The Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Common Good hosted its inaugural Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton Culture and the Public Good Symposium on April 10. Named for two of the foremost socially engaged Catholic thinkers of the 20th century, the signature annual event culminated a year of themed research support at the institute.
This year's speakers were Vauhini Vara, journalist and author of The Immortal King Rao and Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age ; Shankar Vedantam, author and host of the Hidden Brain podcast; Jenny Odell, artist and author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time; and Rainn Wilson, award-winning actor, comedian, and New York Times bestselling author.
Notre Dame Magazine editor Jason Kelly recapped what these famous faces and voices had to say about our strained attention spans, how tech companies seek to monetize our time, and what we can do to cultivate deeper, more engaged life experiences.
Despite the shelving decisions of many bookstores, author Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is not a self-help book, a genre that promises readers nuggets of influencer insight to nourish their optimization quests. Instead, the book critiques the notion that even leisure should be curated in the service of economic efficiency.
“I have a whole section where I insist that the point of reading my book is not to make you feel refreshed enough to be more productive at work on Monday,” Odell said. “Rather, it’s to question our notions of productivity overall. What is considered productive labor and what is not, and why? It’s an important distinction to make, I write, when the phrase self-care is appropriated for commercial ends and risks becoming cliche.”
Odell was one of four featured speakers at the Downes Ballroom on campus April 10 for the inaugural Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton Culture and the Common Good Symposium. The event focused on attention (pun intended), the annual research theme for the Franco Family Institute for Liberal Arts and the Public Good.
Panelists were asked, “How should we hold attention?”
That has become an especially pressing question as we reckon with the costs of how we pay attention today. Nobody needs to be reminded that distractions are omnipresent. As we speak, white noise courses through my headphones to keep my mind on writing this rather than whatever my face-down phone has to entice me. (Nothing. I checked.)
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Originally published by at al.nd.edu on April 23, 2026.