Virtues & Vocations, Part 14: Cultivating Purpose

Episode Topic: Cultivating Purpose 

Anna Moreland, Chair and Director of the Villanova University Honors Program, and Thomas W. Smith, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at The Catholic University of America, will discuss their recent book, The Young Adult Playbook: Living Like It Matters and their work in education for flourishing among undergraduates.

Featured Speakers:

• Suzanne Shanahan, Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director and Professor of the Practice at Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns
• Anna Moreland, Chair and Director of the Villanova University Honors Program
• Thomas W. Smith, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at The Catholic University of America

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/918bca.

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Virtues & Vocations. 

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Transcript

Meet the Speakers: Dr. Anna Moreland and Dr. Thomas W. Smith

0:06

Screens everyone. Happy 2025. Welcome to the first Conversations on Character in the Common Common Good webinar for this year. This series is part of Virtues and Vocations, a national forum that is housed at the Institute for Social Concerns at the University of Notre Dame, and supported by the Kern Family Foundation Virtues, invocations seeks to foster a community of practice amongst scholars and practitioners across disciplines who are keen to understand how best to cultivate character and moral purpose in higher education in the professions. This webinar is one of the ways we facilitate these conversations. I am Suzanne Shanahan and I direct the Institute for Social Concerns and I'm host for this series today. We are super excited to welcome doctors Anna b Moreland and Thomas W. Smith on cultivating purpose. Dr. Anna Moreland is chair and director of the Villanova University Honors Program and an associate professor in the Department of Humanities. Her interests lie in faith and reason medieval theology with an emphasis on Thomas Aquinas, the theology of religious pluralism and comparative theology, especially between Christianity and Islam. She is the author of the Known by Nature, Thomas Aquinas, on Natural Knowledge of God and Muhammad Reconsidered a Christian perspective on Islamic prophecy. Dr. Thomas W. Smith is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences of the Catholic University of America, as well as ordinary professor in the Department of Politics. I'm not sure what ordinary means there, but I'm sure he is more special than ordinary, winner of several departmental and university-wide teaching awards. He has published in some of the leading journals in the nation. He is author of Revaluing Ethics, Aristotle's Dialectic Pedagogy, and is currently working on a book entitled Faith in Politics for Local Audiences. He is also a Notre Dame alum. Today, Morela Smith will discuss their great new book, the Young Adult Playbook, living Like It Matters, and their work on Education for Flourishing for Undergraduates. Welcome, great to have you both here. So good to be here with you, Suzanne. So I, I wanna do something, and essentially read, the press about the book as we begin to open it up, because I think it's really helpful in situating what you were trying to do here. so let me just read a bit of a blurb. The Young Adult Playbook goes where other life design books refuse to go. It asks deep questions about what constitutes a happy life. After decades of listening to their students, Morland and Smith name the underlying desires In young adults while searching for a lucrative career, they long for meeting meaningful work. Their social media and gaming practices point to a deeper yearning for intimacy, and their leisure habits have been crushed under the productivity machine. Vick's book helps them unlock their deepest desires. It offers practical strategies to improve habits, and it leads them to recover activities lost from childhood. The book is threaded with the real voices of young adults who have found their way out of this rough terrain. They offer much needed models of hope, providing a concrete map, through unprecedented challenges. Journal exercises throughout the chapters tailor the strategies for each individual reader. Plenty of books diagnose the ills of the digital age. Few off, offer a pathway out of these challenging as caring, effective, and effective college professors. More. Lyndon Smith have spent decades rescuing students from their impoverished landscape. In this book, they attempt to reach the students, they can't teach. So I'm hoping each of you, and maybe we could start with Anna, how did you get to this particular book? It's clearly, based on your experience, but what in your background led you here? if Anna, you could start and then, Tom, maybe you could jump in after that. Sure. So first, Suzanne, I just feel like you failed to mention in my bonafides that I married into the mafia. Okay. My husband is a Notre Dame alum also. so I feel like I should say that at the beginning of a conversation that's hosted by the University of Notre Dame. So Tom and I are longtime friends and colleagues, and as, you mentioned, we've been listening to our students for decades. and we were part of a curricular initiative in, at Villanova before Tom moved to the Catholic University of America. that helps students arrived to college, walk intentionally through their four years, and then equip them with the necessary tools to flourish in life beyond graduation. and yeah, I walked into Tom's office one day because he had given a lecture the night before and we'd had these conversations and just said, do you wanna write a book with me? And, he said, sure. And we had, we didn't know what we were getting ourselves into, quite frankly. So we started that summer and started to write together. We would throw spaghetti against the wall, and this book emerged that really was a labor of love for both of us. It was not, it's not part of my academic expertise or Tom's. We read every word allowed to each other, and it was really a graced experience. And we also included hundreds of students throughout the writing process. They read the manuscript, it is as it developed, and gave us these wonderful criticisms, as we were writing. so we're really, we loved writing the book. it was a totally graced experience and we're excited to share with it, share it with as many people who are willing to read it as possible. Great. Tom? Yeah, I'll start by saying thanks for, mentioning that I went to Notre Dame'cause I didn't have to because I would've went there. yeah. we had, we didn't know what we were getting into. but we both shared this passion for students and student success. I. There's a lot of things to love about teaching, but one of the great things is all the potential, all the rich encounters you have with young people, that's so much a part of our life. and we still see a lot of potential in our students that we love so much, but we also see this kind of sense of stuckness, this sense of drift. how do I mer how do I move into a full adult life? What does a full adult life look like? How do I know when I've made it? And it's not just that they're struggling with, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, work hard. they're struggling because they work so hard. They struggled because they are on this path to success and they're not sure it's working for them. and so we really wanted to roll up our sleeves and think about why that was and how we could help in a kind of a practical way. One of the things that was great about. Writing with Anna is that we pushed each other to write the first non-academic book that we've both written. there was a lot of back and forth saying, you can't, we have to show notel. we can't keep footnoting things. let's let the student voices emerge. And that was really a lot of fun. So this is, I think is an important to note. This is a really interesting book for two academics to write because you have this section where you talk about works, consulted at the end, but it's not your typical academic book. There are sections, where there are little exercises for students and, lots and lots as you say, stories. I think the other thing that's really striking is it's a profoundly hopeful book. And, I'm wondering if that strategy you had from the very beginning, so Anna pops into your office. For some reason you say yes. Did you really imagine this kind of very practical book and to have this hopeful message? Was that deliberative or did that emerge as happenstance as you started to write? So I think Tom and I share intellectual virtues and values and religious ones. and a similar orientation toward our students. I think we both lead with listening and have for a while. and so the hope that Tom spoke about just now is real. Like it wasn't manufactured or made up or we didn't have to work at it. but I think where we worked the hardest wasn't really on the hope, but it was on the. Practicality, the moving away from diagnosing the problem, which so many self-help books do kids these days kind of books And much more towards strategies to help students overcome this difficult terrain. I think that was the, that was, I think, I don't know Tom if you agree with me, but that was a challenge to get that right. And another challenge to get right was to widen the net as broadly as possible without losing the core values that are at the heart of the book. Yeah, I would agree with that. Anna said something to me a couple weeks ago that really has resonated. It's clearly a mental health crisis that people are going through, but she said it's also, this crisis of flourishing and just reducing it to a mental health crisis. It absolves your responsibility in a certain way. you can give the referral to the counseling center and instead of saying, the adult world is really deeply implicated in this culture achievement, this productivity machine trap that we've created, and we have to figure out a way of helping students disentangle themselves from it. That was really, great that, Anna shared that with me. my, the hope for the book that I really tapped into was, the students themselves. I think this generation gets a bad rap. people talk about snowflakes and, woke people and so on. I don't find them this way by and large. I find them sober, serious. understanding that they might have to have diminished expectations from what the previous, that maybe the millennial generation had to, has to wrestle with, but also really interested in moving through in a practical way. and figuring out what a good life looks like. And they know they don't have the markers. And so what we're, we, were constantly saying to ourselves is, let's look at what's underneath what they want. like you said in the intro, they wanna play video games, but really they want human connections with friends. And so how can you build out from that? they're very interested in dating, but they don't know how to do it. they're very interested in kind of romantic intimacy, but they don't, they can't articulate it that way. And how can we tap into the kind of natural desires of the human heart you might wanna say, and make that the sort of source font of a real hope. Great. So one of the things that I find really interesting is. this characterization of students. oftentimes in such narratives, it's easy to almost parody the current crisis of students. And I think that you portray them as, people who are struggling in ways, but who are serious, who are trying, to live a good life. And I think that's one thing that differentiates it. I think the other is thinking about, as academics, most academic books on this generation have the critique, but not the response. how was it, Ray? Did you feel comfortable writing about the kinds of things you're writing about in terms of relationships and offering strategy? Is this, did you get that from your parenting skills or, yeah. I'm dying to know what your kids think about all this. but yeah, like how do you get into that mode? Because I do think right there is a practicalness to this book. It's strategic. but there are not the kind of strategies one often hears from an academic. here's how to actually live life and was that a challenge for either of you or did this just come totally natural? You were like ready to go tell people how to find a partner? I'll just give a quick vignette. When we wrote the leisure section, I had a group of about, about my 20 of my students read it and give us feedback. And, they said to me, Dr. Moreland, you have to write a section on drinking. And I was like, I don't wanna write a section on drinking. I'd rather not think about my kids drinking or you drinking for that matter. You're like, gotta write a section on drinking. And so I said, then write it for me. write, give me the stories. They emailed me the stories and I wrote a section on drinking. we wrote a section on drinking that is, it, so much of it was responsive to what they were asking in the classroom. I think that's really the power of the book is the student voices more than even our own. Yeah. It definitely comes from the student voices. I'll also say that my wife's a child psychologist. She sees young people from, five to 20, 5 30. And so daily we talk about the struggles of young people. and my wife Suzanne actually shows up all sorts of places in this book. And the stories that, she's anonymized and shared, show up in, in all over the place. I would also say that I think it comes for both of us, from the experience of parenting, we really want, wanted to be good parents. I'm sure our student, our sons and daughters have other things to say about that. but you get to a, to an age where you start to think about your students, like children, like your own children, and you want them to flourish and in the same way that you want your children to flourish. And, I think that really is a deep part of the reason why we wrote the book. Great. you talk about, there are really three different sections. One on work, one on leisure, and one on love. can you one of you just walk through the kind of spine of the book and the logic of those three sections and briefly what you were trying to achieve there? I think, when we sat down and made a list of the things that we wanted to write about, we really wanted to write about the basic building blocks of human flourishing. what is it that makes up a good life? and its sort of elements. and we also wanted to address the places where they were struggling at the same time. and so these three pieces emerged quickly as both the loca of struggles, but also the center of a good human, of a good human life. really quickly, when they come and think about work, they're obsessed with work. They want, they, most of them think about college as a transactional relationship. It's just about getting a job. they're given a social script. And parents who don't know what to say when their sons and daughters come and say, I wanna find a good job. Say, do anything, keep your options open. You can do anything. So on the one hand, they're told this kind of open-ended, keep everything open. On the other hand, they're told there's only a couple really successful careers. it's be a doctor, be a lawyer, be a be an engineer, or you're a failure. and so they're really confused about actually how you make a good choice about work. And so a lot of the practical exercises in that section are, coming from the insight that work is a gift. You have to develop your talents and you also have to serve the human community. That's what meaningful work is. And so here's a process of discernment where you can learn to think about how that works in the particular, for your own life with your talents and your communities. the same kind of thing with dating. We meet them where they are. where they are is, there's two options on the menu. Hooking up and opting out. Most don't hook up. Most opt out. But those are both strategies of control. because love disrupts their plans and they are full of plans. And so there's this invitation to say, ask for more for love, ask for more, what, what would love look like? Don't shut it down'cause it leads to loneliness. and here's a couple strategies for dating because people don't date anymore. And so you're really starting from scratch. in terms of leisure, I would say, yeah, when they put down that productivity machine, when they're done with all the activities and achievements that they're focused on what is left, that's the heart of a good life. but really they're so exhausted by that other stuff that what they do is, get on a screen or, engage in social media or play video games and they don't. They know there's a problem with that, but they're not sure what to substitute for it. And so the leisure chapter is how do you cultivate your leisure garden? How do you think about your life as a Sabbath? that's the three elements of the book. So I think of, the section on meaningful work. I can imagine lots of my colleagues getting close to that conversation. I don't know that many of my colleagues really appreciate leisure or fully understand leisure. and I can imagine lots of them running from a conversation on love and dating in, in a conversation with students. it are these conversations you like all the time have feel comfortable having, and what's the kind of context in which you have those conversations? Yeah, so I have them all the time, with students who don't even know me, will make an appointment with me because they've just heard the word on campus. They can come and talk to me about things that I just never imagined I'd be talking to students about. the truth is they are driving blind. They need a manual. The manual is so basic. They, over the years, I have found them more and more resisting resistant to the idea of dating and yet more and more desperate for it. At the same time, both of those things are going on. And so they need to have these conversations about like, how do we even get to, do we meet at Starbucks? What do we do when the bill comes? What are the conversations like? It's super basic, Suzanne, like astonishingly basic. but then they go on an actual coffee date and. They say the most astonishing things after, that, they've gotten to know somebody in, in a new way. And one of the, I think one of the stumbling blocks for a lot of my colleagues is, the assumed heteronormativity. And, I say over and over again, the epi epidemic of loneliness is radical for however you identify. And I've helped students all across the spectrum try to seek lifelong companionship or at least companionship while they're in college. And it makes a difference. It's what they're, it's, it matches their deepest desires, but they just don't know how to get from A to B. Yeah. I have this experience when I'm off to a, do a, give a dating workshop as I do, and this is strange, like, why would this 55-year-old man talk to 20 year olds about dating? it's absolutely bizarre to me. They usually start by folding their arms and, this kind of look like this guy has nothing to say to us. And I would say mostly because we've listened so, so much to these students. Five minutes in, they're all asking for pen so they can copy the stuff down. They're desperate for it. And so when I, the courage that I get for these kind of conversations is somebody's gotta do it. one of the things we found in the book is I think something like 65, 70% of students surveyed wish they, their parents would talk to them about dating. Like when I was 20, I did not wanna talk to Ed Mary Smith about dating. That's not something that, that naturally occurred to me. but they are desperate for adult interaction. And I would say to faculty who are, understandably reluctant as I think we were to engage these questions initially, somebody's gotta do it. And when you look out in, into your class, what you should see are these bright. Terrific young people who are struggling and, they're struggling. increasingly when I talk to faculty, in hallway conversations, they will say, what is with the students right now? and there's, so there's this sense that these things and showing up in your classroom. And so if you wanna be effective educators, you really have to know what they're going through, even in order to teach them. So I wonder if the next version of the book is the sort of the faculty guide, like how to have these conversations effectively with students because, I think a, faculty, I know, I remember being director of undergraduate studies when I was at Duke and a faculty member coming to me and saying, when I have office hours, I shut my door and hide hoping nobody comes by. Because if they come in, what do I say? I was like, hello. But they literally wanted a script, and especially if a student came and was having any kind of challenging or wanted to express anything personal, I think for a lot of faculty that's uncomfortable to terrain. I think most faculty were born and raised being pretty nerdy. And so that sort of outward engagement is a challenge. and I think yeah, knowing that your students are struggling and being able to provide actual good advice. And you, Anna, you said who pays? I don't know who pays. and Right. I met my husband on a coffee date. but still, like, how do you actually know what's effective and is that just practice? At being open and listening over many years. I think one of the things Tom and I have found is that the book has a radically wider readership than either of us would've anticipated. First. We've taught it in high schools with a lot of success. Now high school educators are adopting it. Second, we've taught it to older, to gra college graduates, graduate students, and then other young professionals to, in a way that I, we didn't realize those issues, that the focal point we talk about is in college, they actually graduate with you. Third parents, therapists, counselors, grand. I feel like Tom and I both have this experience. I shouldn't laugh. It's really not funny. But when we talk around the country about the book, inevitably somebody starts crying and I feel like the book I. Strikes, it touches a raw nerve for young people for sure, but also for the people who love them and care for them. so even the, even just giving them a window into the student experience in this book alone, I think that begins to go the distance. That's great. Yeah. I was thinking as you were talking about audiences, it'd be great for people who are learning, right? Graduate students who are gonna go out and teach to give them some context for how to think about these things would be great. a different question. You, both teach at Catholic universities. To what extent, is there a explicit or implicit faith orientation to what you've written? Yeah. This is something that we really wrestle with. I would say this is the thing that we wrestle with the most because our faith is really important to us. It informs the book in certain fundamental ways. We have these reorienting stories that, that pivot students away from the kind of narrative that they've been given to a wider context. So Genesis shows up in the book, for example. but we didn't want, in a generation that thinks of itself often as spiritual, not religious. We didn't wanna come clean with religious commitments, even though they're there. and we also wanted people who didn't have any orientation to spirituality or religion to benefit from the book. so we ask people to grow where their planet, I guess I would say. we don't ask for any, we don't assume any religious commitment among the students. some students see it there, and I think it is there. but we wanted to cast as wide a net as we possibly could. And so there were a lot of conversations as we wrote about, making sure that we. We invited the broadest possible audience into the conversation. do you think, that within the context of students who are, deeply religious or for whom their faith is important to them, that, is there a version of this that's slightly different, that has, a more direct sense of telos to it for more fateful audiences? So what I've found in teaching the books in these different groups, the, so not the books, the one book into these different groups, is that they actually hear different melodies in the music. So the, students you just mentioned actually do hear the deeper melody, and the, say the Ring Bryce Spring. College crowd. Yeah. they end up being really impacted by it as well because while the script is a little bit different, they've got no idea how to date. and so we've heard those students be as, enthusiastic about both the lectures and then the manuscript as it was developing, as the students that have been alienated by the Catholic church or just, don't have religious inclinations. I, I'm gonna say, Tom and I worked so hard on this very question that I'm really gratified each time I get this kind of positive response for both. From both. just to push on that a little, so was that, did you write it so that it would have that. you can write it so it appeals to everybody in some way, but it sounds like it does more than that. It's that people are able to see something more in it if they are from certain backgrounds. That's, I think that's right. Yeah. I think that's right. And one of the things that, that I really appreciate about the reaction is that students who read it say, I feel seen. I feel like somebody listened to me. One of the things that strikes me about all the conversations that we've had with students is how much they don't trust the adult world, sadly. and how much that, that mistrust is really well placed. they don't necessarily trust their institution's. Higher education. They have a very transactional relationship, often with them as, as much as they're proud to go to this or that place, sometimes, they don't necessarily trust their, the religious institutions and the government. Annie, you had that student who came to you and said the adult world, this is a couple weeks ago, right? The adult world offers us addictions to sports, gambling and weed and porn. when we're trying to, we're trying to move into adult life and they offer us addictions. and the book really tries to offer them something else. and I think because we cared so much about that question, there's a strange way in which they trust the book. Avery, could you push on that a little bit more? Because there is this Yeah. how do you get, how do you write something that students will trust and is it because their voice is so present? Because there is this extraordinary distrust of adults and it's also why it's extraordinary that, Anna is this Villanova wide source of. Consultation on life's issues, right? That, that there is this kind of separation. And was that, yeah, did you have particular ways you were thinking about cultivating trust in the book or did you just write it hoping that people would be convinced or engaged and it created a trust? So I think it emerged out of a trusting relationship between Us and our students. So when I tell you that hundreds of students read the manuscript as it was developing, I'm not exaggerating. So we listened to hundreds of student responses and feedback, and then the book emerged out of that. So it emerged out of that trusting relationship. So in the romance section, there's this subsection that was for originally entitled hashtag Pizza Space Love. And the student said to me like Dr. Moland, so if you insist on using a hashtag, and we don't recommend that you do, you can't have a space between pizza and love. I didn't even know how to deploy the hashtag. So take that little vignette and apply it to the whole book. we really listened to them as it was developing. The only thing I'd add to that, I think that's great. The only thing I'd add to that is, paradoxically trust has to be extended to be earned. And so what we're really doing is trusting the young people, in ways that adults often don't. You can do this, you can have a good adult life and you should trust, all of your instincts around mistrust. There is a lot of things to mistrust right now. But you also are, young people who are serious about getting some things done and leading a good life. And we think you can really do this. And here's some tips that we've learned from some of your peers. they respond to that because they're being treated like adults. Yeah. Can I cut and so Sorry. No, go on Anna. And just go back. Can I just loop back to one thing? From the very beginning, Suzanne, you started talking about hope and the book is hopeful, but in part it's hopeful because Tom and I both think that young people have lost hope too early. They don't think they're gonna be happy in the work they do. They anticipate being miserable. They've already free time is wasted time. They've got no hope for what they're gonna do when they're exhausted from the productivity machine. And then they somehow have this sort of rom-com idea that when they turn 30 some somebody's gonna walk into their life and all of a sudden magically they're gonna be able to have a. a family, a marriage and family life, and there are no steps to get there. They've lost hope really in all three categories, and the book delivers hope to them. and I think one of the ways that I think is really striking that it delivers hope is it's practical. it's like these are the steps to do this. And one of the things that I think I heard you talk about in some conversation, Tom, was the productivity machine and how to think about Sort of life as a gift, as a different pivot. Could you talk a little bit about the importance of that? what's the productivity machine, what's the pivot? Yeah, this is part of why I say that this generation is getting a bad rap. they work harder than any generation generational cohort in, in recorded history. they're, They're think they're thought of really as human capital. And I think we're training them to be an economy that really asks'em to work a lot. and a lot of what they, a lot of the way they conceive of their young lives has to do with the college admissions process. everything is affected by this. they're so achievement focused. even their free time activities have been turned into achievements. they don't go down to the, schoolyard and play pickup basketball. They have to go to travel sports and so on and so on. So their whole life is defined by this work ethic and, production of achievement. and they're exhausted by it. and they think of it as, as futile. and, they don't have as much of a sense that life is something that is given, and that has to be responded to as a gift. and that reorientation to life as a gift opens, reorients them to things like friendship. it reorients them to things like free time. you are not responsible for take, keeping this whole thing going. I think this is part of the reason they're so driven to distraction. You can take a day off and nothing will happen. you can take an evening off and enjoy yourself and come back refreshed. somebody needs to put that out there. How do they, you think about something like oat break, take an evening off, take a day off. It seems that one of the huge issues for young people is the competitive pressure. I talked to, I have a daughter who works crazy hours and she's always, the other people are doing it, so I can't. And how do you reorient like a cohort of young people because they do think right, what she's saying is, if I'm not online by 6:00 AM then I'm not gonna Sort of the boss will be looking at that person. I won't get the same opportunities, those sorts of things. How do you address that sort of broader competitive stress? So the metaphor that I often use is the, urination stations at air airports across the country. there weren't these pet relief stations, I don't know, 10 years ago, and then all of a sudden they started to crop up because one person I. Probably somebody who was on the janitorial staff at Logan International Airport said, this is crazy. So that first pet relief station opens up and now it's all over the country. That's how social change happens. I point out their water bottles, the different, the evolution of drinking water. and so we point out these different social scripts that they have the power to turn away from, and we just try to give them the courage to write their own script. One of the things that we talk a lot about is getting anxiety out of the driver's seat. their lives are full of anxiety, and anxiety is partly a function of the kind of monkey mind bouncing around. and so when you think about a human workplace, one of the things that you can think about is what exactly is your boss asking from you? Is are. I know it feels like unilateral disarmament not to log on at six o'clock in the morning. because you seem to be empowering everybody that is. But is that what your boss wants? is your boss really clear about the direction she's giving, and the metrics that, that she wants you to hit? if not, then that's a really good conversation to have. but if you're driven by this kind of constantly looking at the other guy, that actually might not be the best for your work performance because you're not sure what the expectations are. so humanize your work environment by empowering yourself to understand exactly what's being expected of you and living it up, living up to that and then letting it go. One of the things that we say is. elevate work to the position that it's in, that it should be in, in the life. Work is a really important part of your life. It's part of what makes you who you are. but also limit it. Put guardrails around it. That's always the sort of response in the book. Elevate love, elevate work, elevate free time, but also put boundaries around it so it's not taking over your life. Okay. So I'm giving my daughter your email. We can have that conversation. and it's going back to this sort of, question of your kids, right? I often find, the same thing I say, to my children. If someone else says it, it's awesome. I'm like, did I say that yesterday? so just Bri have your kids read it? What was their response? are these things you say to your kids and they pay attention? as a parent, what is this I think it's made both of us in our respective families better parents for sure. It's made me a better parent, and also a better faculty member and instructor of, I have, four kids from 22 to 14, so I'm like in the thick of things now. And I've had my older three attend these dating workshops that I give, which is hysterical by the way. and yeah, I think they've been really receptive. some more than others. but it's really helped. it's helped me. And Tom mentioned that synergy between. Starting and starting to think of your students as your children. Not in a creepy and infantalizing way, but in a, we want you to blossom way. and I think that's exactly right for both of us. My 26-year-old daughter calls me America's dad, and then she immediately says, America's not doing so well. Dad, how much of that is your fault? Yeah. I don't think we can blame everything on you, Tom. okay there. before we open it up to questions, I wanted to ask about character. So you talk about meaningful work and I think of the importance of purpose in work and moral purpose in particular, how much does character matter to this story that you're telling about work, leisure, and love? Yeah. I am very ambivalent about the word character. My background is Aristotelian political theory, and so I, I cut my teeth on thinking about virtue and the importance of virtue for a happy life, character in this generation, which is so focused on achievements, I think feels like another box they have to check. and so it's not something that you do when nobody's looking. It's something that you manifestly do when everybody is looking. It's something that you put on your resume. what I think this generation needs is a sense that, healing flourishing can come out of your struggles. That, that your struggles are not separate from the good life that you're trying to lead. and then you have to move through them in order to get to something else. that, that language I think, resonates more because it's manifestly not about, what you can do for me or what you can do on the market. Great. Anna, do you have anything there or should I open it up? Yeah. So just real quick, I just wanna connect what Tom just said to his earlier comments about gift, about basically life as gift. life is a gift to be received, and at the heart of the book is that the center of human living is loving. and life is about loving more than in being loved. it's because we are able to love, because we are loved. but there's a reception and a giving forth that is organic throughout the book. that I think speaks something that students resonate with, resonate in a way that avoids the kind of pitfalls that Tom was just speaking about. Great. okay. From Howard Gardner, every author would like their book to be evergreen. It's hard to think of this when dealing with young people today. Apart from what is happening politically, nationally, and globally, do you discuss this issue in the book and would you discuss politics with your current students? So I'll just say Howard, that, I had students last semester want to talk about politics in the classroom with me, in November because we had developed a culture of trust in the classroom. And I said to this student, look, we're already talking about sex. Do we have to talk about politics? So I'm willing to, but I'm taking on some hard subjects as it is. And we're, and the book takes on some hard subjects as it is, and we can't take all of them on. So I would not say that the book is political in the kind of sense I think that Howard's raising, but I don't know if Tom agrees. So just a quick question. Do you, is it easier to talk with students about sex than politics? Wow. I certainly have more practice at talking to them about sex uninvited, but still it's there. Sorry, Tom, go on. No, it's a really good question because everything in this context has been politicized. The food you eat and the way you dress and your private life. and so if you dodge the question, it feels to the students like you're not being authentic. And so I think you have to honor the ways in which all of the things that you're taking up, how you're spending, your free time, the work that you choose has social and political implications. but I think, going back to Anna's point about love, and maybe this is gonna sound impractical, but I think it's true. love is the opposite of power. love is the consistent care for the good of the other. and power is the desire to control. And I think part of the reason this generation is exhausted by the question of politics as much as it wants to engage it is because, it is often about this kind of, how can I wrestle this problem to the ground and own it once and for all, instead of moving through life in ways that, that care for communities and the work that you do. and so honoring the question, letting it sit, but then pivoting to, the practical question of what is it that you wanna do in your life and how are you gonna love what you're doing? maybe that's not a good answer, but that's what I think. Oh, that's great. I appreciate that. okay, next one. How do you cultivate the relationships with students? To create a sharing listening environment in which they feel safe to be vulnerable, show, their true faces and provide you with unfiltered feedback. Yeah. I think this is a hugely great, like what is this magical environment the two of you have created and how do we get some magic over here? Yeah. I think part of it is this trust question. you can start by saying, today in class, we're gonna have some difficult conversations. that, that is a frightening thing to say, for an 18-year-old who's whole light life has been surveilled and policed in a certain way. by the institutions they've inhabited and also by each other. And so you actually start with, food. You start with living together. You start with, bringing together in the dorm and saying, what rules do you guys wanna follow this semester? and they're changeable, if they're not working, who's gonna help lead this community? So you start by building trust around, the friendship and community itself. the difficult conversations will come, but what carries you over those difficult conversations are the trust and friendship that you've already built. And focusing really on that question, going on a service trip, together, going out into the community together and putting shoulder to shoulder, helping fellow man through a fellow man and woman through a common problem. All those are ways of building friendship and community that will redo, redo to benefits in the classroom, right? Dialed down really quick, dialed, dialed deep, just in the classroom really quickly. I find anonymizing student comments very helpful. So either writing on sticky notes, putting it in a basket, and then students read each other's comments that are anonymized or they write papers. I set up a PowerPoint and so they read each other's comments again where they, all of a sudden they feel like, oh my gosh, I'm not alone. Somebody else is saying the exact same thing that I feel that works to break down barriers between them really quickly. Great. Those are both super helpful. next one, you talk briefly about work as a combination of what you're good at and how you can help your human community. Do you have any other advice for def for identifying a vocation or figuring out a job that's best for you? How do you draw the line between not being too picky and expecting the perfect job just to appear in front of you, especially when you're young and entry level? Not setting, settling for a job that makes you miserable. So how do you balance those things? that's a great question, by the way. It's a constellation of questions and the fact that this questioner is asking those questions gives me hope that the question is gonna come to some really great answers. I think the work that first work chapter in the book sets, a pathway of four steps that, young people can go to following Ignatian discernment practices. So we adapt spiritual discernment practices to professional discernment and help students concretely move through, these sorts of decisions. that's one of the most practical chapters in the book, and it has helped a lot of young people that Tom and I both know. So I would refer this questioner to that chapter. And generally, get out of your head and into your imagination and heart. they're constantly thinking, what am I good at? What am I good at? What am I good at? you're probably not good at much at 20 or 21. it takes a long time to get to be a good teacher and a good lawyer and a good doctor. and so meaning will come from getting good at something. but then also use your imagination to cast yourself into different lives. Look for exemplars that you really admire. think about, think about the choices you make in terms of pro and pro, not just pro and con. That's true. More true to the choices you make. Great. you've mentioned dating, but you also, do you also address friendship and have any postgraduate students shared the frustration of being distant from their close friends? Are in other parts of the country. you graduate, you get sprinkled everywhere in a new city by yourself, working and working lonely. Yeah. One of the things that happens when they read the romance chapter is they sometimes say, oh, this can work for friendship too. Yeah. The heart of the romance chapter is moving from a relationship with somebody who's a stranger to an intimate relationship and helping them see that intimacy is actually what they want. And so we define intimacy as knowing somebody who knows who you are genuinely and loves who you are. and being that, having that be reciprocal, so many of their relationships are mediated through social media and people are constantly pushing out a false image of themselves and breaking that down and getting to the point of genuine intimacy we think is really important. And that's a process of. Navigating kind of boundaries. This is how we describe it. thinking about moving from that stranger relationship to an intimate relationship, as a process of slowly learning to trust slowly. Not oversharing, not underhar, and what does that look like, and what are the kind of steps through that. We, they, I think young people find that really empowering. okay. does the book address major financial decisions? maybe that's volume two. for instance, when to buy a home or Reasons to never buy a home. I think that is volume two. Tom and I started talking about a book on commitment. So the second level questions, it does deal with some, in the work chapter. I. With how finance should figure in big dec big work decisions. But really, I think that's a second edition question, Tom. Yeah. And if the questioner has any recommendations for major financial decisions, I'm all ears. Okay. Still some research to be done in that area. next one, it strikes me that, the intimacy crisis you speak of is connected to the ways in which academic context courses have disengaged from conversations about desire. A question like what's worth wanting, is not traditionally part of teacher training or engineering education. So is part of the solution bringing back conversations about desire into the anesthetic academic context? Yeah. Like how do you do all this in engineering or physics. Yeah, that's a great question. what the way we excel as academics is maybe different than what young people might need. and they're, this is not a, this is not a knock on academics to, to be a successful academic. You have to specialize, you have to make progress in a relatively discreet area of research and teaching. these human questions, I think are wider questions. and so being open to students, bringing them to you and knowing that you're, there's a certain sacrifice involved in that, you're gonna, it's gonna take some time away from your research into particle physics, for example. I do think it makes you a better teacher, to understand where your students are, where they're coming from. but I think it's incumbent on. Universities to start to think differently, maybe about certain aspects of rank and tenure. Certain, implicit incentive structures embedded in things like rank and tenure, and inviting faculty into development workshops, giving them opportunities to grow and recognizing that good work as they make progress through your career. You don't wanna be a fighting a rear card action on these questions, and you really need some institutional support. So if, if there are provosts and presidents out there, this is something they could actually tackle. Great. I think this is probably close to our final question. what's the root of the problem if young people have lost hope too early and are exhausted from the productivity machine, how might we address the cultural context that give rise to the parenting and schooling practices? Perpetuate this cycle. So should we be moving it back? And this really is about, what the adults are doing and Right, you're addressing what the young people are doing, but really it's their parents and teachers' fault. Yeah. So I think this is why the book can be so powerful to put it into the hands of parents and teachers and faculty and admissions officers, et cetera. because it, it gives a very palpable sense of the effects of the productivity machine. And, while we don't, it's not a cult, a big cultural book on how to make changes in society. It's very much practically driven to individual young people and the people who care about them. the wider cultural issues are very much in the background, and we could have a sort of a whole other book written about that. I think we're coming up with several more volumes for you. So a whole lot of work to do. so by way of final question, maybe for each of you, what's the feedback you've received that you have loved the most, that somebody said something about the book and you're like, that just makes me feel fantastic. We had a, a presentation on the book at Villanova and we had, a young woman who had been affected by our focus on dating, and she brought pictures of her family with her children and she said, this work helped bring me to that. the, the. The invitation is to open up to wider and wider horizons for your life. and so when you get students who say, I feel seen and I was able to move forward and flourish, in ways that I hadn't previously thought about, that's just amazing. That's just a real gift. Great. Yeah. And two things. One is receiving emails or notes from people who say, I heard about this book, I read about the book, and it sounds x it sounds like my nieces and nephews. It sounds like I'm really wanna give it to people that I care about, because they really need this book. That is incredibly gratifying to me because it's not just that the young readers feel seen, but it's the people who care about them recognize that the book taps into something. And then, the other kind of email that I love, that Tom and I both received a couple of weeks ago was from. a faculty member at a business school, at a large secular university who said, I just bought 20 copies for students here. And so it, it's those wider circles that we'd like to be able to tap into. That's fantastic. great. So I just wanna thank you and everybody else who joined us today. This was a lot of fun. it's a great book. Everybody buy it for their students. get ready for volumes two through 12 out next year. y'all will be busy, so I hope you're still friends and can keep cranking them out. next month we have, character and transformational leadership with Nathan Hatch on Monday, February 17th. So hope everybody can join us then. And thanks so much for joining. Really appreciate it. This was terrific. Everybody had a thank a Notre Dame connection. Very important. Loved it. All right, great. Take care. Thank you. Bye.