Filosophy of Phootball – Why is it impossible to go for three? All sports rules are silly, aren’t they? But why are they all the more thrilling the sillier they become? If immoveable objects win championships, is there even a need for an irresistible force? Knute Rockne developed the Notre Dame shift after watching stage dancers, and this course posits the question of whether designing plays and formations of increasing absurdity could actually create a competitive advantage. (There is a mandatory field trip to a burlesque show).

Theological Architecture – This isn’t your mother’s nunnery any more. Jacob had his ladder and people have been singing about a stairway to heaven at dorm dances for years. With a careful study of dwelling places and houses in Scripture, we can determine exactly what kind of crib God wants (and it’s not a trough in a stable). From Solomon’s Palace to the Upper Room we consider divine amenities and blessed proportions. This course couples sacred geometry with the actual nuts and bolts necessary to build it. We know He’s scheduled a Second Coming; let’s make sure this time we’ve got a place ready for Him…a really nice place.

Northern Indiana and Climate Change: Why Doesn’t It – This course examines the sometimes desperate question of how to change the climate on the Indiana tundra. Chinese scientists have already discovered a way to seed clouds which then wash the smog away. Joining professors from Psychology and Aerospace Engineering, students suffering from seasonal affective disorder launch just about anything into the atmosphere to make the permacloud evaporate, thereby creating local warming.

Sustainable Development – Not what you might think. This is actually a mathematics and business course, as well as an internship with the Development Office. Similar to horticulture, students learn how to cultivate and keep benefactors, as well as their proper care and feeding. Partnering with the Department of Art and Design, students will develop pants pockets that are easier to get your hands into. Partnering with Environmental Sciences, students will learn how to make it rain. Adjunct instructors will be provided by the Morris Inn, University Catering, and the Murnane Family Ticket Office (a perfect example of what we’re trying to do here).

Right Writing —  This isn’t complex. The course teaches the difference between your and you’re; its and it’s; who and whom; and among there, their, and they’re. An English professor will explain to students what the passive voice is, so that it may be assiduously avoided in written composition. A Philosophy professor could explain the conditional contrary-to-fact nature of the subjunctive mood, if students were able to grasp the concept. And a Dutch schoolmarm will drill into students how bad it is to always split infinitives. If you think this isn’t a necessary course, just read the graffiti in the Library.

I myself will be available to teach a course called Holy Cross Privilege. You have vows of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience, and you might have to live in a dorm, but you get a roof over your head, three squares a day, free football tickets, and asking for the aid of the Mother of God is a local call. Don’t scowl, there’s no cowl! And you’re not a Jesuit.

EFS CSC

Padre’s book Father Sorin Says: The Founder Comments on Today’s Notre Dame is available from the Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore and Amazon. The Core Curriculum Review Committee is considering making it required reading for all students, alumni, and fans.

The post Good Fridays w/Padre: Core Values appeared first on Her Loyal Sons.

Not surprising that an athletic conference, the source and summit of bad ideas, is the water trough from which a particularly preposterous notion has begun to drip.  It seems the Big Ten (or Big .714, which is what you get when you try to force 14 into 10) is spending all the extra cash it made from Ohio State’s success, on vast quantities of cheap booze.  Like tipsy fez-clad Shriners running around their conference hotel late at night, the Big Ten pundits have come up with a Very Bad Idea.  Unlike the Shriners, these brilliant plans have nothing to do with plastic wrap on toilet bowls, but pertain to meddling with football and basketball eligibility.  In short, the Big Ten wants to bar all freshmen from playing football and basketball.  Well, not all freshmen – just the lads.  This sounds like it was thought up by an angry nun presiding over a roomful of rumbustious sixth-graders, who won’t let the naughty boys play outside at recess, but instead is making them stay in and write-out Bible verses.  The Big Ten is angry because their boys aren’t graduating much when they play football and basketball; thus, they are creating this so-called “Year of Readiness.”

No, this won’t send high school players running to the SEC like their hair is on fire.  No, this won’t create a “Year of Slacking and Frustrated Acting-Out.”  No, this won’t generate a system of fifth-year graduate students taking ghost classes so they can play one last season.  To think those things you’d have to be cynical…or realistic.  And, No, this isn’t unfair, even though it does not include half of the student population and none of the other sports.

It is true that graduation rates need to be improved for football and basketball players.  But I have a more radical solution: Make them work as hard as their classmates who play nothing more than Checkers.  It seems to have worked pretty well for us, since we often have the best football graduation success rate in the nation.  Too bad it has prevented us from being #1 in the football rankings – except when it hasn’t.  The Big Ten believes this will begin a “national conversation.”  I believe the conversation will begin with, “What the Hel heck is this?  Were they wearing fezzes and drunkenly running around a conference hotel late at night when they came up with this idea?  The “Year of Readiness” is about as attractive as a big, sharp, icicle ready to fall on someone’s head.”

Unfortunately, the Big Ten isn’t the only leaky gutter dripping Very Bad Ideas.  It seems our own University is toying with the notion of dropping the Philosophy and Theology requirement.  Well, not exactly dropping it, but making it more user-friendly.  Instead of a boring course in dreary old Aquinas, students can study Catholic painters to learn about God.  Like Caravaggio, who loved to paint Biblical figures either cutting off heads or getting their heads cut off.  He was also an inveterate gambler besotted with insatiable and diverse carnal appetites, as well as a murderer.  But dam darn, could he paint St. Paul falling off a horse’s as butt!

I didn’t hammer a holy Cross into the frozen ground of Northern Indiana, in weather just like this, to have my University decide studying about some Jesus guy was taking up too much time in busy students’ schedules.  And who’s got the chapped hindquarters about Philosophy?  It’s the study of…studying.  It teaches you how to think.  Call me old-fashioned, but that really should be the goal of a higher education.  Maybe a couple of Philosophy classes in the “Year of Readiness” would teach Big Ten “student”-athletes how to think through the merits of studying, passing, and graduating.

Maybe it’s all the excess time spent cooped up inside that causes these Very Bad Ideas to form.  I’ve often blamed spending four years living in Zahm or Dillon for warping young minds, four years of living in Morrissey for warping young hygiene.  At least here we haven’t seen the Very Bad Idea of jumping out second and third-story windows into snowdrifts.  Apparently this fad has developed in Boston.  Sure, going to BC is miserable and humiliating, but it’s no reason to hurt yourself.

So, my advice is as follows: Big Ten, if you can’t graduate your football and basketball players, tighten your own belt; Core-Curriculum Review Committee, cancel the Theology requirement, and you might find yourselves in hot water (and hot everything else) at the end of your earthly lives – cancel Theology and Philosophy, and you might as well have us join the ever-ready Big Ten; and lads who are thinking of jumping out a window into the snow, go play football on the quad or basketball in the Rock…and never, ever, attend a Jesuit school.

EFS CSC

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