opinion

My love-hate relationship with Coach Brey

By The Observer · Friday, March 19, 2010

Four years ago a couple friends and I were sitting in a condo in Tucson on our first spring break of college, drinking the Amstel Light that my friend's dad happened to have in the fridge that day when the NIT bracket was announced. Our Fighting Irish that season had solidified their spot in the NIT field with their 6-10 record in Big East play (which was a frustratingly impressive feat considering they outscored their league opponents by 37 points) and we were eager to find a way to support the team.

Has anyone seen my old friend John?

By The Observer · Friday, March 19, 2010

Can you tell me where he's gone? There's about to be a very big vote on health care reform, and wouldn't you know that such reform includes funding for violence to the littlest among us. And despite the president's claim to the contrary, you know he's going to sign that bill if and when it's presented to him by the House and Senate. Can there be any real any doubt?

Workout recruitment

By The Observer · Thursday, March 18, 2010

It's when I'm sitting at my desk watching "Lost" and Facebook chatting with friends (a Word document ambitiously open to give the illusion of productivity) that I feel the fiery judgment piercing from behind. I covertly glance over my shoulder and see them staring at me. I know that I'll feel better if I put them on; slip my feet into those faithful Nikes knit with sweaty memories and whispered promises of endorphin highs and self-satisfied pride. But usually I just turn back to my conversation, guiltily ignoring their gaze. When I do concede, I'm tying the laces with reluctance motivated by remorse, not excitement. What happened to me? I used to be fit, healthy (I still am — that never entirely goes away) but I'm "softer" than I was when I ran for the track team only six months ago. I want to emphasize that this is about getting healthy, not weight loss. Being active makes me happy, increases my self-confidence and generates a sense of pride in my physical appearance. This is why I'd like to put together a group to keep each other accountable and make working out a social activity. Send me an e-mail at bburgeso@nd.edu if you are interested.

A plea for Freedom of Speech to Fr. Jenkins

By The Observer · Thursday, March 18, 2010

Dear Father Jenkins: We are graduates of the University of Notre Dame who went on to graduate from law schools around the country. We write to express our profound concern and disappointment regarding the University's recent treatment of a group of students who engaged in free speech to inform their classmates and the public about Catholic Social Teaching and its relation to the University's investments. We understand that on Saturday, Feb. 20, Notre Dame students peacefully gathered in a parking lot outside of the Joyce Athletic Center to inform the public about the University's investment in HEI Hotels and Resorts, a company that has been accused by the Office of General Counsel of the National Labor Relations Board of egregiously violating workers' rights. Notre Dame Security agents forced the students to halt their leafleting and confiscated the leaflets. The University subsequently summoned three of the students to appear at a Disciplinary Conference presumably for their attempt to inform the public about Catholic Social Teaching. As you know, the confiscated leaflets reference a complaint issued by the General Counsel of the federal National Labor Relations Board against the HEI-owned Sheraton Crystal City Hotel, alleging that HEI interrogated, threatened, suspended and fired mainly immigrant hotel workers who are organizing collectively to improve their working conditions. Some of HEI's hotel workers, like Hermen Romero who works at the Sheraton Crystal City, earn as little as $9.59 per hour. In addition, HEI has raised the cost to employees for family health insurance to over $300 per month, making it harder for workers to pay for health benefits for their children. The leaflet called on Notre Dame to adhere to Catholic Social Teaching, as articulated by the United States Catholic Bishops, which declares: "All people have the right to economic initiative, to productive work, to just wages and benefits, to decent working conditions, as well as to organize and join unions or other associations." The leaflet also cited Pope John Paul II, who stated in Laborem Exercens that the union's "task is to defend the existential interests of workers in all sectors where their rights are concerned. … [Unions] are indeed a mouthpiece for the struggle for social justice, for the just rights of working people in accordance with their individual professions." The students tried to leaflet outside of an event — a Catholic Mass — held at the Joyce Athletic and Convocation Center (JACC) that was open to the general public and was in no way a closed, private University gathering. The leafleters confined their peaceful speech activity to the JACC parking lot, and did not disrupt the Mass itself. Public forums and public parking lots are a traditionally respected site of free speech activity. Public places where communities gather have historically enjoyed the highest level of Constitutional protection under the First Amendment. The University should afford the same level of respect to non-disruptive free speech activity carried out in a church parking lot open to the public. Notre Dame's policy, which apparently requires student groups to obtain permission from the University prior to engaging in peaceful expressive activity, is a troubling a priori restriction on free speech. Such overbroad permitting requirements grant the University unlimited discretion to decide what categories of student speech should be forbidden on campus. It is precisely for this reason that federal courts have repeatedly overturned analogous governmental permitting schemes as unlawful limitations on First Amendment rights. Even worse, the circumstances suggest that the University has applied its policy in an arbitrary manner, calling police officers to shut down a peaceful, non-offensive student gathering and threatening to sanction participants, simply because it disliked the content of the students' message. According to the students, they have regularly leafleted at other student events without similar retaliation. Further, as a recipient of federal educational funds, the University is no doubt aware that Title 20, U.S. Code § 1011a, "Protection of student speech and association rights," provides that no student should "be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination or official sanction" by an educational institution receiving federal financial assistance for participating in constitutionally protected speech. Apart from these legal concerns about Notre Dame's actions, the University's mission is to adhere to Catholic Social Teaching. As such, we are stunned that it would deploy resources to suppress the dissemination of those basic tenets. The Church consistently and vigorously defends the right of all workers to organize a Union, and the right of all people to freedom of assembly, as pillars of this teaching. The University's prohibition of its students from leafleting on Feb. 20 and its decision to take the students to a Disciplinary Conference are deeply troubling from both a legal and an ethical standpoint. We strongly urge the University to refrain from future disruption of peaceful expressive activity by its students, and to terminate its unjustified disciplinary proceedings against any students who were involved. We believe that such courageous, principled students, who devote their time and energy to speaking out on behalf of others, act in the best traditions of the University of Notre Dame. They deserve to be recognized for their witness, not disciplined for it.

Believing in the Irish

By The Observer · Thursday, March 18, 2010

Irish eyes are smiling on the Fightin' Irish 2010 Men's Basketball team. We have huge momentum going into the tourney and it is time to pull out all the stops. I see an Irish victory over Kansas in the final. If every Irish fan could visualize this result, it would occur.

Why Christian are chicken

By The Observer · Thursday, March 18, 2010

When was the first time you ever saw God? I don't mean "I saw God in the bumble bee on a rose petal this morning." I'm talking face-to-face. Was there ever a time when you actually looked into the face of your Creator? This is not a trick question. The Psalms seem to suggest that each of us, before we were born, gazed upon the face of God, and God upon us. This seems worth pondering. Psalm 139 tells us, "From the beginning, Lord, you created my inmost being, You knit me in my mother's womb. My body was not hidden from you, When I was made in your secret place. When I was woven together, Your eyes gazed upon my body." This is an intimate psalm about our creation. There is a notion here that, sometime even before we were conceived in our mother's womb, we gazed into the eyes of the Pure Love who created us from the very beginning. (Since I was a Program of Liberal Studies major, I have a license — granted upon graduation — to cite scientific phenomena and processes, with no precise understanding of them, to make purely literary, philosophical and theological points, which I will now do.) You may recall from high school biology class a most unusual phenomenon called imprinting. Imprinting, as I understand it, was first discovered to occur in chickens. It describes the almost humorous phenomenon that the first living thing a baby chick sees when it hatches out of its egg, it believes for the rest of its life to be its mother. So, for example, if a baby chick is hatched in an incubator by a lab technician, and the first living thing it sees after it hatches is the lab technician, guess what? The lab technician is "Mommy." And if the chick is let out of its pen, even if there are other hens around, including its real mom, it will follow around the lab technician. In fact, if memory serves me right, it has been shown that the lab technician can disappear for months, even years, at a time, but if she comes back one day, the chicken will immediately start to follow her. That's how powerful the imprint is! Now this is where the Scriptures — from Psalm 139 to the Gospels — get interesting. John's Gospel, for example, records the story of a man "blind from birth." This man, in other words, has never seen another person in his life. And then Jesus comes and opens his eyes. So, the very first person the blind man sees in his life is Jesus. In order to cure him, John tells us that Jesus made clay and smeared it into his eyes. Now John is a masterful story-teller, and this detail is hardly unimportant. In fact, clay is the very material out of which God made the first humans in Genesis. So, just as Adam and Eve gazed on God, and God on them, with no obstacles, so this man will gaze on God and God on him, face-to-face, through Christ. And sure enough, the man opens his eyes, and gazes upon Jesus, and from that moment on, he has a longing deep within him, to know something about this man who re-created him. The whole remainder of the Gospel is this man coming to a deeper and deeper knowledge of who Jesus is. First, "He's the man who gave me sight." Then, "He's a prophet." Until finally, Jesus asks him, "Do you believe in the Son of Man?" He answers, "Who is he, sir, that I might believe?" "The one speaking to you is He." The longing we have to come to know the first person we ever see is a longing that is meant to keep us always trying to encounter God more intimately. Now, the funny thing about all this is, this instinct is so powerful in that little chicken, its longing to have a mommy is so incredibly powerful, that it makes the chicken start following the first thing that moves! And we'd laugh at that, except that we know, that every one of us does the same thing — just in much more complex ways! This longing at the center of our being is so powerful that we very often fill it with the first thing that we see moving! In fact, all our other longings — our longing to eat and be full, to see beauty, to befriend someone and feel loved — are all instances of this one central longing at the core of our being — to see our Creator again. During Lent, we give up things we desire, little things for which we often long. One way to think about this practice is that it is our way of reminding ourselves: All our desires in the end are just little instances of our desire for God. And only God, who we looked upon first, before we were born, will ultimately fill our deepest longing.

Saint Patrick's: A quiet day at home

By The Observer · Thursday, March 18, 2010

As I sit here in my study, I write that it is Saint Patrick's Day, a day which warms the cockles of my heart as an Irishman. All too often the great intellectual contributions of the Irish to the world languish unrecognized, despite their astounding literary, theatrical, scientific and artistic contributions. It is salutary and important, therefore, to have a day in which we pay tribute to the great Irish minds of the past. It has not escaped my attention, however, that many people feel this day is nothing more than an excuse to indulge the baser aspects of their human nature. I look out my window over the quad and see, not the orderly procession of fellow students to their classes, but all sorts of quite unaccountable frivolity. It appears that many students have forgotten how to walk, as they stagger and stumble from place to place. Some of my schoolmates who have found comfort in the opposite sex are quite openly expressing their affection for each other by kissing, not gently but rather deeply, after the French fashion. All this, I think, is due to the regrettable stereotype of the Irishman as a hard-drinking, potato-consuming, ugly, brawling lout, swinging a shillelagh with one hand and guzzling a Guinness with the other. I even overheard a conversation yesterday in which some students were excitedly discussing their plans to create and consume a drink they referred to as "Irish car-bombs" — a most insensitive name which makes unacceptably light of a truly dark period in recent Irish history, the sooner forgotten the better. Indeed, I have lately noticed a great decline in public civility and morals. Why, as I was walking back from a gathering of fellow mathematicians late one night, a lady on the street walked up to me and quite boldly inquired if I wanted "sex business!" "Certainly not!" I replied, offended. "I have no intention of exposing my genitals to passersby on the street. We have hardly made each other's acquaintance and you wish to exchange bodily fluids and lice with me? Get out of my sight!" The nerve of that saucy wench! Yes, not for me the idle frittering away of time on pursuits of debased pleasures. I shall celebrate this distinctly Irish holiday by immersing myself in its intellectual life, perhaps underlining passages of interest in "Finnegan's Wake" or chuckling at certain scatological episodes in Swift which I must confess I find highly amusing. Perhaps I shall take up the study of verb declensions in Gaelic as used in the "Tain Bo Cuailnge," the great Irish mythological epic, equaled only by the Iliad in historical importance and literary merit. Or I might comb my sideburns so as to gain a greater resemblance to James Clerk Maxwell, the great unifier of the forces of electricity and magnetism and Ireland's answer to Einstein. What's that? I hear a knocking at the door of my apartment. No doubt mathematical friends, come to discuss the pursuits of the mind. Come in, gentlemen! As it is Saint Patrick's Day, the preeminent Irish holiday, I thought we might discuss Sir William Rowan Hamilton's contributions to the science of the quaternions and the vector calculus. Why sirs, your faces and cheeks are all quite red! Is it truly that cold out? I had thought it quite temperate. Please, my friends, lower your voices! There are other people in this apartment complex. Does my nose detect the distinctive odor of cheap whiskey? Well I never — you're all quite soused! What are you doing with that strange contraption, that funnel affixed to a plastic tube? Is that a canister of inexpensive beer? Don't put that dirty tube in my mouth! Mmph! Glug-glug-glug-glug-glug! Good heavens. I feel quite strange. My whole body is positively thrumming with energy. I have a truly odd urge to sing popular music of the most low and shameful persuasion, "power ballads" and "bohemian rhapsodies" and whatnot, at the top of my lungs. What's that you say, my good fellows? You know of an establishment nearby which sells drinks and allows its patrons to sing — a "karaoke bar?" Lead me there, gentlemen, I am at your disposal. Might I trouble you to pour me another alcoholic beverage through your wonder tube? Glug-glug-glug-glug-glug! "Is this the real life, is this just fantasy …"

No moral 'inconsistency'

By The Observer · Wednesday, March 17, 2010

In light of some flaws in Mr. Durkin's article "Moral consistency on the issue of life" (March 16), I would like to offer some accurate ideas from a Catholic perspective. I would like to state that I am both a member of Notre Dame Right to Life and personally against the use of the death penalty in the United States.

Limping toward God

By The Observer · Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Most, if not all, of us make progress in the faith. We make our way toward God, not by leaps and bounds, but by stutter-steps: slowly and incrementally. The historical record — the lives of the saints — verifies this. Even those saints who had a remarkable or extraordinary experience of divine grace spent the vast majority of their life moving slowly toward God, with bumps, potholes and obstacles all along the way, and many of these self-imposed. In the wake of what is perhaps the most famous "conversion story," an experience of grace in a Milanese garden, St. Augustine (430 A.D.) later tells us that the resolution achieved there was only partial, and that, even as a bishop, he battled the familiar temptations and sins of his past. So we mustn't imagine that this otherwise nameless Samaritan woman in John's Gospel who was shacking up with her paramour, after her encounter with Jesus, toddled on home and never sinned again. That encounter with the Living Water, that moment of grace, was not the end of the story; in many ways, it was just the beginning of one. As those who have participated in the RCIA can tell you, baptism isn't the end of the process; it's just the beginning of another, longer process of daily assimilation to Christ.

We want a response

By The Observer · Wednesday, March 17, 2010

On Feb. 20, a group of concerned Notre Dame students gathered outside the Joyce Center before a Junior Parents Weekend event to raise awareness about Notre Dame's investment in HEI Hotels and Resorts, a company that has recently been issued charges by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for allegedly unfair labor practices surrounding their employees' attempt to organize. HEI will have to defend itself in a trial on April 6. Students who have investigated the issue and spoken to HEI workers find Notre Dame's continued support of and investment in this company alarming. They chose to flyer outside the event in order to alert students and parents, who are investors in this University, about where exactly their money is going.

Free FLAME concert

By The Observer · Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Logan, Notre Dame, Bayer, U93, Best Buddies and DTSB is sponsoring a free concert March 18 at 6:30 p.m. at the Century Center for Disability Awareness. FLAME is a very unique rock band. All the musicians have either a physical or developmental disability. I saw them last year, and I can say they have many talented abilities. South Bend should lay out the red carpet for this rock band. Last year, they came all the way from New York on their tour bus to play at IUSB. They were robbed. Yes, people robbed the bus, while they were getting ready to play. Someone robbed them of their credit cards, cell phones, cash, ipods, whatever they could find on the bus. The band still went on stage and played in spite of how they were violated. The people that travel with them were teary-eyed and the musicians were clearly shaken. I have to commend the band FLAME, and the people that support the band, for coming back to South Bend. So thank you to all the sponsors that are bringing wonderful free entertainment during these tough economic times. We all need to come and celebrate these talented men and women! As a mother of a son with autism, I am thankful that you are bringing disability awareness to South Bend. South Bend, please keep them safe! See you on the red carpet, and be prepared for a rockin fun evening!

Bring on the Madness

By The Observer · Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Since we are in college, I think that it is pretty safe to say that St. Patrick's Day is one of the best days, if not the best day, of the year. What if, however, I could tell you that it gets even better? God has granted us the perfect two-day follow up to the best party day of the year, and it comes in the form of even more energy, adrenaline and excitement than St. Patty's Day. This event will cause people to skip class for the rest of the week, and for the dedicated students who will actually attend class, their attention will be likely be consumed by it. (As a warning to any professors: if anyone has their laptops open in class on Thursday and Friday, they aren't taking notes. They aren't even paying attention to you at all). Many, including myself, would say that these next two days are the best of the entire year. Yes, March Madness has finally arrived.