I Named This Baby After You: A Tribute to Alasdair MacIntyre
For several years in a row on May 26, the feast of St. Philip Neri, I have written an email to Alasdair MacIntyre with a brief greeting and a recent photo of the son we named after him. He usually replied within a few hours, and his use of exclamation marks always surprised and delighted me. A few times there were ten in a row—as if the key got stuck. My favorite thing about this is imagining that there may always have been a string of exclamation marks in his mind behind his tiny smiles and even full-on frowns. Those marks betrayed the childlike spirit that moved me most in the eighteen years of my acquaintance with him (using the past tense is really hurting).
When I was in college at the University of Pittsburgh, I attended the Newman Center run by Oratorian priests nearly every day of those four years. My Catholic faith and culture were formed by Neri’s charism, especially the playful part. There I met my friend Nic The, who told me to seek job opportunities at Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics Culture since I was marrying a Notre Dame theology graduate student and moving to South Bend.
From a couch in the Newman Center recreation room, I cold-called the Center’s director, David Solomon, and told him about the Catholic Studies major that I had designed with the help of one of the Oratorians, Fr. Michael Darcy. It was one of the best conversations I had ever had, but at that time, there was no opening at the Center. I was hired to teach theology at St. Joseph’s High School and began to take theology Master’s classes that summer at Notre Dame. From then on, I attended every CEC event that I possibly could, which meant getting to know the great work of Alasdair MacIntyre, hero and dear friend of David Solomon.
In the Fall of 2008, I found myself at a Catholic Culture Series lecture on Evelyn Waugh given by the late Jesuit, Fr. Paul Mankowski. As I was crying and laughing at how wonderful it was, David came up to me and asked, “Do you want to work for me?” I said, “Yes, but I might be pregnant!” He looked at me with big smiling eyes and said, “That’s OK!” I went home to talk to my husband and discern what to do. I loved being at St. Joe’s, but I was afraid of teaching pregnant since the way I did it was very kinetic and intense. I was also intimidated by the prospect of running CEC programs while hormonal and uncomfortable. I was terrified of a lot of things. But, channeling his other hero, St. John Paul II, David’s face had radiated, “Be not afraid.”
After lots of prayer, I decided that I would only take the CEC job if I were not pregnant and if I found a great person to replace me at St. Joe’s. Both boxes were checked. One day my husband and I were in the basilica parking lot when we spotted two friends who seemed distressed. We inquired and heard the wife say, “We’ve been praying a novena to St. Joseph for me to find work. Today’s the last day and nothing has come through.” I said, “What sort of thing are you looking for?” She said, “High school theology.” I was amazed and replied, “Would you like my job at St. Joseph’s High School?” She worked there for several fruitful years, I am so happy to say.
If you know NFP, you might know that traveling (over Christmas, in our case) can throw off your cycle. So when my signs were ambiguous, I phoned a friend. Following her advice led us unwittingly to make a baby a week before I started at the CEC and wittingly to make her his godmother.
I do not know if there is a better workplace to be pregnant with your first child than the CEC. David offered me the couch in his office if I ever needed a nap. Elizabeth Kirk had all of the best baby advice in the world. Dan McInerny kept things light with his P.G. Wodehouse computer background and ebullient personality. Tracy Westlake knew I was in labor before I did, telling me very bluntly as I was leaving the office on a Friday evening, “You’re going to have that baby tonight.”
In the office, my contact with Alasdair was seldom, though we shared a wall; but I saw him regularly in the classroom, having been assigned to make audio recordings of his final “God, Philosophy, and Politics” class before he retired. And so, every Monday and Wednesday of that spring semester, I sat in the back with then-graduate student Ray Haine and tried to eat nuts discreetly. I did not have time for lunch because, right before Alasdair’s class, I would attend David’s “Morality and Modernity,” which functioned as a celebration of and guide to MacIntyre’s After Virtue.
Rushing between those two classes in the snow with all the audio gear and my gestating son was sometimes tough. Tougher still was the odd experience that repeated itself at the end of each of Alasdair’s classes: he and I would be last to leave, but one could hardly say that we left together. He would erase the board and I would pack up the recording equipment; then, every time, he would turn the lights out while I was still struggling with my bags, and start off to our shared building, keeping ten steps ahead of me all the way back to our adjacent offices.
It was sad to ponder why this world-famous philosopher did not care if I lived or died (hormones). But one fine March day, he showed up to class wearing a yellow sweater and a new smile. He had been to Ireland over spring break and celebrated his eightieth birthday with hundreds of admirers, from Opus Dei numeraries to dyed-in-the-wool Marxists. I had never seen him so playful and happy. I had the thought, “Maybe he won’t turn the lights off on me today.”
The end of class arrived. I was rushing a bit, but not too much lest I throw off the moment: Alasdair went to hit the light switch, but instead gripped the frame of the door, lowered his head in a kind of death to self, and turned to look at me: “Are you going to Flanner Hall?” I eked out a “Yes,” and then he offered me his arm like Mr. Tumnus. Off we went, talking as we walked.
“Tell me about your family,” he began.
I gestured awkwardly at my belly while saying, “Well, this is my first child; and my husband and I are from small families. But we’re both very enthusiastic Catholics, and we hope to have a very large one.”
He said, “Ah, so your mother lives with you?”
Pause. “Uh—no she doesn’t.”
“Your mother-in-law, then?”
“No.”
“Your sister?”
“I don’t have a sister.”
“Your sister-in-law?”
“No, she lives . . .”
“Then who is going to help you raise this very large family?”
I was stunned but deeply intrigued. We stopped in the space between Flanner and Grace Halls and he said that he intended to go to the cafeteria. I said I was hungry too; and we then shared one of the most important meals of my life. He told me about Seamus Heaney’s reflections on aunts and how they are the bedrock of culture. Your mother’s or your father’s sister used to help raise you, right in the house or at least in the village. He told stories about the fishing villages he had known and the importance of fostering community outside of the immediate family. It was an unsettling but important moment of growth—toward a less rigid, more attuned, and therefore more responsive approach to my future children.
The best bit of that conversation was when I told him about my time at the Pittsburgh Oratory and how I had gone to Italy with them to see the sites from St. Philip Neri’s life. Alasdair took his fork, slammed it down on the table, and loudly proclaimed, with spaces between the words for emphasis, “I—love—Philip—Neri.” My heart burst into flame. He had been to all those same places and felt the same deep kinship. It was wonderful to share it together.
As the weeks passed, the navy-and-black-only wardrobe returned and we did not have another heart-to-heart like that one, but I did write in my notebook while he was lecturing, “I will name a baby after this man.” I did not do it with that baby, but I did bring him to fourteen academic events, including the Medical Ethics conference in Rome. I remember bumping into Alasdair at the olive bar at Martin’s Supermarket, where I was returned to the familiar experience of being ignored by him, this time while he deeply engaged my baby. I did not mind.
After a year of passing our firstborn like a baton, my husband and I had a serious talk about whether or not I would continue working. It had become clear that, for his PhD’s sake, he would have to hand over many of the parenting responsibilities that he had assumed while I continued the job that I loved so much. I knew that I could still attend CEC events—tailgates, the Fall Conference, guest lectures—I just would not be running them anymore. So, I became a dedicated groupie instead.
I made sure to attend Alasdair’s talks whenever they happened. A few of them profoundly redirected my life. During one keynote address in the old McKenna Hall I wrote down, “I will dedicate myself to teaching drama.” Now I direct several plays per year at local schools. During another I tried to retain his words at the Fall Conference on friendship, and they have guided me into better, more honest relationships. The most fulfilling encounter of all was when I brought to his talk my third son, then three months old, flagged down photographer Peter Ringenberg, and approached the philosopher with the words, “I named this baby after you.” The elder Alasdair smiled and quipped, “Oh, I’m sorry,” as he looked straight at baby Alasdair’s eyes and held his little hand. What a moment!
When I wrote this, on the day of the feast of St. Philip Neri, I was writing to you, dear reader, and not to Alasdair. And today, I am a drama teacher and an honorary “aunt” to dozens of college girls and to my godchildren, and an actual aunt to my nieces and nephews. I know how to give tough love when necessary, but with many exclamation marks. I am so glad that Alasdair MacIntyre gets to be with God, with David, with St. Philip, and with St. Benedict. He has been another—doubtless very different—cultural and spiritual father to me.