Timestamps

• 00:00:15 Introductions
• 00:03:35 Why Community? (Brendan Steven)
• 00:07:55 Contemporary Challenges to Community (Brendan Steven)
• 00:14:20 Committing to our Church Communities (Brendan Steven)
• 00:20:25 Remarks on Presentation (Samantha Rossi)
• 00:22:00 Remarks on Presentation (Maria Lucas)
• 00:24:40 Personal and Cultural Reflections on Health & Strength of Community
• 00:40:00 ‘Thick’ vs. ‘Thin’ culture – Pros and Cons
• 00:51:10 the Impact of Migration and Cultural Diversity on Community Formation
• 00:55:30 Fostering Friendships today & the Contemporary Fear of Commitment
• 01:05:55 Starting Next Door – Encounter and Social Friendship in Fratelli Tutti
• 01:11:20 Trends in Happiness & Well-Being – Autonomy and Control vs Care and Community
• 01:24:40 Concluding Reflection & Closing Prayer

Event Description

November 24, 2022: Building & maintaining supportive relationships & networks. It is both easier and more difficult than ever before to build and sustain friendships and community in our time. A panel of committed, Catholic young adult professionals, including a young resident physician, a lawyer, an academic, a communications specialist, and a governmental policy analyst, look at ways of building supportive personal and professional communities in a splintered and aggressively secular world. We’ll assess the factors behind this status quo and discuss ways of staying better connected in an era of ‘disconnected connectivity’. Hosted by Peter Copeland, animator for Catholic Conscience.

Panelists

Brendan Steven – Executive Director Emeritus of Catholic Conscience, current Animator with Catholic Conscience, and Chief Writer for the United Jewish Appeal (UJA)

Maria Lucas – Lawyer, Co-Founder & Secretary of the Indigenous Catholic Research Fellowship (ICRF)

Samantha Rossi – Family Medicine Resident Doctor in Toronto

Books and Studies Referenced:

• American Life has become more Comfortable, but less Happy – Arthur Brooks
• Canadian Happiness Report, March 2022 – University of Toronto
• Life Satisfaction in Canada – Resources from the Happiness Economics Research Group at McGill University
• the Paradox of Declining Female Happiness – Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, October 2008
• ‘Leisure as the Basis of Culture’ – Josef Pieper: Michael Naughton teaching note, University of St Thomas
• Communitarian social philosophy – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Robert Putnam study on positive and negative social effects of diversity
• Francis Fukuyama on the politics of identity
• Dorothy Day’s ‘the Long Loneliness’
• the Synod on Synodality in the Catholic Church
• the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church
• Pope Francis’ encyclical on Social Friendship, Fratelli Tutti