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Liz Kay
Hello and welcome to the Providence College podcast. I'm your host, Liz Kaye. And I'm joined by producer Chris Judge of the Castle 2005 here in the Providence College podcast. We bring you interesting stories from the Friar Family. This week, we're speaking with Liz Duffy, a member of the Class of 2023. Duffy was a recipient of the Father Smith Fellowship for Service and Study Abroad, thanks to the fellowship.

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Liz Kay
The Rhode Island native spent the summer in Geneva, Switzerland. While there, she worked with Dominicans for justice and peace drafting statements to be presented to the United Nations Human Rights Council. It was the perfect assignment for Duffy, who's majoring in both humanities and theology. Liz, thanks for joining us today.

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Liz Duffy
Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

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Liz Kay
Can you give us a little background about the Father Smith Fellowship?

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Liz Duffy
Yeah, absolutely. So it's a program designed for students to basically create any independent proposal for study or service abroad anywhere in the world, as long as there are Dominicans there and that are working. And so basically the student designs their own program, and they're responsible for communicating with the location and setting things up, and then they can apply it after they've done that for the actual fellowship, which covers all the costs that are necessary for the travel and the study.

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Liz Duffy
And then, you know, you're helped by staff and chemist, ministry and mission and ministry to basically find a place to live. Find maybe other students who might be going to your location. And typically in years past, there have been between like eight and ten people who are awarded fellowships. But this year it was just two, two of us this past summer.

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Liz Duffy
So, yeah.

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Liz Kay
And how did you get familiar with Dominicans for Justice and Peace?

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Liz Duffy
I actually Father Peter Martyr Young was, who was chaplain here for a long time. He put me in contact with the general promoter of the delegation for the Dominican Order. And so I had an interview with him over the summer and just learned a little bit more about it. And then Pam Tremblay, who works in mission of ministry now, also knew about it, and she thought it would be perfect for me.

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Liz Duffy
And so just conversation with them. So tell us a little bit about.

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Liz Kay
Your placement there.

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Liz Duffy
Yeah. So they have three offices, Nairobi, Vienna and Geneva. But Geneva is their is their biggest office and primarily because that's the location of one of the U.N. offices in Geneva. And so basically, I was in my title, was an intern in the office, but I was responsible for a few different things on the day to day. But a big part of my experience was the researching and kind of just learning about the processes at the U.N. and also just about what it means to be an NGO, because it's obviously a different experience than like a diplomat.

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Liz Duffy
So, yeah, so I would I attended many of the sessions at the U.N., which is really cool. And I'd be responsible for kind of listening to the statements of other from other countries, from other NGOs, and then reporting back to my supervisor about what they said. And yeah, so it was basically a 9 to 5 one a Friday, and then I would travel on the weekends and everything, which was really cool.

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Liz Duffy
Yeah.

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Liz Kay
What were some of the highlights of the experience? Well, I had.

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Liz Duffy
One really cool project that they gave me. It took me a long time, but basically the project was to draft something to be given to the Dominican friars at the general chapter of the order, which they hold every four years. And this year was in Mexico. And basically the order comes together and they talk about like what kind of projects that they're undertaking around the world and whether they should be continued to be like invested in and kind of their progress and what they're accomplishing.

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Liz Duffy
And so the general promoter of the order of this delegation asked me to basically put something together for him to present at the general chapter, which felt like a big project. And it was actually very rewarding because it was kind of a question that I had going in was like, well, obviously like the Dominican farmers are known for their preaching, for their intellectual life, but they're not as typically not as invested in like social justice per se, as maybe other orders like the Franciscan example.

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Liz Duffy
And so this was my question, like, why did why the friars, why this work? So basically what I did was I went through like the the from them the fundamental constitutions of the order and see like, okay, what, what is the purpose of the Dominican friars and how does that relate to this work in particular? And I had to come up with basically like a a kind of visual with information about for them to present.

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Liz Duffy
And it was really cool. It took me a long time, but it was really rewarding because I answered my very question and how it ended up turning out was basically they were kind of three ways that the charisma of the order related to the work and it was preaching because in a certain sense they were going and preaching the truth of human dignity to this group of people at the U.N. community, because a lot of the work that the delegation does is with other communities of Dominicans around the world.

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Liz Duffy
And then just their engagement with the intellectual life, because so much of it is it has to do with thinking and contemplating and yeah, really being invested in the intellectual life. And so it was a really cool project. That was a big highlight for me, definitely.

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Liz Kay
Paul Clement So basically like trying to find these threads between the work that you're doing and the mission of the Dominicans.

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Liz Duffy
Exactly, yeah. Yeah.

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Liz Kay
It seems like a great culminating opportunity for you as a theology teacher who's been involved in campus ministry and many other things. A PC. What other opportunities have you had during your college career that help prepare you for this?

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Liz Duffy
I would say in a big way. When I came to PC, I was a policy major and I quickly realized that that's not what I wanted to study. But I never thought I would study theology. But I happened to pick up a class, and when I dropped my Polish high class, I picked up a biology class and I fell in love with it.

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Liz Duffy
And I was shocked because I didn't have a very strong faith life. I was really interested in deep questions, but I kind of rejected a little bit of what I had been taught in my early life. And I and I was trying to be a very independent thinker and, you know, all these things. And but I fell in love with it, and I found that it had the answers to the questions.

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Liz Duffy
I've been searching for my whole life. Why am I here? What does it mean to be a human being? What was I created for? All these things. And so really my theology classes gave me a very strong, like anthropological understanding, which has framed the rest of the stuff that I've done at PC. And just in general. And so I would say my my course of study is really for me in that way.

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Liz Duffy
And then just involvement with campus ministry to I was a part of the Pure Ministry program for two years and so I met a lot of people with beautiful, beautiful faith lives and had some experience kind of like leading some small groups and that sort of thing too. And then I would say a big challenge for me, this fellowship was being alone because I was totally by myself.

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Liz Duffy
And I think that a big part of the reason why I was able to do that was because I had a lot of support coming from here, just through communication with friends and with staff and with the Friars. And I felt very, very well supported. But also, I think like honestly, so this is a benefit of COVID, I guess, but just that things became more isolated and so you're more independent, more responsible in certain ways.

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Liz Duffy
And so my dependance on God really increased during COVID and I was able to really rely on that too when I was abroad, which was really, really helpful.

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Liz Kay
So you didn't get a chance to study abroad during, you know, when the academic.

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Liz Duffy
Semester? No. No, sorry. I mean, abroad, like. Yeah.

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Liz Kay
It sounds like your faith life really deepened while you were at PC. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

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Liz Duffy
Yeah, sure. So I was raised Catholic and I come from a big Irish Catholic family. But in high school, I really started to like ask myself whether I believed that I believed in God, if I really believed in the Catholic faith. And I began to read for classes in high school. Some other thinkers like Ayn Rand, who's like a libertarian thinker, and even like Karl Marx and these socialist thinkers.

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Liz Duffy
And I was just it was the first time I'd been presented with so many different views. And I was like, Well, there is really a lot out here to consider. And so I kind of got to the place of basically, I would say agnostic, where I was just really trying to like explore and think deeply about these things.

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Liz Duffy
But I didn't, I wasn't committed to any particular thing and I didn't think I was going to PC either. Actually, even though two of my siblings came here and my parents came here to serve for our family, but again, part of my sort of rebellious time was I want to get out and I'm not going to go where other people come, but I ended up here and I've been so happy that I did.

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Liz Duffy
It was very providential for me to be here, but the first thing I was introduced to was the community and campus ministry. I did Faith Works, which was pre orientation program, and it was the first time I met people who really had like a deep sense of their love for God. And it showed in their joy and their radiance, and they wanted to talk about it and they wanted to help you understand it.

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Liz Duffy
And I had never really had that experience before. And it is very tangible, very real. And then the other part of it was the sort of intellectual side of things with fires. They had the answers to my questions and and they taught them to me in a way that was caring and allowed me to, like, continue asking questions and not sort of like see, not sort of just like tell you that this is true and that's sort of the end of the road.

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Liz Duffy
It's more like this is why we believe this to be true. But here's all these other things that you're probably thinking about, and then we would like have these conversations that would really help me further understand. And so that kind of patients and I honesty really helped me a lot. And then after that I just started going to adoration all the time and St Dom's and Mass and everything and Grace worked in me and here we are.

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Liz Duffy
And so I have a very deep faith life now, which I'm incredibly grateful for. Yeah.

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Liz Kay
And you weren't kidding about your very fire family, right? Yeah. How many siblings do you have?

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Liz Duffy
Five siblings?

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Liz Kay
Yeah, five siblings. So of your family, of six children, three of you have become students. So how what tipped it tipped the scales for you and actually convinced you that PC was the right place.

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Liz Duffy
So I actually really wanted it to be one, which is where one of my other brothers went and I didn't get in. And so I was like, okay, well, I'll go to PC for a year and then transfer. That was my plan. And I had spent a week here. I said, I called my parents and I said, I'm not leaving.

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Liz Duffy
I said, there's no way I can leave. And so, yeah, I was really it was the people I met and it was sort of community I felt, which is a cliche, that sometimes people say it's a cliche that we use all the time for our family. But it is very true and yeah, I've been incredibly happy here.

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Liz Kay
That's wonderful. So what were some of the things in that first week that sealed the deal for you, that made you realize that this was, in fact, the right decision?

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Liz Duffy
A big part of it was I had met people who were really interested in answering the same questions. I was in high school. I didn't really have that. It was kind of it was kind of like, let's pursue these questions not as a means of getting to the truth, but just as a kind of means of for the sake of asking deep questions.

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Liz Duffy
So it's kind of just different purpose there. And I could tell, you know, and even my friends and here it was like we would have these conversations at midnight, you know, like in by the by the flame. Like we would just have these very deep conversations. And I finally met people who were interested in having those conversations, which was really special to me.

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Liz Duffy
And like I said, seeing the faith, life and my friends too. And in the Friars, it was a totally different way of living than I had ever seen. And it just impacted me very deeply and the Friars, too, I didn't want it. I just I they're they've been a huge part of my experience and very supportive. And I remember at the end of Faith Works, we had a sort of like reflection time.

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Liz Duffy
And I, the Pam Tremblay, who was the director at the time of the program, said, like, if anyone has anything they'd like to share, please feel free. And I remember standing up and saying, for the first time in a really long time, I feel like I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. And, you know, you have a you all have a big role to play in that for me.

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Liz Duffy
And I like start to cry a little bit and that even didn't feel like me. I just felt like I just felt very like moved to say that. And but it was true. It was true. I felt like this was the place I'd been called to be, even though didn't really know. I wouldn't have said that at the time.

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Liz Duffy
I wouldn't know what that was like. But yeah, so some of it's I'm not able to articulate, but those are some big things, big parts of it.

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Liz Kay
And so now looking back on it as a senior, what are some of the classes and other experiences that stand out for you as like kind of like core memories from your experience?

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Liz Duffy
Yeah, I would say this program, which I love, a lot of people complain about it, but I absolutely loved this program and that program is part of what led me to be humanities major because I loved that it was interdisciplinary. One day I'd be, you know, reading a novel that would be carrying the same themes of this philosophical text.

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Liz Duffy
And I got to really engage with it in a way so sive. Definitely. I took a class called Biology and Political Life with Dr. Rick Barry, which was really great, and that I think prepared me very well actually to be to be kind of combining my interests in like politics, which I've always had and theology, and like how these kind of conversations that that I think helped prepare me for in my work in Geneva in a big way too.

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Liz Duffy
I'm just thinking about things in a particular way and so that class definitely I've taken a lot of classes on Aquinas clients as thought, which have been really great too. I probably taken maybe four at this point between philosophy, theology, which there's a lot of overlap. So maybe, you know, let's see what else. I also took this class to make an intellectual tradition with other Iranians last semester, which was really great.

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Liz Duffy
We basically the class kind of had like two main parts and he kind of framed it like very Aristotelian way, like form a matter of the order of the meaning in order. So kind of the form being the sort of general purpose of the order, a little bit of Saint Dominic's life. And then the matter being kind of more of like here are particular Dominican friars who have lived out these aspects of the terrorism of the order.

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Liz Duffy
And I felt like I just had a really like deepened understanding of the Dominicans and I knew where to look to for answers to those questions after that class. But yeah, I mean, we read a really cool book in my class who called I'm Lost in Thought by Dr. Zena Heads and it was really interesting and it actually led me to really think about the intellectual life very deeply.

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Liz Duffy
One thing she talks about is the voice of Acadia, but it basically means a kind of like laziness or sloth when it comes to actually using your leisure time. Well, and it prompted me to like really think about that. And I ended up actually planning I've been trying to get I don't know if you're familiar with the domestic institute, so we've been trying to kind of deepen our relationship with them as like between courses campus and the domestic institute.

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Liz Duffy
And so I put people.

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Liz Kay
Who don't know what though. Could you talk about it?

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Liz Duffy
Yeah. So the Dominicans, too is a is a project set up by the Dominican prior to the Eastern Province. Basically, its main purpose is to bring to bring the Catholic and Dominican tradition to secular campuses. And so I tried to get a chapter started here, but because we're already Dominican culture didn't make much sense. But they have a lot of media and stuff that's designed to kind of bring it to campuses where the Dominican friars aren't physically present.

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Liz Duffy
So they have this program called the crisis one on one, where they have like students come together and just read an article summa and talk about it, which is cool. And then they are on retreats, intellectual retreats, where they have speakers from all different colleges. I'm not necessarily Catholic colleges and come and speak on a particular topic. So they're based in Washington, D.C. neck like very much near the Dominican House and studies where the where the friars study and they're becoming priests but so anyway I put together an intellectual retreat basically for students at the Dominican House of Studies on this topic of Acadia.

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Liz Duffy
And so that was really I mean, I wouldn't have done had I not read this book and taking this class was very cool.

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Liz Kay
One of the things you got to take advantage of here at P.S. was the new classes as part of the Catholic Humanities minor. Can you tell us some of the highlights of those courses?

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Liz Duffy
Yeah, definitely. So they formed this minor, I think it was last year is when they created it and they I know that they've been trying to build the humanities program in general. They have a really cool set of opportunities, honestly, like the humanities form, which I'm sure a lot of students are familiar with. They have a speaker come and then they have an opportunity for students to have like a meal with the speaker afterwards and continue the conversation.

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Liz Duffy
And so anyway, I think the Catholic Humanities minor kind of came out of people had an interest in in philosophy and theology and in all these areas of the humanities. But particularly with like the Catholic tradition and you know how that's informed that area of thought. And so I know they have a couple of courses, the Catholic intellectual tradition course, the Dominican intellectual tradition course, which I took.

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Liz Duffy
And then they have a really cool set of these like one credit courses that you can take and so many different things. I've taken two of them, one A Walker Percy and one a Gregorian chant, which is so interesting. And a good way, interesting and good. And so basically it's a six course minor, I'm pretty sure, but you can take you have to take one of those Dominican or Catholic intellectual tradition courses and the intro course to humanities, which is kind of like a survey of some influential texts from like the 17, 18 or 1900s.

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Liz Duffy
And to kind of give you a sense of it's it's actually somewhat like Civ in the sense of interdisciplinary I took it with Dr. Patrick Macfarlane and we read novels and we read philosophical texts and we read a little bit of theology. And so it was it was cool to have that kind of interdisciplinary approach. But yeah, it's very flexible.

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Liz Duffy
You can take those are the only two requirements. So outside of that, you can take any four classes in the humanities disciplines, which they're six or seven. So it's very flexible and open.

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Liz Kay
PC doesn't offer a ton of those one credit classes, but I think some of them there's there's one on stargazing.

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Liz Duffy
Yes, yes, there is. Yeah. Yeah.

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Liz Kay
That's pretty wide range of opportunities.

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Liz Duffy
Yeah, definitely.

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Liz Kay
Like any good PC student though, I think you might have some intramural accomplishments to be proud of as well.

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Liz Duffy
Yes, of course. Two T-shirts to the three V, three basketball, which I'm very proud of.

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Liz Kay
Did it take you a long time to to acquire those?

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Liz Duffy
It was actually freshman year. Yeah, I did one freshman year, which is great. I really thought at that point I was like, I'm going to win one every semester, but didn't. I haven't. And then last year or junior year in the fall.

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Liz Kay
But you got you checked it off the bucket.

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Liz Duffy
List right away. Exactly. I can graduate now.

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Liz Kay
But speaking of graduation, it's it's an a rare conversation with a college senior that does not end in. So what are your post graduation for this year? What are your ambitions and thoughts about what happens after May?

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Liz Duffy
Yeah, so I thought a long time, basically the whole time I've been here, that I would get my master's in theology and then hopefully get my Ph.D. in theology and be a college professor. That's kind of what I really want to do. But recently I've been thinking about not doing that for a couple of reasons. I love theology and I would love to study it forever, but I also have been thinking more about what might be a good way of combining that passion with something that might have a few more jobs out there for me.

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Liz Duffy
So there are a couple of different options I'm looking at. The Domestic Institute actually has a fellowship program that I'm looking into in Washington, D.C. and when I was before I came to speak to the thing I always thought I would do was go to law school. And so I'm putting that back on the table a little bit and hoping to work in a law firm next year and just see if I enjoy the environment and the work.

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Liz Duffy
And yeah, I think that's kind of what I'm thinking right now. So I don't want to go to school right away. I need a little break. But yeah, so that's kind of what I'm thinking about.

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Liz Kay
If you were considering law school, what what kind of what type of law do you think you practice?

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Liz Duffy
I'm not sure I in this actually a lot of this thought came from being in Geneva because I'm also very passionate about the pro-life movement and just questions of human dignity in general. And so I would love to kind of work for an institution organization that is promoting things that I believe in. And so I don't I don't think like the corporate law side is really for me, but maybe something like constitutional law could be cool or yeah.

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Liz Duffy
Any, any kind of organization that, that needs like a legal advisor for that kind of work, you know, for that kind of those cases of human dignity would be really cool for me.

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Liz Kay
Be remiss to mention not to mention that your father might be a familiar person to some students at Peace's campus. Yeah, as a attorney who's taught business law.

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Liz Duffy
Yes. Yes. He talks in school. Yes, exactly. Yeah, he did. So he he does business litigation, which again, I don't I don't know that I would I would do that kind of law. But in talking to him, too, it's been very informative for me about thinking about law school. And he like he came here, he was an English major here and he didn't work.

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Liz Duffy
He didn't go to law school right away either. And he's always told us, like any of my siblings and me, if anything about law school, if not, go right away and to work first. And that's what he did. And he went to night school and he worked for three years and he already he was already married. My parents got married at 22.

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Liz Duffy
And so they they were already getting ready to have a family and yeah. So, but it's been very helpful too because obviously he's done this. So it's been it's been great. Yeah.

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Liz Kay
Well, this it's been wonderful to talk with you. Thank you so much for joining us.

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Liz Duffy
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. Absolutely.

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Liz Kay
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