Carter Snead appointed Director of Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture

This is wonderful news!

Now I can give my annual donation to the ND Fund to Protect Human Life with full confidence in the fund's future.

The Center's current director, Prof. David Solomon, on his replacement:

It is difficult for me to imagine a more suitable appointment. Professor Snead is one of the most exciting new scholars on the ND faculty, a major figure in contemporary bioethics. He is passionately committed, as are all of us at the Center, to the prolife cause and to the cause of Catholic higher education. We all look forward to the exciting new ideas he will bring to the Center.

For more information visit the Center's website here.

The Sycamore Trust also weighs in:

...There could not be a more welcome development. Professor Snead is superbly qualified to build upon the work of Dr. Solomon and his associates that has made the Center a focal point for Catholic intellectual life and the driving force for pro-life reflection and action on campus...

The full statement from the Sycamore Trust can be found here.

The Great Courses

Below is a fascinating article from The City Journal about "The Great Courses" company which provides college courses on CD & DVD.

This is one of my favorite companies, and I have listened to a number of their courses in my car.

The article analyzes the popularity of these courses and notes their more traditional approach, as opposed to the politically-correct, identity-group focus of contemporary on-campus university courses:

The canon of great literature, philosophy, and art is thriving—in the marketplace, if not on college campuses. For the last 20 years, a company called the Great Courses has been selling recorded lectures in the humanities and sciences to an adult audience eager to brush up its Shakespeare and its quantum mechanics. The company produces only what its market research shows that customers want. And that, it turns out, is a curriculum in the monuments of human thought, taught without the politically correct superiority and self-indulgent theory common in today’s colleges...Continued