Megan Sullivan

I'm Roman Catholic.

But I think one of the ways that you care for the souls of young people, especially college-age students, is by helping them just open up what they've been thinking about and worried about for a really long time but maybe have not had the words to express.

And I think it's a huge gift if I can send a young person home for the summer or for Christmas break back to their family's

with the language and ideas to have a serious conversation with people they love about what they're

concerns and skepticism is.

And so I think, you know, if you, if you, if you want to play this philosophy game, as Plato says, you got to let the arguments blow you where they will.

Plato famously thinks that logic is like wind that kind of pushes you in a particular direction as you start to follow it.

And so you've got to help students realize, you know, at this point in their life, where, where's the wind blowing them?

Yeah, it's super interesting.

I told you, Manoush, we teach a unit on work.

And in that unit, we read Aristotle, but we also read Karl Marx.

And most of my students at Notre Dame have worked hard their whole life, but they've never actually had work.

They've never traded their time for a wage the way that a lot of labor and capitalism trades their time for a wage.

In fact—

Students will write these essays.

I laugh so hard, but they'll write essays about Karl Marx, who famously thought that wage labor under capitalism is totally alienating.

And my students will tell me how serving as the treasurer of the ultimate Frisbee club has caused them to realize how alienated they are from their species being.

And I was like, oh my gosh, Karl Marx is throwing up in hell right now.

If you think that you're part of labor and not the bourgeoisie, you've like really not understood what he's talking about.

But if I check back in with them, now I've had lots of students graduate from Notre Dame and graduate from the class that I still am friends with and keep in good touch with.