A Habit of Vision

Blending the two languages of economics and theology to help students discover a meaningful life in business.

The priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote that there are two types of conversions. One happens suddenly "at a crash"), like St. Paul's. The other kind is slow ("lingering-out"), like St. Augustine's. Mary Hirschfeld (Ph.D. '13) has experienced both.

Her first, an intellectual conversion, began at Harvard University in the fall of 1983 when she arrived to begin her doctoral studies in economics.

Outwardly, Hirschfeld, who joined the Notre Dame faculty in 2022, looked like a person in the right place at the right time. "I was ambitious — really ambitious," she recalls. She had a distinct goal to win a Nobel Prize in economics. She began studying under Lawrence Summers, who seemed destined to win the prize himself. (A world-renowned economist, Summers went on to become the 71st Secretary of the Treasury and, later, Harvard's 27th president.)

In retrospect, Hirschfeld sees herself at Harvard as "rudderless." "My mindset was all wrong," she explains. "You don't win a Nobel Prize by trying to win one. You go out and find a real problem and devote yourself to solving it." She slowly began to realize she was working hard at being successful without a clear sense of what success meant to her or what larger purpose her work served.

But as she began to search for more purpose in her work, she also began to wonder about the larger questions of meaning and significance — questions she was not sure the discipline of economics would be able to answer.

In search of a broader worldview, she accepted a job at Occidental College, a liberal arts school in Los Angeles. There, she taught and explored a broad range of subjects, including interdisciplinary courses like "The Development of Capitalism," which blended history, economics, politics and philosophy.

After almost a decade of slow intellectual conversion, her religious conversion arrived. As someone who considered herself somewhat spiritually inclined but not the religious type, it was "unexpected."

"It was not the product of searching philosophical or theological inquiry into the existence of God or the truth of the various world religions," she says. "It was more a matter of being knocked off my horse and then dusting myself off with a mysterious but overpowering sense that I needed to go to the local parish and find out what I would need to do to become a Catholic."

She received the sacraments at Easter Vigil in 1998 and set out to understand the purpose of economics in light of her new Christian worldview.

In time, she found herself at an impasse. "It is challenging enough to train students to think like economists when one is fully committed to that project, even more challenging when one has doubts," she says.

She soon met a woman at a conference on vocation who asked her "What would you do if you won the lottery?" She recalls that she replied without hesitation: "I would study theology." So after 15 years at Occidental College, she resigned from her professorship and embarked on the long journey through a doctoral program for a second time.

This time, her experience as a graduate student was completely different — and not only because she was attending Notre Dame instead of Harvard. Her journey was focused on "why?" questions, not just "how?" questions. "I was studying in a field with lower prestige and much less impact on public discourse," Hirschfeld recalls, "but it was raising the question I thought mattered most — questions about the higher ends that economics ought to serve."

She initially considered leaving economics behind altogether. But eventually she saw that her intellectual calling was to become "bilingual" — a scholar capable of speaking both to economists and theologians. In her dissertation, Hirschfeld attempted to get the two disciplines to "talk" to each other. Her aim was to help theologians see the legitimate role of business and markets in promoting human flourishing while also showing economists the need for a deeper, richer account of happiness than most economists possess.

Hirschfeld's project developed into her 2018 book, "Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy," published by Harvard University Press, which she completed after being hired as an associate professor of economics and theology in the Department of the Humanities at Villanova University.

Improbable as it sounds, Hirschfeld has gained more influence today expounding upon the thought of 13th-century Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas than she had as an ambitious young economist or as a department chair with tenure and a corner office. Her book was met with wide acclaim, winning several awards, including the Aldersgate Prize and the Economy and Society International Award. It was also translated into Portuguese, French and Lithuanian.

In 2022, Hirschfeld was recruited back to Notre Dame as the John T. Ryan Jr. Associate Professor of Theology and Business Ethics at the Mendoza College of Business with a joint appointment in the Department of Theology. The following year, she became academic director of Mendoza's new Business Ethics and Society Program. Hirschfeld's courses allow her to teach at the intersection of theology and economics. The program offers business students a minor in Business and the Common Good with courses like The Meaningful Life in Business.

Most of the courses in the program allow students to fulfill core theology and philosophy requirements while applying these subjects to business in order to help students envision what it means to approach business as a noble vocation.

"Any human activity can be done in a good way or in a corrupt way," Hirschfeld says. "In business, the corrupt way — the ignoble path, you might say — gets a lot of press. But the next step should not be to dismiss all of business as ignoble. The next step should be to gain as much clarity as we can about what makes the difference between good and bad business. Otherwise, we are criticizing business without helping future business people see what the noble path looks like."

"Mendoza's motto is Grow the Good in Business," she says. "We are asking, ‘What is that good we're trying to grow?' and ‘What is the path we should take to grow it?'"

As she teaches, Hirschfeld draws not just on the two languages of economics and theology but on the life experience she gained through her two conversions.

"The point is not to have students follow the path I took but to realize for themselves what true flourishing looks like and to understand how that fits into their vocation," Hirschfeld says.

Gaining this vision is an imperative, not just for personal fulfillment but for professional success as well.

"We want students to be successful not just in business but in life as a whole. And that requires a habit of vision, a way of seeing how what I'm doing now serves a larger end," Hirschfeld says. "And as students come to know more about who they are and what they value, they resist the kind of frantic rat race and burnout that is all too common in our culture today. And they are in a better position to receive the good things that come from the noble path."

Illustration by Errata Carmona. Photo by Barbara Johnston.