Our Wicked Problems
Led by Grammy® Award winner and Director of the Notre Dame Folk Choir Dr. J.J. Wright, this series will introduce The Passion, a new artistic production combining Scripture with original poetry and set to original music. Through Christ’s Passion, we learn to encounter suffering and incarnate love, to behold one another in our “not-enoughness.” As we enter the upcoming Lenten and Easter seasons, we invite you to journey with the Folk Choir and some of our closest collaborators through the development, rehearsal, and performance process of The Passion. Along the way, we will explore the Passion and Resurrection in light of the most pressing issues on the minds of our students, including the clergy sexual abuse crisis, the role of women in the Church, and climate change. In May, the choir will make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where they’ll walk in Jesus’s steps through the Passion and record this new work at the Jerusalem Music Center.
Meet the Speaker: Tristan Cooley
Tristan Cooley is a poet, librettist, and fiction writer from Silver Spring, MD, and served as the librettist for The Passion. He holds a BFA from The New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music and an MA from CUNY, Brooklyn College. He makes his home in Vermont. Current collaborators include the University of Notre Dame Folk Choir under the direction of J.J. Wright, and the theatrical production house Sounds & Voices, led by Dominic Mekky and Franky Rousseau.
Meet the Speaker: Eric Styles
Eric T. Styles, since 2016, has served as the Rector of Carroll Hall, an intentional undergraduate residential community at the University of Notre Dame. A Chicago native, he holds degrees from the University of Cincinnati and Loyola University Chicago. Eric worked as a Parish Liturgy Coordinator at Saint Benedict the African Catholic Church in Chicago and as a House Manager for the Theatre School of DePaul University. He discerned religious life for seven years with the Society of Jesus, during which time he prayed the thirty day retreat designed by St. Ignatius Loyola and received formal training in spiritual direction. He later left the Jesuits and eventually found his way to Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota, where he worked as a Campus Minister for Liturgy and Faith Formation. Now at Notre Dame, he continues to assist as a retreat leader and an occasional spiritual director. Eric remains active in the performing arts as a collaborator with Afro House, a Baltimore based music driven performance art ensemble. Eric writes about theology, liturgy, and contemporary culture for publications like America, Church Life Journal, and U.S. Catholic. He is deeply interested in the intersections of ritual, performing arts, communal identity, and the interior life. Eric is the co-host of Meet Father Rivers, a podcast about the extraordinary liturgical and musical contributions of Father Clarence-Rufus Joseph Rivers.
A Peek Behind the Curtain: Collaboratively Writing Lyrics for the Agony
Please hover over the yellow speech bubbles to see the comments of the collaborators as the lyrics were being written and get a peek behind the curtain into the writing process of creating the Agony in the Garden for the Folk Choir stage.
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Featured Speakers:
- J.J. Wright, Director, Notre Dame Folk Choir, University of Notre Dame
- Kim Belcher, Professor in the Department of Theology, University of Notre Dame
- Tristan Cooley, Librettist for The Passion
- Eric T. Styles, Rector of Carroll Hall and Host of the Podcast Meet Father Rivers, University of Notre Dame