Domers: A Year at Notre Dame Book

What is it about Notre Dame that has, since its founding 150 years ago, made it such a mythic place in the American imagination? To find out, Kevin Coyne spent a year there, going to all the football games but staying for all the other days too - from freshmen orientation to graduation. In between he attended classes, masses, pep rallies, and parties; hung out with virtually every group of students on campus - from pre-meds to ardent pro-life activists to varsity football players to budding philosophers. Coyne was also a fly on the wall as the faculty debated "whither Notre Dame?" and its academic future; he sat in on the previously sacrosanct trustee meetings, to which no outsider had ever been admitted; and he spent time with the university's president debating how Notre Dame can uphold, in these cynical times, its belief that a "true education integrates faith and reason."

Notre Dame remains a place of mythic stature to American Catholics, offering both a vision of their highest dream, and a ladder to climb toward it. Coyne's unlimited access to all areas of the college, from faculty meetings to football team Masses to dorm beer busts, has helped him create a rich and complex portrait of America's most prominent Catholic university.