Notre Dame Magazine
New Light in Old Darkness
Why the Middle Ages matter more than ever Imagine traveling to the vibrant port city of Alexandria, Egypt, in the year 1000. Perhaps you are a Muslim legal scholar making the...
Read Article
Travel Books
Gregory Greif’s essay received an honorable mention in Notre Dame Magazine’s 2019 Young Alumni Essay Contest. Travel Books When traveling, I always make sure to bring a...
Read Article
Destination Mars
Before he answers any questions, Mark Kirasich wants to clarify the nature of his job. “I am NASA’s Orion program manager,” he says, presuming — correctly — that...
Read Article
A Sisterhood of Sorts
When the University of Notre Dame went coed in 1972, it did so on the crest of a wave that seemed poised to change everything for American women. The Equal Rights Amendment had...
Read Article
A Remedy for Battered Hearts
How do you represent resilience? Is it Rosie the Riveter, her bicep flexed? Is it a diamond, one of the hardest substances on Earth? Or does resilience resemble hope, which Emily...
Read Article
The Days the Music Lived
On a Saturday afternoon in late April, the only sound in the grassy bowl behind the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts in Bethel, New York, is the occasional passing car. Sometimes...
Read Article
Newspaper Man
It was the summer of ’69, and Matt Storin was waiting anxiously in the U.S. Capitol press gallery for the Senate’s return from its August recess. A month before,...
Read Article
The Lost Virtue
Ask people, “Who or what comes to mind when you hear the phrase ‘greatness of soul’?” and you will encounter blank looks and a confusing ragbag of replies. I know. I’ve...
Read Article
The Good Shepherd
The first time I heard about Stan Rother, I was standing in the room where he was killed. It was a sitting room, about 28 feet by 20 feet, in the rectory of Santiago Apóstol, the...
Read Article
The Surprise-Packed Cosmic Funhouse
The world is a magical place. I believe this to be true, although many would quarrel with the meaning of “magical.” It is surely a realm possessed of wonders. Many of these...
Read Article
What Is the Way Out of Here?
“It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it,” Flannery O’Connor once wrote, and for Catholics, each day’s headlines this past year...
Read Article
Are We Alone?
In October 2017, a telescope in Hawaii detected the first confirmed “interstellar object” spotted in our solar system. Christened ‘Oumuamua (pronounced oh-MOO-uh-MOO-uh),...
Read Article