de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 0:00 This is Episode 34 of Ethics and Culture Cast from the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 0:18 Welcome to Episode 34 of Ethics and Culture Cast from Notre Dame's de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture. I'm Ken Hallenius, the communication specialist at the Center. In this episode, we sit down with professor Jenny Martin of the Program of Liberal Studies and the Department of Theology. We talked about her teaching across the disciplines, about the differences in teaching first year students and seniors, and about how cultivating a sacramental imagination is necessary to transforming a pornography-obsessed culture. Let's sit down for this week's conversation. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 1:05 Jenny Martin, thank you very much for coming to be with us today. Jenny Martin 1:08 My pleasure. Thank you. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 1:09 So tell us a bit about yourself. Tell us about how you came to Notre Dame. Jenny Martin 1:13 Sure. Well, I came to Notre Dame in 2005, actually, as a graduate student. I worked on a Master of Theological Studies in the History of Christianity 2005 to 2007, and then I switched to Systematic Theology for a PhD. So I did my graduate work in theology here as well. And then I finished my dissertation in the summer of 2012, and got hired in the Program of Liberal Studies, which is the Great Books department here at the university, in 2012 that same year. So I was interested always in theology, my father was actually a Protestant minister, which, you know, if you told me 30 years ago that I would have been teaching Catholic theology at Notre Dame, it would have come to, to be a great surprise to me, but yeah, so um, so I came to study theology and the theology department here and then moved over to the pls, department. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 2:10 Awesome. So you are in PLS, the Program of Liberal Studies, you have a concurrent appointment in the Department of Theology. What do you teach? And and not only what do you teach, but how does that relate to your kind of professional intellectual interests? Jenny Martin 2:26 Great, thanks. So, in PLS the backbone of a curriculum are six great books seminars. So great books 1 starts with Homer. And we end great books seminar 6 with a turn to the civil rights movement, the modern novel. So we go up to about the 1960s. And all of the faculty in the department teach the seminars, so I spend a lot of time reading actually outside my discipline. I'm teaching right now, um, a literature university seminar for non majors, where we're reading Homer, and Aeschylus, and Euripides and Aristophanes, and all the sort of Greek ancient tragedies and some of the histories and epics as well as some of the Platonic dialogues. So I'm teaching that right now. But a few semesters ago, I was teaching Kant and Wittgenstein and Virginia Woolf, you know, so it's a real teaching a lot outside your discipline. Inside my discipline, we have 13 tutorials that are connected to the curriculum in a lot of different disciplinary areas. So we have two requirements in theology, several in philosophy, some in Fine Arts. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 2:36 Was that Salome? Jenny Martin 3:34 So I teach both of the theology tutorials which are more lecture driven, more content driven, and those are taught by someone within the area of expertise. So the first one I teach is for generally freshmen and sophomores. It's a class called the Bible and its Interpretation. And the second course I teach in the theology sequence is Christian Theological Tradition for seniors. With respect to the first course, I tried to make it both sophisticated and fun. We end up looking at not only the Biblical texts, but also the history of Biblical interpretation. Not only in, you know, Jewish interpretation, artistic interpretation, but also in homilies, in movies, in popular culture, and in art in those kinds of things. So a big component of that course is a creative project that is done in accordance with an exegetical paper where they pick a passage, and then they create really whatever they want. I've had a lot of really interesting final projects come out of that Bible course, oil paintings and short stories and poems. There was a choreographed dance one time. Jenny Martin 4:50 It was not it was from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, of course, right. So we go to the Snite museum a lot and spend some of our class time thinking about how image and text are combined, and how different images can pick up on different threads of the Biblical texts or different versions of the Biblical text. Or if you've got, there's a few pieces over in this night museum on the banishing of Hagar by Abraham. And after we read that section of the Hebrew Bible, we go over to the museum and we look at several of these. There's a Rembrandt, that's there in their archives, or their storage. And there's also some pieces that are on permanent display. And we look at those and talk about how the artists have picked up on different, picked up or innovated completely absent elements of the Biblical text. So that's very interesting. And the students I think, seem to really enjoy that course. Jenny Martin 5:44 The other course is the Christian Theological Tradition, or Christian Theological Traditions, which is for seniors, and that course, is probably more near to my own research interests. I write a lot on the nature of Catholic tradition, the operation of Catholic tradition, I think a lot about what it means to retrieve the past, what it means to think about the past and what conservation of the past looks like, in the present, and with an eye toward the future. So those those kinds of like meta questions that are interested in, in my own research come out pretty closely in that, in that course. We read Yves Congar's the meaning of tradition, where he, he's giving a very dense account, a sort of meta account of what Catholic tradition is and how it how it operates. Because when we talk about tradition, sometimes students think, Oh, it's traditional, it means it's dusty, it's old, we have to sort of drag it from cold storage and bring it into the present. But I try to show in that class that that tradition is durable, and it's it's actually a category of not only the past, but also the future. Jenny Martin 6:57 So in order to sort of demonstrate that concretely, I've arranged the syllabus where I have patristic interlocutors connected with modern interlocutors, so I've arranged it thematically according to the Apostles' Creed, we follow the Apostles' Creed. And so we move through, we take a long time, actually, with the first word credo, what does it mean to believe something? What does it mean to believe in a culture in which religious belief is, is often not valued? What does it mean to believe in a culture where empiricism and scientism and all these kinds of -isms where everything is sort of reduced down to its empirical provability? What does it mean to believe something invisible, to believe something beautiful, to believe something old, you know, all of those kinds of things. We spend several, several weeks on that and then we move through the more dogmatic elements, the doctrine of God as Trinity, Christology, pneumatology, ecclesiology, and I pair kind of patristic readings with modern readings. Jenny Martin 7:59 One example of that is, in the pneumatology section, we read a lot of biblical texts on the Holy Spirit. We read some of Yves Congar's book, I Believe in the Holy Spirit. And we read a book by a modern theologian, Shelley Rambo, about trauma theory, and what does it mean to go through a trauma. So what she does in this book is she connects this with a doctrine of the Holy Spirit, it's sort of notion of abiding, of waiting in a kind of middle space between Good Friday and Easter. You know, it's it's really sort of a beautiful thing, and the students respond well, to that. Jenny Martin 8:35 I also add, sort of selfishly, Charles Peguy's poem, The Portal of the Mystery of Hope, at the end of every version, every iteration of that course, since I've taught it starting in 2012. Because what that text does, it's a kind of poetic representation of what tradition is it repeats these images, without losing any of them. And it has this really beautiful image of tradition as very concretely practiced. Dipping our hands into the holy water, crossing ourselves from hand to hand, he says, from fingertip to fingertip, eternal generation to eternal generation, all the ones going to Mass. You know, it's a really beautiful, beautiful image of tradition, that's very much liturgical, and concrete, and having to do with ordinary Christian practice, which I think is really beautiful. I hear from my students that a lot of parents get that book for Christmas every year. Anyway, so um, so I think that that is a good summary of the kinds of things I teach. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 9:38 Yeah. Jenny Martin 9:38 I can speak a bit more about how it connects to my own intellectual interests. But I've spoken to that a bit. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 9:43 Yeah. So you teach a class for freshmen, you know, kind of first years, and then a class for seniors? Do you see growth? de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 9:53 Yes, very much. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 9:56 Which is a good thing. Jenny Martin 9:56 Yeah, of course. Yeah. I do. I think the question, the theological questions get more sophisticated. But I have a soft spot for the for the freshman version, because, well, I have to do, sometimes I have to do a bit of dismantling of preconceptions in the freshman course, or freshman and sophomore course, especially actually students who have gone through Catholic schools their whole life, and they they've somehow gotten the they're under the misapprehension that the Bible is, can be reducible to, to sort of one meaning, or to, like an immediate application. And so part of the challenge and the joy of that class is to sort of indicate through a lot of different ways kind of explicitly, but implicitly, through all these juxtaposing all these different ways of reading, that the Bible is really a very sophisticated document that does more literarily, and spiritually, and liturgically than it is just to give us the do's and the don'ts. You know, so there's a sometimes a reductive picture of the Bible, or students sometimes either under- or overestimate their familiarity with the Bible. Jenny Martin 11:13 And it's interesting, especially in my pedagogical context, to teach the senior level course on tradition, because if we think our entire curriculum in PLS is integrated, and so everyone, by the time they come to me have, they've all taken the same classes in roughly the same order, they've all read the same books. So I get them the semester that they're reading or the semester after they've read Marx and Darwin and Hegel, and Nieztsche, and all of the sort of masters of suspicion, right, and so I get them after this kind of crash course in skepticism, and, and then have to think about how I'm teaching a senior level theology course to students who may be in different places with their own faith life. They, they need to see a kind of rationale for theology, as an academic discipline with credibility, theology as a science in the way that Aquinas talks about that in the Summa. Jenny Martin 12:22 And so I have, I learned, in the course of my years teaching in the program, that I have to start off with some kind of awareness of what they've been reading in their other classes, and to indicate that the way that what's valued as truth, what's valued as real, in the modern world, we don't think that because it's the obvious answer, we think that because we are the inheritors of a long intellectual tradition, where meaning gradually gets foreclosed, from the sort of invisible divine as like in, in ancient Greece, for instance, through you know, through the Enlightenment, and there's other kinds of critiques of knowledge and how we can know things Descartes and Kant, and other figures like that. So I have to sort of make a case for seeing the invisible and entrusting oneself to meaning that can't be demonstrated in a lab, de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 13:29 Non scientific. Jenny Martin 13:30 Non scientific, right. And so part of the way that I do that is use Cardinal Ratzinger's book, Introduction to Christianity, which the students always told me that's, that's sort of the sleeper hit of the of the class, everyone thinks that it sounds very, very cut and dry and very dull. But it's actually – Ratzinger gets people in that book, he understands. And you know, the fact that this book was written as a series of lectures given to college students at the University of Tübingen in the 1960s, that comes through because he knows his audience, and he knows exactly the kinds of things that early college students are thinking about, that he starts a book called Introduction to Christianity, with the story about about doubt. He retells tells the story of Kierkegaard's clown, where he's dressed up as a clown, he goes into the village, he says, Oh, the village is burning, the village is burning! And no one believes him because he's wearing a clown outfit. And Ratzinger says, This is precisely the position of the Theologian in the modern world, right? It seems like a very destabilizing way to begin a book about Christianity as a cardinal, and then a pope. But at the students, they're disarmed and they're charmed by that book. And I think that helps to show them the sort of respectability of the theological discourse, because Ratzinger is so careful to do that. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 14:56 Yeah. We actually used that in an RCIA class that I did last year with two professors were who were entering the church and they chose this book. Yeah, it's not a book that we would have normally used for RCIA, de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:11 Yeah, no, that seems like an outlier. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:13 Yeah. But it was superb. It was the first time I'd read it. And I was like, how did I miss this? de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:18 And I think his chapter on the Trinity is also one of the best kind of articulations of Trinitarian thought there is. I mean, he, he manages to cut through all of the very speculative, important speculative conversation about what the Trinity is and gets to the real heart of it, which is love. Sort of, he's an Augustinian at heart. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 15:23 Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, now Jenny, you're a member of the de Nicola Center's Faculty Advisory Committee. How did you originally get involved with the dCEC and what are some of your ongoing involvements with the Center and especially with our student fellows? Jenny Martin 15:54 Sure. Well, Carter Snead reached out to me back in the Spring of 2017, it was with an invitation to come have a conversation with him about some of our overlapping interests and, and the interests of the Center. And we just really hit it off and had a great conversation and the end of that conversation, he asked me to be a faculty affiliate for the Center, which I happily accepted. And since then, I've been most heavily involved probably with as a regular host for the Salon Series Sorin Fellows dinners, I've had students over to my house for dinner, two or three times to talk about various texts. A CS Lewis text, The Weight of Glory. And we also read some pieces from Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the in the year that the Center was doing a lot of events on that. And I'm also slated to be the Fall 2019 Bread of Life speaker in November, which I'm really looking forward to that and having a conversation with the students in that capacity. Jenny Martin 16:56 They also, when I first got involved, very generously helped to fund a trip to Rome, where I got to go to Rome and meet the pope, met Pope Francis. And this was in combination with my husband's work in the Institute for Church Life, where they received a prize for their work in science and religion. And so we got to go and have dinner at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. And it was the CEC that helped me to go and to do some independent research on Hans Urs von Balthazar which I work on. I got to go to, to a formation house there in Rome, that is headed up by Father Jacques Servais. Casa Balthazar is the name of it, and I got to spend some time with him and work in their library for a bit too. And the Center helped to fund that which I'm very grateful for. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 17:42 Wonderful. Well, now you've spoken and written various things over the years, your CV is actually pretty extensive. But the concept of "cultivating a sacramental imagination in an age of pornography" was the title of one of your talks. Unpack that for us. Because I think there could be no more timely topic. Jenny Martin 18:05 Sure, absolutely. Yes. I was invited by Elizabeth Groppe, who was a professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Dayton, back in, I think, the spring of 2015, to give a talk at St. Mary's on.. Well, she asked me to give a talk on beauty and the potential sort of healing qualities of beauty in an age of pornography. And so the, the task itself seemed very difficult. The, the, the entire conference was based on kind of more sort of on the ground work that people were doing on the ill effects of pornography on the brain and on the sort of addictive qualities of it, and the, obviously, the damage that it does to both the viewer and the participant. And so I was compelled by the problem. And the way that I approached it was I stepped away from kind of the the sort of nitty gritty difficulties of the concrete problem of pornography, which I think is actually a problem of public health, that needs to be dealt with. Jenny Martin 19:18 And I think it's connected to... Well, it's it's connected to, I think a lot of the sexual misconduct that's been coming out both sort of in Hollywood and in sort of broader culture. So I, I took a more conceptual look at this issue. Elizabeth had asked me to think about beauty as a way of countering some of the harmful effects of pornography. So what I did is I, I was thinking about, what, what pornography is, is a subset of a way, a reductive way of thinking about the world, and thinking about anthropology. It's not only reductive, it's also highly susceptible to commodification and exploitation. And it decouples beauty from depth in certain ways. Balthasar, the Catholic figure that I work on, talks a lot about perception. And he has this, this phrase about, if you see, I can't remember the exact phrase, but he's talking, he talks about what he calls "inhuman seeing" where he thinks about, if you look, and you just see the appearance, you're doing violence, so that kind of like ontological depth of beauty, the inherent dignity of persons, all those things. So So I use this idea of inhuman seeing from Balthazar as a, it's a kind of like conceptual act of violence that precedes actual acts of violence. Jenny Martin 21:01 And so I talked about that, and I recommend a way of re-figuring the human imagination, the cultural imagination, the theological imagination, first, by reconnecting beauty, to ontology, beauty to being, beauty to depth, it's not merely appearance, it's not really surface. And that I think, natively resists a kind of profit-driven commodification of the machine that drives pornography is money, right? It's money at the end of the day. And then I talk a lot about Bazlthasar's more biblical anthropology, where you have the connection of embodiment, and materiality and spirituality, where he connects the, the senses with the spiritual senses, I mean, so it's a very sort of whole-bodied idea of what it is to be a human person. And it's also a very relational quality, relational aspect of anthropology. Jenny Martin 22:04 So, you know, I think, at the end of the day, it's not nearly enough to talk about it in conceptual terms like that. But I think, I mean, it's a, it's not a sufficient condition, but it's a necessary one to start thinking about. What how we value beauty, how we value, sort of the exhibition value of, of beauty, and how we look at people and how we look at the world. I mean, to me, and not just to me, but the sacramental imagination has no competitors, right? It's to see the world as imbued with grace and meaning and to see every body as worthy of dignity and respect and care. And it just, are there concrete ways that we can sort of recover that, that way of seeing the world where things have been so reduced to sort of being with like, you know, images reflected in the media, or reduced to what can make money, you know, those kinds of things. So, you know, it's a, it's a very difficult issue that I feel ill equipped to deal with, all the way down, but you know, in in terms of like, just thinking about how we see other people and how we see the world and how we understand what beauty is, there's, you know, a limited kind of antidotal quality to that, that I think is important, even if it's not fully sufficient. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 23:39 Yeah. Well, um, what are you working on now? I happen to know that you'll be speaking at the Catholic Imagination Conference in Chicago, hosted by... which the center is a co-sponsor of so... Jenny Martin 23:52 Wonderful! de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 23:53 So I'll be there to hear you. Jenny Martin 23:54 Oh lovely! de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 23:55 But what are you working on? Jenny Martin 23:56 Sure. Um, well, the, the particular work I'm doing for that conference, which I'm very excited to be part of. I mean, it's, it's a wonderful collection of novelists and musicians and poets and theologians, all kind of coming together to, to talk about the future of the Catholic literary imagination and talk about art. So what I'm doing for that is, I'll be on a panel with Irish poet John Dean. And we're talking about the aesthetics of faith and doubt, that is our task. So my own presentation will deal actually with various receptions of this very well known painting, the Hans Holbein painting Christ Dead in the Tomb, where it's a very stark, very visceral kind of depiction of the death of Christ. So this is the one of course people know that Dostoyevsky describes in the... Has Prince Myshkin, say, I think, you know, "someone can lose their faith looking at that," and Balthazar, who the theologian that I work on, saw that painting quite a bit, it's in Basel, where he's from. And he, he was very interested in that. And he's written a lot about the painting as well. Jenny Martin 25:09 But the, I'm also supplementing the sort of literary and theological kind of engagement with that painting with Julia Kristeva, who was a very, you know, she's interested in religion, but she's not religious at all. She's a sort of so-called French feminist who's working in the psychoanalytic tradition. And she's also written about that painting in ways that I find very compelling. So thinking about her notion of what she calls abjection, where subjects get kind of excluded and put outside the mainstream. She connects that with with this painting, and she talks about it also in in a book on melancholia and depression. So I'm, I'm kind of I'm kind of interested in seeing how this non-religious figure reads this painting in connection with a Swiss Catholic and a Russian novelist, right. I mean, it's very interesting to see the different responses. Jenny Martin 26:08 My main project, though, is a new book project called, well tentatively called, "Recollecting Forwardly: A Poetics of Tradition." And in that book, I'm considering some of the under-studied poetic and philosophical forebears of the Catholic ressourcement movement. I've mentioned in the talk already Charles Peguy, the poet. And I'm also working on Henri Bergson, who's a philosopher and phenomenologist, who was 1859 to 1941. But a lot of these thinkers were reading Bergson. So I'm really thinking about, I mean, broadly speaking, using these figures, and themes and text to illuminate sort of meta questions about tradition, about time, how does time operate? How does repetition operate? How can we conserve something without making it, without killing its vitality? You know, how can we bring it into the present? Jenny Martin 27:10 One of the other things I'm interested in, in that book, is how the language of metaphor or poesis are... seem to me to be intimately connected with the way that we talk about Catholic tradition, right? I mean, we have a lot of metaphors for how it works. You know, Paul Claudel talks about it, as you know, like a man walking, you have to have one foot on the ground, and one foot lifted. So you're, you're moving, but you're also grounded, Balthazar talks about it as, as like the flame in the Olympics that's passed from one to another. And the thing about a flame is it's living, it's dynamic. It's also in certain ways, vulnerable, and fragile. And so so how is it? How, what did these metaphors do for us, when we're thinking about how tradition operates? If tradition is a category that's more than just the texts and dogmas that are written down. Right, if tradition also... I mean, in the most sort of metaphysical sense, most theological sense is like, Yves Congar talks about the original tradition, traditio, or handing on, is the father's handing on of God's self to the Son, right. I mean, so it's a Trinitarian grounding of tradition. So what does it mean for the way we think about Catholic tradition, that it's in this Trinitarian envelope of being as such, right? I mean, it's a very kind of interesting question to me. And to think about, you know, what's up for revision? What's not up for revision? How can we, as concrete participants in the Catholic Church, be part of this dynamic conversation and be part of this handing on that is a reflection of sort of Trinitarian life. So. So that's, that's the newest book project, and I'll be on leave in the spring so I can spend some time working on that. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 29:09 I'm glad we got you now, then! Jenny Martin 29:11 Yeah, me too. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 29:12 Well, Jenny Martin, thank you very much for taking time to be with us. Jenny Martin 29:15 It's my pleasure. Thank you very much. de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture 29:22 Thank you to Professor Jenny Martin. You will find links to her books and essays, and to the poetry of Charles Peguy in the show notes. Subscribe to Ethics and Culture Cast so that you can always get the latest episodes by visiting ethicscenter.nd.edu/podcast. We would love your feedback. Please review the show on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you get your podcasts, and email your suggestions to cecpodcast@nd.edu. Our theme music is I dunno by grapes, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution license. We'll see you next time on Ethics and Culture Cast. Until then, make good decisions Transcribed by https://otter.ai