I live about five minutes from where I grew up on the east side of South Bend. Dillon Hall was the farthest I’ve ever lived from my childhood home.
At Notre Dame, the confined geographic boundaries of my life make me an anomaly. The fact that I’ve always lived within walking distance of a campus populated by global citizens sometimes makes me wonder if I’ve lacked vision or ambition. Everyone here seems to be going somewhere.
Other times I realize that miles are not the measure of a life. People are drawn to Notre Dame from far and wide not because leaving home has inherent value, but because of what’s on offer here — a wealth of experiences and perspectives, bracing intellectual and spiritual encounters, friends, mentors and colleagues who enrich our lives.
Where we come from matters, but where we’re going depends on the people and opportunities life presents to us, and how we engage with them. Notre Dame opens doors to innumerable relationships and pathways to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our place — literal and figurative — in the world.
Cheng Wang has wondered well into his 60s about how to define himself. Born in China and sent to a reeducation camp as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution, he attended graduate school in the United States in the 1980s and has lived in North Carolina during a long career in technology. His cultural straddling raises a complicated question: Who is he, exactly? A year in Notre Dame’s Inspired Leadership Initiative and a visit to his family’s ancestral village in the mountains of Fujian province helped him begin to tease out an answer.
John Cord’s path to personal discovery required traveling only the familiar knobs and hollows of southern Indiana. Becoming a deacon in retirement, caring for parishioners and prisoners in the communities he serves, Cord has learned unexpected things about himself and the place he has lived most of his life.
Those and other stories in this issue offer insight into the circuitous process of realizing our truest selves: Chris Chiappinelli shedding his nagging sense that professional obligations should supersede the fulfillment found on mountain trails; Mike Gianunzio ’76J.D., navigating a long and varied legal career before reinventing himself as a radio host; theologian William Cavanaugh ’84 advocating for communion with each other — and God — to keep us whole in a fragmenting culture.
The new University president, Rev. Robert A. Dowd, CSC, ’87, introduced inside as he embarks on his tenure, followed a straight line to Notre Dame and his vocation before venturing far from the familiar. He grew up 45 minutes away, played priest as a Catholic schoolboy and came to college here like his father before him. To deepen his academic expertise and widen his worldview he asked for an assignment in Africa, which became the focus of his advanced degrees in political science.
Not all these people have Notre Dame connections, but their experiences resonate with the ideals of a place that strives to inspire personal journeys measured in incalculable inner growth and unquantifiable meaning.
Even for a townie, that goes a long way.
Jason Kelly is editor of this magazine.