Megan Sullivan

He said, professor, I sleep with my cell phone across my bedroom at night.

And sometimes it goes off in the middle of the night and I wake up and I think, oh my God, something's happened to my mom.

And I feel sick to my stomach until I can get to the phone and answer it and know that she's okay.

Feeling that way about everyone, that would be unbearable for me.

And I just remember thinking, like, one, oh, my gosh, Chris, I had no idea that you had these, you know, that you were capable of feeling, like, vulnerable in this way.

But also he's, I think, on to a very profound point about why a lot of us, you know, intellectually we realize that love is essential to the good life, but...

When it comes down to our day-to-day life, we are super cautious.

We realize that love makes us really vulnerable to the world and to other people in ways that we're oftentimes not comfortable with.

And when you love someone, they could seriously hurt you or something terrible could happen to them and then you'd be crushed.

Most virtues make you stronger.

Love is this virtue that weirdly its strength comes from making you weaker.

And we've got to be okay with that.

I think if there's a big mistake that we've made in our country in the last few decades, it's universities have been kind of afraid or tepid about organized religion.

I think if we really believe that people go to college to learn how to care for their souls, to learn why they're here,

Thank you so much for having me.

I think I spent, you know, it would have saved me a lot of money in therapy down the road if I had been able to have more open and searching conversations about what role religious faith plays in a good life with teachers that I trusted and cared about when I was young.

I think that's something we do really well at Notre Dame that I wish had been a bigger element of my education growing up, and I wish more young people had the experience of.

Catholicism, look, there are questions.

One of the things that I love to do for my students is I will take passages from the Christian Bible, the gospel, where I think Jesus is asking a philosophical question the same way Socrates asked his students philosophical questions, and

And just show my students that they are allowed to debate Jesus on this.