Category: News

Named for the late Rev. Don McNeill, C.S.C.—the founding director of the Institute for Social Concerns—the program is designed as an interruption to a student’s undergraduate trajectory, making them briefly but acutely aware of the challenges faced by unhoused people.

While one cohort navigated the Sonoran Desert, other Proximities students pursued parallel examinations of structures of justice and injustice across the country: examining healthcare access in Minneapolis, analyzing environmental health and industrial policy in New Orleans, and exploring restorative justice and the use of arts to promote dignity in Philadelphia. Grounded in the conviction that understanding injustice requires getting proximate to those most affected by it, the seminars bridge interdisciplinary inquiry with immersive witness.

Through the Enacting Catholic Social Tradition series, the tradition is being brought to bear on issues of technology design, environmental degradation, the contemporary housing crises, financial decision making, and community organizing. A joint publishing project between the Institute for Social Concerns and Liturgical Press, the series has tackled these issues with volumes that are accessible to practitioners while also extending scholarship. 

The Institute for Social Concerns leverages research to respond to the complex demands of justice and to serve the common good. This series, ReSearching for the Common Good, highlights some of the scholars in our community.

For Ryan Juskus, assistant professor of the practice at the Institute for Social Concerns, the true cost of our global energy systems is best seen not in atmospheric charts but in the mines, extraction sites, and waste pits of marginalized areas like Appalachia or the Amazon.

By creating these spaces of encounter, the Institute for Social Concerns bridges the gap between campus and community, transforming theological principles into a shared power for local change.

The Institute for Social Concerns leverages research to respond to the complex demands of justice and to serve the common good. This series, ReSearching for the Common Good, highlights some of the scholars in our community.

Ayana Mathis described her newfound understanding of hope as a vision of the imaginative possibilities of the now that does not promise to remove all doubts, fears, and vulnerabilities. Instead, these are part of “the web of uncertainties that make real hope possible.” In place of optimism about a certain future, “we are better served,” Mathis stated, “by the precarities of the now.”

Out of their overlapping commitments, Suzanne Shanahan, the Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director of the Institute for Social Concerns, joined forces with Andy
Hoffman to bring the vision of management as a calling to life as a faculty workshop hosted at Notre Dame.

The McNeill Winter Plunge, a one-credit course offered by the Institute for Social Concerns, serves as a purposeful bridge between the classroom and the world’s most pressing needs. Inspired by the legacy of the institute’s founder, Rev. Don McNeill, CSC, the course is a carefully designed curriculum of proximity, accompaniment, and inspiration.