Send a Volley Cheer on High
The Fighting Irish are on a mission; plus, the best of 2024 (including Challenger and Challengers)
Happy 2025! Before we begin, let’s keep those in my ancestral homeland affected by the Palisades, Eaton, Hurst, Lidia and Kenneth fires, particularly those putting their lives on the line to bring them under control, in our thoughts and prayers. Now, we’re back to Family Matters.
Shake Down the Thunder: The Triumph of Marcus Freeman and the Irish
The Year That Was: The Best of 2024
Empire State of Mind: New York pushes the envelope on parental policies
It’s Me, Hi: U.S. News, Newsweek, Public Discourse
Quick Slants
Shake Down the Thunder
Marcus Freeman turns 39 today, and for his birthday he got Notre Dame fans a return to glory. A historic first home playoff game that took care of Indiana, an all-cylinders takedown of Georgia in New Orleans, and last night’s gritty, gutsy, come-from-behind Orange Bowl victory against Penn State has put the Fighting Irish on the verge of their first national championship since 1988.
They don’t pay me for my football analysis,1 but Freeman’s impact on Notre Dame football — making the Irish “likable” again, in the words of a national columnist, while Mary Katherine Ham is looking for legal damages — goes beyond the gridiron. And his successful three years at the helm can tell us a little bit about how to think institutionally in an individualistic age.
Freeman isn’t a Notre Dame grad, but if you had to ask the Congregation of Holy Cross to design a more compelling ambassador for their university in a lab, they might struggle. Upon arriving to South Bend, Freeman converted to Catholicism. He and his wife, Joanna, have six kids, and have become known for bringing his family to the practice facility and letting them interact with the players and staff. He told the National Catholic Register’s Jonathan Liedl that the move was partly driven by logistics, but also to set an example:
“The other part of that is making sure that our players see us outside of just being coaches. I want them to see us as fathers and as husbands, because those lessons that they learn from watching us will last forever. They’ll last an eternity, in terms of [helping them] view what being a father and a husband is like.”
His predecessor, Brian Kelly, had altered a long-standing tradition at Notre Dame, so that players would attend Mass as a team the night before a game, rather than at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart immediately prior to walking over to the stadium to dress for kickoff. One of Freeman’s first moves was to resurrect that tradition, inspired by his memory of a recruiting trip as a high school player. As he told Liedl:
“What better time is there to go have Mass? What better time to be able to really be on the edge of your seat to get every word that comes out of the priest’s mouth and to be as close to God as you can? And if you’re any type of competitor, when the foot hits the ball, you’re going to be ready to roll. I don’t want [my players] to be ready three hours before the game; I want them to be ready at game time. And that’s going to be part of the message: Let’s be calm today before the storm.”
What attracted Freeman was Notre Dame’s distinctiveness. And for a university often caught betwixt its elite academic aspirations and its identity as the nation’s leading Catholic university, his stamp on the program offers a reminder and a model. Leaning into what makes Notre Dame unique can provide it an identity — like quarterback Riley Leonard crediting the team’s weekly Bible study for helping it build a unified front.
When the university is at its best, it’s living out its mission as a Catholic university at the top of its game — producing peer-reviewed, policy-influencing academic research into poverty at the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities, or shaping the public conversation around bioethics at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.
The constant temptation facing Notre Dame’s leadership — including my former hallmate, newly-installed Fr. Robert Dowd, C.S.C. — is drifting along with the influence of their “aspirational peers,” becoming interchangeable with Duke or Vanderbilt with the trappings of a vestigial theology requirement and a crucifix in every classroom. Chasing secular prestige at the cost of its Catholic identity pits two halves of the university’s identity against itself. To put it in football terms, losing Notre Dame’s institutional identity would be like its independent football team joining a conference. What Freeman is showing is that with the right leadership, an institution can choose excellence and fidelity to mission without having to sacrifice either. He has eschewed talk of personal identity and brand to stress a message of team-first sacrifice.
It wasn’t roses from the start — Freeman was the first coach in Notre Dame history to lose his first three games, giving cause for some to wonder if the school had made a mistake in hiring a well-liked but inexperienced first time head coach at age 36. Earlier this year, the Fighting Irish — 28 point favorites — lost to the Northern Illinois Huskies of the Mid-American Conference, which threatened to derail their season. Yet Freeman’s squad turned it around, marching onward to victory though the odds great or small, and winning hearts along the way.
After being down 10-3 halfway the Orange Bowl, Leonard told ESPN that the team received a halftime pep talk that saved their season: “History is written by the conquerers,” he recalled Freeman telling them, “and we’re holding the pen.” When the story of Notre Dame football gets written, its leader might have some lessons for the broader university as well.
The Year That Was
2024 produced a true bumper crop of books right up my — and, if you’re reading this newsletter, your — alley: Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, Brad Wilcox’s Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, Catherine Pakaluk’s Hannah's Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, and Conn Carroll’s Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy.
But beyond those works, I’m happy to present a personal “best of” list for 2024 as you build out your to-read and to-watch lists for 2025:
10.) Out of expediency, here are links to the aforementioned Carney, Wilcox, Pakaluk, and Carroll reviews — too hard to disentangle the Year of Family Policy Books!
9.) Untold: Hope Solo vs. U.S. Soccer: The "Untold" series is essentially Netflix's ripoff of ESPN's 30 for 30 series, and their sympathetic treatment of Hope Solo’s rise and fall is among the best in the series (though its peak is probably the installment on the story you didn’t know about the mystery girlfriend of former Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te'o.)
8.) ‘The Great American Bar Scene,’ Zach Bryan / ‘The Tortured Poets Department,’ Taylor Swift: Below-par Swift is still better than most, as evidenced by her latest album’s 15 weeks spent atop the charts; TTPD could have used a tighter edit but boasts a few bangers and a lot of heartache that, one hopes, will hopefully be soon put behind her with wedding bells. Bryan’s melancholic twang nears greatness in spots with some poetic turns of phrase and high-profile guest stars, and is destined to provide the soundtrack to lonely nights under open skies.
7.) Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up, : As I summarized for Public Discourse, this book reveals how “therapeutic” hasn’t just triumphed; it colonized the classroom in an effort to remake K–12 education into a process of healing “trauma” and prioritizing “mental health.”
6.) The Wild Robot: A beautifully made children’s movie is rare enough, but one that sends a touching message of allowing unexpected blessings to knock you off your career track and what it takes to love self-sacrificially and eventually let go is even more of a rare bird (or, goose.)
5.) When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, : The sign of a worthwhile book, beyond just a compilation of essays, is how its signature gimmick sticks in your brain, and once Ganz introduces you to the parallels between the culture of the early ‘90s and aspects of the MAGA movement, it becomes hard to unsee it.
4.) Challengers: There’s nothing that gives me more sympathy for Boomers than popular culture aging into early 2000s nostalgia, and watching an absolutely electric Zendaya and her two love interests navigate the junior tennis circuit in a pre-flip phone era makes up for some dubious tennis scorekeeping and unsympathetic characters. The tennis sequences, with dubstep beats and some balls-eye camera work, are right on the line between kooky and just plain fun. In tennis, love means nothing, and this movie might mean nothing, which makes it a perfect match.
3.) Dune: Part Two: If Dune: Part One is slightly better overall (nothing compares to the Sardaukar attack sequence towards the end), the sequel brings it home — no easy task. Spectacular cast, production and sound design meets epic scope, imagination, and even some bits of humor, and the result is the cinematic event of the year.
2.) Say Nothing (FX/Hulu): - Everyone says Shōgun was the best thing on TV last year, which might be true; I haven’t watched it yet. But “Say Nothing,” a largely faithful remake of the reporting that Patrick Radden Keefe put into his book of the same name, puts you in Belfast in the midst of The Troubles, with some stellar casting. The drama might feel a little over-embellished in spots, but the tension is real, the stories real, and the entire series worth your time.
1.) Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space, Adam Higginbotham: As I wrote for Public Discourse, Challenger pairs exquisitely with Higginbotham’s prior exploration into Chernobyl, and is another opportunity to showcase his ability to report out complex scientific concepts in a way that reads like a thriller. As NASA matured out of its Apollo era into an attempt to make space travel prosaic and affordable, it was able to dodge disaster until confidence gave way to recklessness. An outstanding retelling of America’s Icarus moment.
Empire State of Mind
New York has been producing a lot of family policy ideas lately, which deserves their own mini-section. It recently became the first state to require employers to provide 20 hours of paid prenatal leave, including OB check-ups and prenatal care, fertility treatments, abortions, and other pregnancy-related conditions.
Gov. Kathy Hochul is pushing for the creation of a $110 million fund to help construct new child care facilities; boosting the supply of facilities could help new entrants into the market and expand supply, while Hochul sees it as a stepping-stone to a universal child care program at the state level. She also recently proposed a meaningful expansion of the state’s child tax credit, which would increase the size of the credit from its current $330 per child level to up to $1,000 for young children and $500 per school-age child. It would also expand eligibility for the credit upwards, allowing more middle-class families to benefit from the tax credit and reducing work disincentives. And last but not least, Assemblymember Zohran K. Mamdani, currently running to replace Eric Adams as New York City mayor, proposed giving every new parent in New York a “Baby Basket,” which would include basic essential for postpartum moms and their babies.
New York, like many blue states, has taken the opportunity post-Dobbs to make abortion as accessible as possible; it passed a reproductive rights package in the aftermath of Dobbs, recently amended their state constitution to broaden civil rights law to include “sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive healthcare and autonomy,” provided over $15 million in grants to abortion providers to expand access, and Gov. Hochul has sought to expand funding for abortion access services, abortion clinic security, and additional Medicaid reimbursement for surgical abortion. And the prenatal leave mandate runs the risk of being too heavy-handed (and thereby raising the risk of sub rasa pregnancy discrimination) but also treats abortion as equivalent to other types of prenatal care, something conservatives will rightly object to.
But some conservatives like to take the line that progressives are willing to pull out the stops to fund abortion but won’t provide commensurate support if mom decides to keep the baby. In their own imperfect way, New York lawmakers are showing that’s not true — and thus throwing down the gauntlet for red states interested in demonstrating their commitment to moms and babies. No Republican governor should copy-paste N.Y.’s recent laws; but the problems they’re intended to address should inspire some creative policymaking outside the Empire State.
It’s Me, Hi
I was pleased to be included in Public Discourse’s round-up of their “best of 2024”.
Newsweek asked me and others to pick out the moment that defined 2024, which was obviously the assassination attempt in Butler, Penn. But I had to offer a more optimistic image of classic Americana to capture the mood of the country on top of it.
For U.S. News & World Report, I noted that the #resistance to Trump is much more muted this time around, and why that’s a healthy development for our political culture:
“Trump’s popular vote win, the exhaustion of the left and an America that seems ready for a return to politics as usual suggest we won’t see the same kind of confrontational, culture-consuming public acts of resistance this time around.”
Quick Slants
My EPPC colleague Andrew T. Walker offers some thoughts on where social conservatives could advance their priorities in a second Trump administration, including protectin religious liberty, defunding Planned Parenthood, opposing gender transition surgery for minors, and expanding the child tax credit. (National Review)
My EPPC colleague Erika Bachiochi has penned a lengthy, in-depth essay exploring the relationship between feminism and conservatism, published at the Heritage Foundation
Was the 2021 monthly Child Tax Credit payments associated with additional alcohol, cannabis, drugs, or tobacco? A new study from researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health says no
"For many rural women, finding maternity care eclipses concerns about abortion access," reports ABC News
Kendra Hurley compiles three notable papers on child care from 2024 (The 74)
Alan Hawkins would like to see more state efforts on relationship education and marriage strengthening programs (Family Studies)
Connie Marshner offers her retrospective on the presidency of Jimmy Carter, including how his actions helped lead to the growth of the Religious Right (Daily Signal)
Maggie Clark reports on states like Oregon, Nebraska, and Colorado starting to use some of the tools normally used for economic development to boost supply in child care (Stateline)
In the latest issue of First Things, my EPPC colleagues and argue, correctly, that policymakers must do more to give parents tools to protect their kids online.
Congrats to of Capita, who has launched his new Substack, The Family Frontier! Subscribe here:
Comments and criticism both welcome, albeit not quite equally; send me a postcard, drop me a line, and then sign up for more content and analysis from EPPC scholars.
But if they did, I’d spend a paragraph on Drew Allar’s disastrous decision to throw late over the middle with less than a minute left, or the breath of divine intervention that kept Mitch Jeter’s kick from sailing right to help the Irish move on.
I do have some of these links saved to return to... but ALSO, The Great American Bar Scene was maybe one of my year's top highlights, as well. Put it straight in my veins. (I know he's famous but my husband and I only found out about him when he stumbled across his multi-hour interview with Joe Rogan. lol)