of his attention to the history and philosophy of science. A renowned dissertation director and gifted teacher, he taught undergraduate courses in physics for many years, helping students understand the historical context in which scientific discovery took place. His most influential, and controversial, book, Quantum Mechanics: Historical Contingency and the Copenhagen Hegemony…
John Koltes ’64, senior vice president of Alliance Capital Management L.P., made Irish America magazine’s “Wall Street 50” for 2001. . . . The New York Law Journal profiled attorney Art C. Cody ’97J.D. for his work as a commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve in the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom. He was fulfilling his reserve obligation aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise on September 11, when his two-week duty turned into two months at sea. He and wife Stacy have four children. . . . Kathleen Cekanski-Farrand ’73J.D.…
Bryan Gruley ’79 compiled the Wall Street Journal‘s page 1 story of September 12, “Nation Stands in Disbelief and Horror,” that helped the Journal win the 2002 Pulitzer Prize in Distinguished Breaking News Reporting. Gruley was working the _Journal’_s Washington beat at the time, a job previous held by Danny Pearl, the reporter taken hostage and murdered in Pakistan earlier this year. Gruley is a past contributor to Notre Dame Magazine…
Sorin Hall (aka Sorin College) made it onto The Chronicle of Higher Education’s list of “Digs They Dig,” residence halls considered the prime places to live on campuses. Sorin’s famous oversized turret rooms figured prominently in its selection. The list appeared in the Short Subjects section of the paper’s February 22, 2002, issue. . . . James F. Gaertner…
The nature trails and woods adjacent to Saint Mary’s were closed for a week in winter to allow bow hunters in to hunt deer. The deer population around Saint Mary’s has been booming in recent years as the animals have been displaced from other nearby wooded areas, including the parcel north of Notre Dame that became the Warren Golf Course. Groups of deer can now be seen regularly on the Saint Mary’s campus, especially around dawn and twilight. With no natural predators in the area, they’ve also become aggressive. That’s created a personal safety issue on the women’s campus, which is also home to large number of retired nuns in their 80s and older. The chief executive for the group that manages the property for the Sisters of the Holy Cross said the bow hunters were recruited in hopes of reducing the estimated 50-60 member herd by 15. But with the trees bare of foliage and the hunt having missed the mating season — when deer are naturally distracted — the hunters had trouble cornering many of the animals. They managed to kill only eight. One other deer was found to have been killed illegally on the private property by a rifle. Another was struck and killed on the highway between Saint Mary’s and Notre Dame. The company would prefer to feed or inject the deer with a drug that would keep them from reproducing, but state regulations bar them from using it, the official of the management company said. That means there may have to be another deer season on the property. . . . As many as 30 squirrels…
To some residents of northern Indiana, the sight of a crocus, daffodil or robin signals the arrival of spring. But I watch the Stepan basketball courts for the first signs of hoopster activity. From my fifth-floor Grace Hall window I will spy a couple of guys in T-shirts and shorts shooting in the breezy air, followed later — as the afternoons warm and the days lengthen — by games of two-on-two, then some full-court up-and-down, and then by that climactic spring tradition called Bookstore.…
Down the hall from the Spirit of St. Louis
Notre Dame is now represented in the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.
A cosmic ray particle detector invented and built by Randy Ruchti, ND professor of physics, and Barry Baumbaugh, research engineer, was installed last fall in a new permanent exhibit in the Smithsonian museum.…
What’s the difference between an orchestra and a symphony or a philharmonic?
Today, very little.
Orchestras — sometimes called symphony orchestras — and philharmonics both perform symphonies, those elaborate instrumental compositions in three or more movements. Technically, “philharmonic” can refer to any musical organization. The word comes from the French philharmonique…
The Germans call them “hanny,” in Japan they’re “kanny.” In Singapore they say “prawn.” But the best nickname for cell phones may be “money.”
Last fall while many people were worrying where the next anthrax or other terrorist attack would occur, Alan C. Seabaugh was busy inventing a countermeasure: a cheap, credit-card size analyzer capable of detecting and measuring chemical and biological toxins.
Seabaugh, Notre Dame professor of electrical engineering, designed a semiconductor chip for the analyzer, which he envisions police, fire and other public health workers using to identify any of the thousands of substances that might be released in a terrorist attack or an industrial accident. The device also would calculate the strength of the toxin and map the boundaries of the danger zone — and do it all for about the cost of a pocket calculator.…