de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture

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Notre Dame to Present 2026 Evangelium Vitae Medal to Wm. David Solomon, Founding Director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture

The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame is proud to announce that the late Wm. David Solomon, associate professor of philosophy emeritus and founding director of the Center, has been named the recipient of the fifteenth annual Notre Dame Evangelium Vitae Medal, the nation’s most important award for heroes of the pro-life movement. The medal will be presented to Professor Solomon’s family at a special Mass and dinner on Friday, May 1, 2026, at the University of Notre Dame.

Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., president of the University of Notre Dame, reflected on the significance of Solomon’s enduring impact. “Professor Solomon left a lasting legacy at Our Lady’s University—one of sincere pursuit of the truth in friendship and dialogue, and an unflagging commitment to the inherent dignity of all human life,” said Father Dowd. “That legacy lives on through the efforts of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, which he founded, as it shares the richness of the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition through teaching, research, and dialogue. Notre Dame is deeply grateful for David's transformative leadership and vision, and it is a special joy to honor his legacy with the Evangelium Vitae Medal.”

Learn more about David Solomon and the Evangelium Vitae Medal here.

25th Annual Notre Dame Fall Conference

Advance registration is closed for the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture's 25th annual Fall Conference, "That Which I Also Received: Living Tradition" (November 13–15, 2025), which will consider how the phenomenon of living tradition—whether dogmatic, religious, literary, artistic, legal, interpretive, or otherwise, up to and including the customs, embodied practices, and habits of everyday life—serves to bridge past and future.

Keynote speakers Philippe Villeneuve, chief architect for historical monuments at Notre-Dame de Paris, Zena Hitz, author of the award-winning books Lost in Thought and A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, and the Most Rev. Daniel Flores, bishop of Brownsville, Texas, will be joined by more than one hundred other scholars, practitioners, and artists who will consider living tradition.

Learn more and view the conference schedule.

dCEC Mourns the Passing of Alasdair MacIntyre

The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture mourns the passing of Alasdair MacIntyre, permanent senior distinguished research fellow at the de Nicola Center and the Rev. John A. O’Brien senior research professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, on May 21, 2025. He was 96.

Widely regarded as the most important figure in modern virtue ethics, MacIntyre, a native of Glasgow, Scotland, was educated at Queen Mary College, London, and earned master’s degrees from the University of Manchester and the University of Oxford. He moved to the United States in the late 1960s and went on to teach at Brandeis University, Boston University, Wellesley College, Vanderbilt University, and Duke University, in addition to serving as a visiting faculty member at Princeton University and Yale University, and as a senior research fellow at London Metropolitan University’s Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics. He first joined the faculty of Notre Dame in 1985 and was granted emeritus status in 2010. Following his retirement from teaching, MacIntyre remained domiciled at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture as a permanent senior distinguished research fellow, where he continued to write and deliver an annual keynote address at the de Nicola Center’s Fall Conference through 2022.

Learn more about Professor MacIntyre.

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All of our work at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture is aimed at one goal: to share the richness of the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition through teaching, research, and dialogue, at the highest level and across a range of disciplines. In so doing, we enrich Notre Dame’s distinctive intellectual ecology—and we bring the university’s voice into the academic and public conversations concerning the most vital and complex matters of ethics, literature, art, music, social sciences, philosophy, theology, history, political theory, applied and theoretical science, public policy, and law. For more information on how to support the work of the de Nicola Center, visit our support page.

Ethics and Culture Cast

Our podcast features lively conversations with fellows, scholars, and friends of the de Nicola Center. Episodes released every other Thursday during the academic year. Suggestions and feedback welcome at cecpodcast@nd.edu.

Podcast Episode List