de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  0:00  
This is Episode 35 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 35 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 Ernest Morrell of the Center for Literacy Education and the Departments of English and Africana Studies. We talk about his journey to Notre Dame, his work forming future educators and the necessity of developing a critical media literacy. Let's sit down for this week's wonderful conversation.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  1:01  
Professor Ernest Morrell, thank you very much for joining us today.

Ernest Morrell  1:04  
Thank you. It's my pleasure.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  1:05  
So tell us a bit about yourself. Where are you from? Where'd you do your studies? What did you do before you came to Notre Dame?

Ernest Morrell  1:12  
Well, I was born and raised in Northern California. I was born in Oakland, but mostly raised in San Jose. So I spent my entire first 40 years in California. I did my undergraduate work at the University of California, Santa Barbara. And then it was a high school teacher for a while in the Bay Area. And during that time, I went back to graduate school. And I got my MA and my PhD from Berkeley. Okay. So when I finished, as I was finishing, it was the late 90s, we moved to Southern California, and I began working at UCLA while I was finishing my degree, and I got a job in an institute there. So I spent the most of the next decade at UCLA from being a graduate student to an Associate Professor 2000 in 2010, I was approached by the provost at Columbia, and asked if I wanted to direct an institute out there. So in 2010, I applied for that position. And so I spent seven years as the director of an institute and a faculty member at Columbia, prior to coming here, so most of the past 20 years, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles, and now South Bend.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  2:23  
Coast to coast, now to the center.

Ernest Morrell  2:24  
Yeah, so that's kind of how, how the first, you know, phases of my life went prior to come into Notre Dame.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  2:31  
Awesome. Well, why did you and your family want to come to Notre Dame? What brought you here?

Ernest Morrell  2:37  
Well, I mean, it's, you know, it's an interesting question, because it was, during my tenure at Columbia, where, you know, I passed the last barrier review, we call them, I became a full professor and an endowed professor. I was a director of an institute, I was also president of our professional organization. And I began doing a lot of thinking about, like, what is it that I want to do with the rest of my career? Because I was relatively young to have, you know, kind of lept over all those bars? And yeah, yeah, so I had a lot of career ahead of me. And I began thinking about, you know, from a couple ways, one from the research I wanted to do, but two just the quality of professorial life, and what it's like to be a Catholic at an anti-Catholic University, you know, we can call them irreligious, but that's just more innocuous than it really is it, you learn.

Ernest Morrell  3:29  
And I love my time in the Ivy League and the university of California system, but to be honest, they're, they're anti-Catholic spaces. And there's some outright hostility, but then there's just also a real tempering of of the energy that otherwise could evolve into really good work. There, you connect the principles of Catholic social teaching and your scholarship. Yeah. And that became more and more of a desire. Part of it was a real specific desire to do work in Catholic schools. But more so as a more broader intellectual thrust, that I should be able to bring my my Catholic identity into my scholarship more robustly, I've proven that I can do peer review, research and teach at a high level.

Ernest Morrell  4:14  
So that it was that desire that that ultimately led me to reach out to Fr. Tim Scully, who I saw as doing really innovative work, that looked at vulnerable populations, looked at literacy and education and looked at it through the lens of Catholic identity or Catholic schools. And we struck up a relationship, he invited me to do a talk. And then it became a visiting professor for a couple of years. And I thought, you know, this will be a nice partnership. Sure, at that point, you know, my family was settled in Long Island, and my kids were in school. And I figured that that that would be the the medium term plan. I didn't think I would be in South Bend full time, but I brought my family out for a summer where I was doing some research and teaching. And they just fell in love with the place. Wow, yeah, like, this is where we were meant to be. And I thought that they wouldn't be into it.

Ernest Morrell  5:09  
So there was the family part of it, where we could really condense our life into the city of South Bend, you know, focused around Notre Dame and my kids at that time were elementary and high school. So St. Joe Elementary School, St. Joe High School, but they just wanted to be a part of this vibrant campus. And so then I began some conversations with folks and they, they made me an offer and brought the family out. So you know, it's just been amazing to be at a place that's got, you know, kind of the Ivy League, UC academics, but there's also you know, you know, the Virgin on the Dome, the Grotto, and the Basilica, and you don't have that on Columbia's campus. So there's no difference in terms of the you know, the caliber of scholarship and the students. But there's a real difference in terms of our mission. 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  5:56  
That's awesome. And everybody's happy know that you're settled in here.

Ernest Morrell  6:01  
Everyone's Well, the oldest is here. Now. He's a sophomore. At the University of Notre Dame, at that point he was a high school student and I have high school and an elementary school students. They love it. 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  6:11  
That's awesome. Yeah. Well, now, so you are here as the Coyle Professor in Literacy Education, and the inaugural director of the Center for literacy education in the Institute for Educational initiatives, which is part of ACE. You also hold joint appointments in the Department of English and of Africana Studies. So tell us a bit about your students. Who are they? And in what do you teach? 

Ernest Morrell  6:36  
Oh, yeah, sure. So I, I've been teaching undergraduates, which I love, you know, then my work at UCLA and Columbia. I taught some undergraduates, but they kind of foist you on graduate students. Yeah. So the undergraduates have been really, really great to work with, I have a kind of three lines in terms of the courses. So one really looks at how you apply critical theories to thinking differently about education and working with with young people. So that's my Africana Studies class. It's also cross listed in Education, Schooling and Society minor. And so we start I mean, you're looking at, you know, kind of old philosophy and you end up looking at, like youth projects and communities and hip hop, you know, how to how to get kids excited about learning. It's interesting, because in part of that, will read Basil Moreau, we'll read Luigi Giussani, you know, so you get a sense of, you know, kind of the theological approach and the critical approach and the same time what young people are struggling with today, and how to connect to the issues that matter to them. Same time, I still have to learn. Yeah, so that class is called critical pedagogy In popular culture. And I get students from all different majors for that but it's an Africana Studies class.

Ernest Morrell  7:54  
In English, my focus has mostly been on the literatures of the African diaspora. So I teach a post-colonial literature and literary theory class, where, you know, we begin to think about post-colonial voices. And, you know, I frame it using the post-colonial theory, but I also frame by looking at the church, like we have a post-colonial church, and how do we account for the voices that have been muted in the past? You know, and thinking about allowing for this kind of multicultural, multilingual expression? And how do we hold on to the things that we we value from what has been called the colonial age, right? So it's not dismissing, you know, the modern age of the last 500 years, but it is putting it in a different context. Yeah. And, you know, we read some pretty dynamic authors who have a lot of ideas about that, but I tell them, it's not about, you know, hating who we are where or we've been, it's about getting better. Right. And, you know, I think that the church does that very well. Well, and, you know, the recent visit of the Pope to Africa, I think about, this is the future of the church. It's not just the future of the church, it's the future of the planet. And if we're going to be a place at Notre Dame, where the church does its thinking, if we're going to be a place to prepare young people for the world, we have to understand that in order to work profoundly in the world, you have to understand it. Yeah, one of the ways I understand it is through encountering literatures where people have described themselves in their own words, right. So we'll read Chinua Achebe and his experiences in Ghana, we'll read Gabriel Garcia Marquez. We read Salman Rushdie and India, Jamaica Kincaid in the Caribbean, you know, Toni Morrison, so just a lot of different voices from different perspectives.

Ernest Morrell  9:46  
I teach a class on Toni Morrison, as an author who I think is just just so so profoundly poignant, in so many different ways, you know, as a, as an American author, as an African American author as a woman author and as a Catholic author. And so we'll look at Toni Morrison's work across each of those, right? It's her Americanness, her Africanness, her womanness, and her Catholicness. So that's, that that's a fun class. Yeah. And then I have a couple others, Caribbean lit that, you know, down the pipeline, but I can only teach so many classes. The students are great, you know, they, they come they want to learn, they want to be challenged. They want to have a sense of their place in the world. They're very thoughtful. You know, the class discussions are really powerful. It's fun. Working with them as a group, it's working one on one advising theses, seeing where they take these ideas into the world.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  10:44  
Do you get to work with graduate students as well?

Ernest Morrell  10:47  
I have not worked so much with graduate students here. They're the, well, I shouldn't say that. I haven't worked with doctoral students. The masters students, I have had a chance to work with through the Alliance for Catholic Education. Yeah, people who are post the bachelor's degree but are going to be teachers in Catholic schools. And so I do a lot with him around the critical pedagogy. We call critical Catholic pedagogy, the Alliance for Catholic Education it's a two year program, where students will teach in the most high-need Catholic schools around the country to everywhere from, you know, like Biloxi, Mississippi, out to Santa Ana, California to New York and Philadelphia, Chicago. So that's a great program. And about half the students come from Notre Dame, half the students come from other places, and half of them are going to go into elementary education, half of them are going to go into secondary education, so I do get a chance to work with them. Pretty intensely. 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  11:38  
Awesome. Now, you've been a member of the de Nicola Center's Faculty Advisory Committee pretty much since arriving on campus two years ago. How did you - how did that happen? How did you get involved with with us? And then what has been your involvement with, with our students especially like with our Sorin Fellows?

Ernest Morrell  11:55  
Yeah, so the two years before coming Notre Dame full time, when I was a visiting professor, I got a chance to meet a lot of faculty and Carter Snead, your director, found me, you know, yeah. And we struck up a relationship. And he said, You know, I, I'd love for you to be part of this part of the center. So it was really the personal relationship with Carter. And over the past two years, really, it's been longer than that. There's been all sorts of wonderful ways from you chairing sessions at the conference to having Sorin Fellows in our home for dinner. We, we also hosted a reading group for Flannery O'Connor, with undergraduates. Last year, I was invited to be the Bread of Life keynote speaker. So I was able to, you know, speak with the students around that. And that's led into discussion, personal interactions with the students. And as we were talking off the air, there was a student at the Bread of Life dinner, who formed her senior thesis project, largely around response to that. So I'm the second advisor thesis. So he gets to kind of meet and talk about, you know, how some of these ideas that I mentioned in that talk are actually going to inform her senior project? Wow.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  13:09  
Well, let's talk a bit about that. Because that was last fall, you spoke, as you say, at our bread of life dinner, and your talk was entitled, Fighting for Life in the Digital Age: Media Literacy and the New Evangelization. You talked there, and you urged students to develop what you call the pro life media literacy, which doesn't simply ignore the pervasive anti Catholic anti life message that is presented in the popular media by taking a head in the sand approach, as he called it. But instead, you were advocating a combination of healthy skepticism, creativity, and then developing technical skills to make better media. I mean, you you said exactly, we don't like the media we have, develope the skills to create another. So you challenged us, and it was an awesome talk, and we'll link to it in the in the show notes. But you kind of gave 10 practical takeaways and challenges at the end. But maybe you can kind of unpack that a bit for us, and maybe even issue a challenge or two here, if you like,

Ernest Morrell  14:09  
First of all, that was a much better summation of the talk than I think the talk itself, I would have to copy your notes here. You know, I think that the challenge, in preparation for our conversation, I thought of, you know, four distinct categories. And this is the same way that I talk about media literacy with young people with teachers. So the first one is about how we consume, how can we be smarter consumers of the culture that does exist? And the way I think about it for the pro life media literacy is, what are the questions that we should be asking of the text, and by text I mean, everything from a film to the internet to apps, what are the questions that we should be asking of those text as we consume them? And one of the things that I am inspired to do is we should probably come up with just a list of these, like 10 questions you should ask of every TV show you watch. And one of the things about the media that is pretty clear in the scholarship is that it it changes, and in some ways, co-opts our perspective, even though we don't know that it's happening, we get our ideas from all sorts of places, but you know, it says he started walking like your father, you get a certain age is not like your dad ever saw you downs and says here, walk like me, but you just observe it and all of a sudden, like you start walking and talking like your parents, the media's the same way, in a nutritionist you are what you eat, and in some ways, in terms of a media, you know, engagement, you are what you uncritically consume. So how do we watch shows and play video games and listen to music, and engage in a popular culture that we know was pretty overtly anti Catholic without imbibing some of those values? So we want to ask specific questions, you know, and I, in the bread of life dinner, I was really talking to young people about can attitudes toward sex and sexuality that can lead to an anti life agenda, so to speak. And I don't encourage young people necessarily to turn completely away from consumption. But, but I do challenge and have a critical consumption, ask better questions, that'll lead into some of the other things I think that are important in terms of the challenge. But one thing that we can all do is ask real tough questions of what we consume. And like, how, how is this anti Catholic agenda playing out? Not just that it is, but in what ways? Like how is the church referred to one of the things that that I've noticed, in a lot of the popular culture that's targeted to young people is there are no consequences for actions. So we've had just in the past week, we can have like, six kids that have died from vaping. No one ever dies from vaping on a TV show. Right? It's just fun, right? No one ever turns up pregnant when they have unprotected sex on it. So asking these questions, how are these young people able to engage in these activities without having anything bad happene to them? Or when was the last time, you know, you listen to a song that promoted monogamous healthy relationships between married people? And they say, Well, okay, maybe it's not in there. So but but what is it? So asking better questions, I do think that there will be some impetus to walk away from some of this culture. But then at least into the second point, and I worry that there's a vacuous, there's an emptiness in terms of what we replace that with. Right? He can't take an 18 year old or even a 39 year old and take all of their goodies away from them here. Don't listen to this music, don't watch this. And like, well, what but what do I listen to? Or watch? So the second challenge is more about production. So what what are we producing? And, you know, we live in an age now where the technologies have become, you know, democratized Lee accessible, right? Yes, everyone's got democratic access. Almost everyone to technology is a production, whether it's your cell phone, or you've got more sophisticated equipment.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  18:37  
Anybody can podcast? 

Ernest Morrell  18:39  
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, you can use what's in your back pocket to send a message to millions. So we have to be more intentional in the media we produce, in the media we sanction. And a lot of that will be in response to the questions that we ask of the media that exist. We, we need to see more media to show moms and dads who love each other and talk to each other in kind ways in, love their kids, and love God. That's rare to see, you know, the way that marriage is just constructed as a battle of the sexes in a lot of popular culture. And kids are against their parents and husbands are against wives, wives, husbands, and they hate their bosses.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  19:23  
Dad's always a dummy.

Ernest Morrell  19:24  
Yeah. So yeah, it's like the dumb dad motif. It's so done. But it's out there. But we can produce otherwise, you know, to writing our own novels and plays, making our own films, writing our own songs, having our own mobile applications, that are just as engaging and exciting for young people and compelling in terms of its entertainment purposes, but they're more educative. Release all media educative, but they're educative in terms of our Catholic values. And I feel like that's where we are in the most deficit right now, is cultural producers. And that's why I really challenged, you can frown your nose at the movie, but like, go make one.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  20:11  
And make it compelling. Because they're there are lots of, you know, Christian family, faith friendly films. They're not always good. And it's like, this is the best we have to offer. That's just not compelling.

Ernest Morrell  20:24  
No, yeah. When I was a kid, I was in the hip hop. And my dad, you know, was there was Christian hip hop, he said, Why don't you listen to this, I was like dad, it's bad. So we do have to get better about that. And so I think, the young generation, they're, they're hip, you know, we've got just the ecclesial movements now, I mean, these young people are so fired up, and they're so talented, just, you know, we need to harness that energy, right, and be a filmmaker, we need to support that. So the third area, is really how we curate and distribute. And this is where everyone can play a role, you know, whether it's social media, or whether it's just getting up in front of your parish and making an announcement. When, when people do create, the media that we are inspired by? How do we share that? There's a talent to that, you know, used to just have a two part model, and it was consumption and production. Now, there is a science to the curation and distribution, whether it's my Twitter feed, you have a Twitter feed, I have a Twitter feed. You know, I've got 10,000 followers out there on Twitter. So that's a, that's a ministry. Right, right, to say, hey, check this out, you know, CCS, something going on, like, you know, check this out. that's a that's a distribution. And if we have to be more intentional about that, you know, St. John Paul the Second talked about evangelizing the culture, right, which I love is just his way of saying, like, get out there. Use the technologies that are available. You know, it means more than that, but it does partly mean, co-opting those existing technologies for for our own uses and our own purposes. And that's something that is a part of a media literacy. How do I do this? You know, how do I engage on social media? How? How can I do that just offline? With my colleagues, and my co workers, those who live in the residence hall with telling everybody, you know, I saw this great film. Yeah, yeah, getting that film, getting a showing at your parish, yeah. Or on campus, you know, bringing that film and maybe even bringing the filmmaker, this is a part of that literacy, the distribution. So we've got, you know, a few hundred dollars in our residence hall fund, let's, let's bring this filmmaker, let's show this film, let's show it in DPAC, and charge dollar admission and get a few hundred people in there. That's something I think we can all do more of. And the fourth one is just advocacy. You know, what does it mean for us to be advocates, and that term, sometimes has negative connotations. You know, activism can have negative connotations. But advocacy, we have to be advocates, for those that are doing it, and that we can all do, it's kind of related to the distribution, but it's different. How do we how do we advocate for?For those who, who have, who've done the work, right? So it's not he just has to do it, you just, you know, they need support, right? So when, you know, Sorin Fellow graduates and decides that she's going to be poor and write the Catholic novel, the 21st century, then she's gonna need advocates. She's gonna need those of us that are willing to go that extra mile. But those are the four right, asking better questions, what we consume, actually developing, as you say, some of the technical skills to be producers, being distributors and curators, and then fourth being advocates. 

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  24:04  
Awesome.Well, I can do those things.

Ernest Morrell  24:07  
Yeah. So, so that's the challenge. Yeah, use your cell phone for good.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  24:14  
Well, what are you working on now?

Ernest Morrell  24:16  
So um, you know, I, for medical reasons, I have had to step back a little bit from from the university, you know, daily grind, but it's allowed me to jump back into some manuscripts that I really care about. So one, really focuses on popular culture. And it's a book that I wrote in 2004. And I have reclaimed the copyright. And I had shopped around, I did a revision with several publishers, and ultimately decided, what I wanted to do is publish it through my center, the Center for Literacy Education, and give it out for free. So that book's gonna have a January 2020. And it's mostly targeted to educators and to my goal is to get it to 100,000 educators and I have kind of people pre ordering, at least given me their email address, where to send it about, but halfway there about 50,000 educators so far, just in the first couple of weeks. So going back to that manuscript and looking at, you know, your 32 year old writer self when you're 48 can be very humbling. Boy, I knew everything when I was 32

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  25:22  
50%, older, right?

Ernest Morrell  25:24  
It is scary. It is very scary that that person who wrote the book, I think technically is closer to my oldest son's age than my age. But but that's a lot of fun. Because I know it's going to be read it's the first version was was read, and to think about these ideas 15 years later. The funny thing is I expect it to be changing a lot. But I just I find myself agreeing with myself, maybe tempering my argument a little bit more, stepping off of the hobbyhorse. But but for the most part, like I still agree with this stuff, the I guess the products have changed, but the concepts haven't changed as much. But it be great to kind of shore that book up and to get it out there. Then I have a series of projects on the teaching of literature. You know, one of the things I think that, you know, we share a lot of affinities between, you know, my work over at IEI and the de Nicola Center. But this idea that powerful literature has a place in the education of our young. There are two questions that are, you know, kind of embedded in that. One is what is powerful literature? What does it mean to teach it. And so that's always been an area where I've been focused, that I think that authors have done half the work in giving us these really incredible texts. But how we teach them says a lot about our values, will say a lot about how our young people see the world. 

Ernest Morrell  26:50  
So these projects, you know, some of them are focused on specific literatures like how one would teach, you know, the literature of the African diaspora, how one would teach literature that connects to Catholic social values or literature of a particular time or place, asking those questions and then working with teachers and this, I have the fortune to be able to work with teachers across a wide range of age groups that they teach. So from elementary to secondary and tertiary education. So these projects would be, you know, engaging first grade teachers, but also college teachers. Yeah. And how do we make these texts come alive? For young people, understanding what's at stake I mean, I think a great author helps to illuminate the human condition,in ways that other kinds of texts and genres don't do, like reading a novel or a play or poem, are very different than some of the other technical genres. You know, it's always I think, a novel, you know, tells history in a different way. Yeah, historians, historiography is very important discipline, but it's just different. So I'm super excited about being able to work on the ground with teachers part of my role and the Center for Literacy Education, we're now home of the National Council of Teachers of English Squire Office for Research. So we're, we're hosting that office and basically, kind of responsible for the research trajectory, the entire professional organizations, quarter million teachers,

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  28:19  
No pressure.

Ernest Morrell  28:19  
Yeah. But we get to set the agenda, you know, help them think differently about the teaching of literature. And I believe that the teaching of literature has always been connected to value propositions. And I think that's important, you can't eliminate the value proposition from the educational enterprise. But we do have to ask the question of what what now do we value? So that's the, that's the second set of projects. And the third, or, you know, that the academic word I call it discourse studies, and that's really just kind of cultural studies looking at the media. And through asking specific questions about like, how are we forming a set of ideas or values about a particular theme or idea. So the two that I've really been focused on is, the African diaspora, our attitudes toward a group of people and a place are largely determined by the the media that we consume. So that's everything from film and television, to music, to news media, to political documents. 

Ernest Morrell  29:28  
The second major area study is really Catholicism in the media, and there are a few others on campus at McGrath and elsewhere that are really interested in this question, but how is the church and how is the faith constructed and deconstructed, in media discourse? My goal is to use this year of recovery, to really jump into that research, but to write some proposals, because I, I think that, we have to call out the anti Catholicism, in the, in the work of the media, you know, and I consider myself, you know, pro Catholic and anti racist. So, these two studies allow me to deal with each of these areas, you know, because we, we just have to hold the media to account, right, you know, that you can't continue to just uncritically distribute, whether it's, you know, around race around religion, these very negative messages, without people who are impacted by that speaking out. And I want to do it in an academic way. You know, Edwards Said, he was a colleague, he was at Columbia before I got there. But he did that for the Islamic world and said that, you know, the anti-Islamic sentiment in the media is unconscionable. But he did it an academic way. He just kind of laid out the text. And, you know, these are the, these are all the ways that this is an unacceptable discourse. And I was really inspired by that, you know, and I thought this, well listen, first of all, it's something we should be doing for the African diaspora, for these kids, whether you're Haiti or Trinidad, or Gary, Indiana, or South Bend, and you're just watching TV and no one's around, what are you learning about yourself? Or your kind of reading these messages through your cell phone? They're, they're teaching you things, they teaching you that you're ugly or unintelligent. Well, I think it's the same way for Catholicism. It might get to 10 Catholic schools, but if you're, you know, a devout Catholic in a public school, and what are you learning about your faith, implicitly, through the discourse? 

Ernest Morrell  32:02  
So I'm really excited about that work. I have some working hypotheses, as you can imagine. But uh, but I'm more excited about helping us just to be able to walk away from these discourses and to have a language to deconstruct them. You know, and you have to call anti-Catholicism what it is, you know, that it's acceptable. You know, it's acceptable to say things about Catholics in the church that you cannot say about other religions, right? When did that become okay? Right. So you can, if we look at a media story, right, and we look at the transcript. So that's the kind of want to get down that granular level, say it is become acceptable, you know, and 90% that's being generous. 90% of the stories cover the church are negative.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  32:55  
It's being very generous.

Ernest Morrell  32:57  
Yeah. They just talk about, you know, a particular crisis they don't talk about the good that the Church does. Yeah. So I want to use my academic platform, to kind of speak back against that.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  33:08  
Well then this is clearly related to what you were saying earlier too that first thing that we need to do is to ask, what is this saying, what is the media saying, and if it's implicit in everything that in more than 90% of the stories if that anti Catholicism is implicit, that's going to change the way I view my own faith, is essentially what you're saying too, it's kind of that Schrodinger's cat kind of thing. By reading the story, I'm, I'm less compelled by my own faith, and by being less compelled by my own faith,  I'm becoming anti-Catholic in a way too 

Ernest Morrell  33:43  
Exactly, which is a self hatred. Yeah. Well, that's, that's where the work really starts for me. Yeah, this kind of an ontology of self loathing. And so in the two studies, I talked about, you can, there's a relationship between media consumption and self loathing. Yeah. So you're ashamed. And we have a lot of folks that are, that feel as though they should be ashamed of their faith, because of this large media discourse. So, So yeah, my work is kind of challenging myself to to what I what I mentioned, like you said, to ask different questions and to produce, you know, it's a different kind of production. It's not like I'm making films or documentaries. Although there might be an interesting documentary, to work with some filmmakers on this. But the first phase is really to gather the artifacts into what I call an archive, so to create an archive of kind of media artifacts, and begin to systematically ask these questions.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  34:45  
Well, that sounds like you've got quite a project to begin. Well, thank you very much for coming to be with us and and what a what a delightful, what a delightful conversation.

Ernest Morrell  34:55  
Thank you, Ken. It's been my pleasure.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  35:02  
Thank you to Professor Ernest Morrell. Find a link to his excellent Bread of Life talk as well as contact information to receive a copy of his forthcoming book in the show notes.

de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture  35:15  
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