Episode Transcript

From the University of Notre Dame, this is With a Side of Knowledge. I’m your host, Ted Fox.

I’ve been saying that for 4+ seasons and more than 65 episodes now, and that’s not counting bonus episodes and some other fun stuff we’ve gotten to do. And because we’ve spent all that time together, I wanted to let you know some things are changing.

I’m moving to a new position at Notre Dame, and while I initially thought it might make sense to try and move the show with me, I’ve come to realize that wouldn’t quite work.

Thank you to Cidni Sanders, the University’s executive director of academic communications, for allowing me to think through this and being open to even considering it in the first place. Cidni and I haven’t worked together long, but she has been beyond generous with me.

The good news, at least if you’ve enjoyed listening over the years, is that the show isn’t going away. All the episodes we’ve released will stay in our feed and on our website at withasideofpod.nd.edu while my colleagues in the Office of the Provost consider what the next chapter of this endeavor might look like.

So, as we bring this era of With a Side of Knowledge to a close, I’d be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge a few people.

I want to thank Pat Gibbons, who gave me the freedom and support to create this podcast, as well as all my friends in the provost’s office who have listened to me talk about it—and believe me, it’s been ad nauseum—these last few years.

I want to thank all of our guests, who have provided us with so many amazing conversations and thoughtful insights along with a healthy dose of laughter.

And I especially want to thank all of you, the listeners, for hitting play. None of us has enough time in our days, and the fact that you’ve chosen to spend some of it here is something that I will always be grateful for.

Making this podcast really has been a privilege—it’s one of my favorite things I’ve done in over 17 years of working at this University—so I hope you’ll stick around and see what comes next.

Thanks again.

We started out as the show that invited scholars, makers, and professionals to brunch for informal conversations about their work—but last season, we needed to record remotely. This year we’re excited to be able to bring back in-person interviews while still taking advantage of the flexibility afforded by our remote setup.

Patrick Parr is the author of two books of nonfiction, both with Chicago Review Press. His first, The Seminarian: Martin Luther King Jr. Comes of Age, was published in 2018 and described by The Wall Street Journal as “original, much-needed and even stirring.”

Patrick joined host Ted Fox via Zoom to talk about book No. 2, which was released earlier this year. Titled One Week in America: The 1968 Notre Dame Literary Festival and a Changing Nation, its appeal to us, a podcast produced at the university, was immediate. But Patrick doesn’t just chronicle what took place on the Notre Dame campus from Sunday, March 31, through Saturday, April 6, 1968, a story that features an almost unimaginably star-studded lineup of literary and political figures—brought to campus by a group of students, no less—and that included a red-carpet movie premiere in the most unlikely of venues.

No, the book doesn’t stop there because the festival didn’t exist in a vacuum, and during this particular week in America, that truth became evident in ways prominent and painful.

Patrick’s own story of how he came to research the 1968 Notre Dame Literary Festival starts where a lot of good writing does: with a question that comes to you in the middle of the night.

LINKS

• Patrick’s Book: One Week in America: The 1968 Notre Dame Literary Festival and a Changing Nation
• Notre Dame Magazine Story:  Echoes: Sophomore Literary Festival
• Episode Transcript

We started out as the show that invited scholars, makers, and professionals to brunch for informal conversations about their work—but last season, we needed to record remotely. This year we’re excited to be able to bring back in-person interviews while still taking advantage of the flexibility afforded by our remote setup.

Elizabeth Shakman Hurd is a professor of political science and religious studies and the Crown Chair in Middle East Studies at Northwestern University, where she co-directs the Global Religion and Politics Research Group. The author or co-editor of six books, she specializes in religion in U.S. foreign and immigration policy, the global politics of secularism and religious freedom, religion and the American border, and relations between the U.S., Europe, Turkey, and Iran.

Elizabeth visited campus as part of a series of policy discussions marking the 20th anniversary of September 11th presented by Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs and Ansari Institute for Global Engagement With Religion. Her keynote, the second event in the three-part series, focused on what she calls the “religion-heavy” foreign policy of the United States’ War on Terror.

With a patio outside Notre Dame’s Morris Inn as our backdrop, Elizabeth talked with us about some of the issues she addressed in her presentation at the Keough School and why she believes the government should rethink the emphasis it places on religion when acting on the world stage. Her recommendations there draw from testimony she gave to the House Foreign Affairs Committee earlier this year and, it’s worth noting, do not suggest that religion is unimportant, either.

But before we got to where we are now, we started with a little bit of history.

LINKS

• Elizabeth’s New Book: Theologies of American Exceptionalism
• Episode Transcript