The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture welcomed visiting scholar Lauren Spohn, a Rhodes Scholar and doctoral candidate in philosophical theology at Oriel College, Oxford, to the University of Notre Dame during the spring 2025 semester. Spohn's scholarship focuses on the thought of St. John Henry Newman, especially exploring the relationship between faith and reason through the philosophical concept of analogy.

Spohn's academic career began at Harvard, where she earned a B.A. in English Literature before moving to Oxford to gain an M.Phil. in Intellectual History. "I didn't plan on doing a D.Phil., but you keep chasing the questions!,” she says. “When I was an undergrad, I was really perturbed by the disenchantment of the world. I read C.S. Lewis and Tolkien growing up—why is it not possible to be a hero in the way that Lucy or Frodo are? I thought that literature would help me answer this question, but I realized that one can't really talk about disenchantment without trying to understand God's relationship with the world.” Spohn’s quest to understand this relationship ultimately contributed to her conversion to Catholicism in 2021. Her doctoral dissertation investigates Newman's "Grammar of Assent," examining how analogy helps us understand "how a person who's ultimately made in the image of the Trinity comes to personal knowledge of a Trinitarian God."

During her time with the de Nicola Center, Spohn helped organize and lead Sorin Fellows programming related to the Center's "Beauty Will Save the World" initiative. She hosted a weekly lunchtime reading group for the de Nicola Center’s undergraduate and graduate Sorin Fellows, making their way through St. John Henry Newman’s Oxford University sermons. "Newman talks a lot about moving from the notional, the abstract, the propositions, to the real, the concrete, the person. These Newman groups have been like moving from the notional, my dissertation, to the fully-realized concrete personal interaction.”

Spohn also assisted Justin Petrisek, the de Nicola Center's research and publications program manager, in curating a Lenten film series for the Sorin Fellows and the broader campus community. Selected films—Of Gods and Men, Arrival, and Tree of Life—prompted group discussions about a Catholic approach to film, posing the question in her words, "What does it mean to have a sacramental vision of reality, to look at it and always see it—not through it, but see it against the background that this is all a gift from God, and every bit of this is part of His personal providence working out of my life to fashion me into his friend at the end of the day? Film as a medium has a lot of power to help us grow in that way of seeing the world."

Spohn's residence at Notre Dame ended at the beginning of April. "It has been wonderful to come here to Notre Dame because it combines the energy and enthusiasm of a place like Harvard with the big emphasis on faith and the big questions of a place like Oxford." She says that she found the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture to be a good fit with her own interests, both academic and personal. “The dCEC's mission is to share the richness of the Catholic moral and intellectual tradition with the world. I see this as the first and final aim of my research and creative work: to help people fall in love with the truth. The more people you share that truth with, the more you realize just how rich and full and ever-more beautiful the truth is. It has been a great gift to spend this semester with people who've committed their lives to joining that epic upward spiral.”