Every autumn, Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture (dCEC) hosts a conference so animated by vibrant friendship, communal worship and enlightening discourse that its devotees have taken to calling it “Catholic Woodstock.”

If that’s so, then this year’s installment of the dCEC’s Fall Conference will see a new frontwoman taking center stage.

Jennifer Newsome Martin, the dCEC’s new director, will welcome not only scholars, but also musicians, authors and artists to the Oct. 31 to Nov. 2 event, which will focus on the rich tapestry of the Catholic imagination through both academic discourse and stirring performances.

And with her background in bluegrass music and a conversion story that includes heavy doses of beautiful liturgy and the fiction of Flannery O’Connor, it’s hard to think of a better Fall Conference theme for Martin’s directorial debut.

The systematic theologian and Great Books professor will be taking the mic from O. Carter Snead, who turned the Fall Conference into the best-attended annual academic event at Notre Dame over his 12-year tenure. Martin, 44, couldn’t be more excited to lead the 24th installment of the conference, the theme of which was set before she succeeded Snead this past July.

“It’s like a little version of the Paradiso,” said Martin of the annual event, referencing the famed poet Dante’s depiction of heaven in his Divine Comedy. “You’ve got your winemakers and your priests and your lawyers and your theologians and your poets, all together, and having conversations about things that really matter.”

It’s also a fitting image for the capacious, integrative and inviting direction Martin wants to lead the dCEC, a center of dynamic orthodoxy at Notre Dame that includes roughly 8% of the student body in its Catholic formation program. 

But despite the dCEC’s incredible growth and impact, the inaugural Fall Conference of Martin’s directorship will take place amidst a backdrop of some uncertainty for the center.

In April, Notre Dame announced the creation of a new virtue ethics center, with direct backing from the administration. Many have critiqued the new initiative as lacking clear Catholic commitments and also for “subsuming” the dCEC’s role as a campus leader in the study of ethics. Martin and Snead both penned a letter at the time, defending the dCEC’s commitment to both Catholic identity and academic excellence.

Martin acknowledged that the new virtue ethics center has “generated questions” about dCEC’s place in the broader university landscape. But she also says she’s far more focused on ensuring her own center continues to excel — including with events like the Fall Conference.

“My whole approach is to be so utterly excellent as to be above reproach,” she said.

 

Leading With Beauty

As its name might indicate, the dCEC has always had a focus on Catholic culture, including under Snead, a world-leading expert on bioethics policy and faculty member of Notre Dame Law School.

As a scholar of the 20th-century Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, however, Martin’s expertise is on theological aesthetics, literature and the Trinity. And she believes this background will help her “turn up the volume” on the center’s humanist pursuits by making “a joyful affirmation of all the goods of culture.”

A mother of three and wife of a fellow Notre Dame theologian, Martin has previously referred to the transcendentals, the ultimate desires of every person that coincide in God, to illustrate how she sees her leadership as both different from but in deep continuity with her predecessors. 

As a philosopher, dCEC founding director David Solomon’s leadership had a particular affinity with the True, she explained, while, Snead, whose policy work has sought to protect the unborn and the marginalized, was closely allied with the Good. Martin sees her work as particularly inspired by the Beautiful and an instinct “to draw people in by Catholicism’s own native ‘compellingness.’” 

“We’re down there in the trenches doing the same work, but it’s going to have a different valence, as it should,” Martin said. “After all, there’s one Spirit, but many gifts.”

Martin’s humanistic interests come through in some of the new initiatives dCEC will be starting under her leadership.

For instance, next year, the center will launch an international consortium called “Dante Among Theologians,” a collaborative enterprise with Notre Dame’s Devers Program in Dante Studies.

“What would happen if we got the Italianists and the theologians and the poets and the literature people all in one room to talk through some of these things in a genuinely interdisciplinary way?” asked Martin. “I think that’s the stuff that I’m really very enthused about.”

Additionally, the dCEC has scheduled a spring conference on St. John Henry Newman, the 19th-century convert, theologian and potential doctor of the Church. 

Martin depicts these new ventures as part of a desire to bolster and broadcast the dCEC’s scholarly accomplishments, which already include four active book series and a visiting scholar program but are perhaps less well-known than the center’s renowned pro-life and student formation initiatives. 

 

‘Building Bridges’

Martin, who holds concurrent appointments in theology and the Program of Liberal Studies, is also excited about continuing to make the dCEC a place of integration — on Notre Dame’s campus and beyond. Given the center’s focus on both ethics and culture, she believes the dCEC has a mandate to pursue all that is humanly good, in neither a relativistic nor a reductive fashion.

“Maybe I’m just a quintessential middle child, but I want to bring everybody together and have extraordinarily high-level conversations across all the disciplines,” she said, adding that “to be Catholic is to be obliged to the whole of human culture.”

Her expansive vision comes at a time when higher education, and the University of Notre Dame in particular, is focused on interdisciplinary efforts. Holy Cross Father Bob Dowd, the university’s new president, expanded on the theme during his inaugural address in September, emphasizing the need to build bridges on campus and to the wider world.

Martin said Father Dowd’s vision resonates with the dCEC’s mission and her own desires to foster collaboration. And it’s a role that her supporters think she is particularly well-suited to play, in a distinctively Catholic way.

“Everyone in higher education talks about the importance of interdisciplinarity, but Jenny has the courage and talent to actually do it,” said Snead of his successor, citing not only her academic acumen and Catholic commitments, but also her “personal generosity, kindness, decency, prudence and charisma.”

Anthony de Nicola, chairman of the dCEC’s board and a major financial backer along with his wife, Christie, agreed, describing Martin as “passionately pro-life” and a “beloved teacher of the Catholic tradition,” who “deeply understands that Notre Dame’s mission is its most important asset for achieving worldwide academic excellence.”

 

A Personal Vocation

For Martin, advancing a vision of Catholicism that is wide and winsome isn’t just an academic theory. It’s also deeply personal.

A native of North Carolina, Martin was raised as the daughter of a pastor of a Restoration Movement-associated church, which emphasized simplicity and Scripture. In this context, she also learned to play guitar as part of “The Newsome Family Singers.”

Martin loved her upbringing. But according to her, it was her experience of the “wide goodness” of the Catholic Church, particularly in its liturgy, universality and cultural expressions, that sparked a desire in her “to be a part of that.”

“When I became Catholic, I became Catholic because it was the most liberative thing I could imagine,” said Martin, who entered the Church when she was 25, just before starting graduate school at Notre Dame. “It was just so full of possibility.”

Now, as director of the dCEC, she’s poised to share that experience with others — although becoming the center’s head was “never on my bingo card,” the self-described introvert told the Register. 

That changed when Snead gave her a call last winter. Although she was initially skeptical, he urged her to be open to the job and to “do it for the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

He might have been half-joking, but that image played a decisive role in Martin’s discernment. She came to see the role as an opportunity to bolster Notre Dame’s Catholic identity and to provide a compelling vision of faithful Catholic life and study, all in union with Mary’s fiat and under her protective mantle.

“I surely didn’t do it for the football tickets,” Martin quipped.

 

‘A Real Celebration’

Instead, Martin likely took the job to help nurture events like the one that will unfold on Notre Dame’s campus over the next three days.

Entitled “Ever Ancient, Ever New: On Catholic Imagination” and held in tandem with the Biennial Catholic Imagination Conference, the gathering will bring together famed Catholic poets like Dana Gioia and James Matthew Wilson, as well as leading academics, like Judith Wolfe of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews and Notre Dame’s Ratzinger Prize-winning Cyril O’Regan. 

More than 150 academic panels on everything from Catholic fairy tales to Eucharistic theater, wartime art to generative AI, will take place, as well as several musical and theatrical performances, including the film premiere of Raffaella: A New Fairytale Ballet.

Masses will be celebrated by Bishop Kevin Rhoades of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, Indiana, and Bishop Paul Tighe of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education. And as is the case every year, some of the high points for many participants will occur over meals and drinks, officially sponsored and otherwise.

Those not in South Bend can still watch the conference’s keynotes at 8 p.m. Eastern Time on the first three nights via livestream, and about half of the other presentations are expected to be eventually uploaded to the dCEC’s YouTube channel. 

As for Catholic Woodstock’s new frontwoman, Martin isn’t expected to break out her bluegrass guitar — at least during official programming. But she still thinks the event will be worth tuning into.

“There’s a lot here, so I think it’s going to be wonderful,” she said. “It’s going to be a real celebration of all the goods of culture.”

MORE INFORMATION

EthicsCenter.nd.edu/programs/fall-conference/