Thud. Thud. Thud. It’s Friday night and Reagan Cool is making seven pizzas. The herb-seasoned dough makes another thud against the counter as she pushes in her rolling pin.
When junior Reagan Cool went to Washington, D.C., in the fall, as a part of the Washington-Hillsdale Internship Program, she was thinking about intentionality. Having been inspired by Shannon Evans, a Catholic mom and Bible study author on Instagram who started an initiative called “Friday Peace Feast,” Cool wanted to do something similar at Hillsdale. A year after she first had the idea, Cool now hosts weekly Friday evening dinner parties at her off-campus house, calling the ritual the “Necessary Society.”
Around 6 p.m., people start to filter through the backdoor into the small apartment, carrying pizza ingredients and exchanging greetings, mingling and talking, or helping to prepare the meal. After a while, guests start to drift to the main room, sitting cross-legged on the floor around the perimeter of the room as Cool piles glasses and silverware and plates on the coffee table in the middle.
Cool described the atmosphere as “very natural.”
An important aspect of Evans’ Friday Peace Feast is inviting her mixed-income neighbors over to dinner simultaneously, Cool explained, to foster discussions and to help people realize that perhaps they are not as different as they think. Cool adapted the concept to fit her goals for the Necessary Society. Each week, the group of 10 or more students will discuss a contentious topic, which Cool announces via Facebook earlier in the week.
“Some of the topics I come up with myself,” Cool said, “But I also take suggestions from friends. I try to choose topics that aren’t going to hurt anyone’s feelings but also have a range of opinions.”
After opening in prayer, Cool poses her question to the group, before ducking back to the kitchen to take the pizzas out of the oven.
“People typically take a couple bites of food, and then somebody opens up with a response, and we go from there,” Cool said.
Before the guests arrived, Cool helped her younger sister, who was visiting from Adrian, Michigan, to swaps out pans of dough in oven as she shared the topic from the first Necessary Society dinner: The uses and the dangers of technology.
“We ended up talking about how it influences a child’s academic development,” she explained. “My youngest sister has never grown up without screens, whereas I have. Our generation is right on the cusp of that change. What are the effects?”
Some of the other dinner party conversations have included cremation and the restoration of historical sites. Last Friday’s topic: Profanity in artwork.
Sophomore Isaac Kirshner responds first, alluding to an article by Professor of History Bradley Birzer which he also read aloud at the dinner.
“Concerning children,” Kirshner said, “swearing is always and everywhere violent.”
Other voices joined in to break apart the question, and define the term: When is it okay to use profanity in art? Is there a difference between artwork that involves profanity and artwork that is irreverent? Is there a different standard for profanity allowed for men and women?
Cool said her main goal in starting the Necessary Society, whose name comes from number 1886 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, was to foster better community on Hillsdale’s campus. Though the college does offer close-knit communities, Cool was looking for a specific kind.
“We actually have a great community here, but I feel like on the weekends sometimes we lose it,” Cool explained. “You might know everyone in your class, but there’s something really spiritual about sharing a meal, so I wanted to provide an opportunity for that.”
Junior Nina Hufford pointed out that the word “profane” implies something offensive to God, as distinguished from art or words which are merely offensive to us.
“Can only something intended to be holy be profaned, then?” junior Timothy Green asked.
Trays of pizza circulated continuously, in addition to salads, wine, tea, and cookies, as guests threw their various questions into the ring to be wrestled with. When one thread was exhausted, Cool tugged at another.
“What about social media? That sounds very millennial of me, but with social media, profanity is everywhere. Before technology developed, you could at least avoid it more, if you weren’t a part of it yourself. Is our repulsion, or lack of repulsion, influenced by our exposure to it?”
Green pushed back on the concept that all profanity in art is bad, and said that good art has an inherently provocative value.
“If it doesn’t make you think, it’s not worth looking at,” he said.
Cool popped in and out to fill plates, share more pizza, or take away emptied dishes as the evening carried on, the kitchen sink faucet still running in the background at one point as she stopped to make a point or hear a guest’s comment.
“My objective isn’t for us to come together and reach some resolution,” she explained afterward, “or that there are these standards that Hillsdale students should believe. It’s really relationship-based: We’re here to have friendship.”
Cool shared that after returning from her semester in D.C., she noticed her tastes had changed.
“I came back from WHIP and suddenly didn’t like the parties I used to like, and a friend told me, ‘I think it’s because you go into a room full of people, and nobody actually has community with one another,’” she said. “And that’s exactly it.”
Cool said she thinks this has to do in part with maturity.
“I had some people last week say, ‘I love this, this feels like something my parents would host.’ And it wasn’t really patronizing: They were saying that they didn’t know you could have something like this. I think sometimes we subject ourselves to this definition of ‘I am a child.’ We’re adults: We should act like it. In a lot of ways we have a lot of responsibilities, so why wouldn’t we gather like adults?” she said.
She added that most students, herself included, are simply seeking to be known and to have their thoughts heard.
“I think that’s what people are yearning for when they go to the parties that aren’t actually satisfying,” Cool said. “Until you go somewhere where you are known, it’s easy to believe in the shadow of what is right. Not to be a total Hillsdale student, but there it is. When that’s all you ever have, it’s pretty good, because at least you’re with people, and you can normally find someone to talk to. Maybe something about all your sweaty bodies dancing together — I mean, it’s a good workout, but I can go to the gym for that. I’m here to know people.”
The Necessary Society’s goal is to create a different, intentional kind of gathering, she explained.
“There is authentic community here,” she said. “Even if you don’t know everyone when you walk in, when you walk out, maybe you don’t remember their name the next time you see them, but you know the things that they believe, and you shared a meal together. That’s really what Christ wants us to do.”
Though the group of people comes from a variety of backgrounds and different denominations of faith, Cool said that so far, she has not needed to dispel any tension during discussion.
“People respect one another. Maybe that’s part of this thing that we encounter in college, where you think, ‘I’m not mature enough for this.’ But you’re not willing to be the first person to be the immature one, and so it just raises everyone to a standard of maturity,” she said.
“Can we take something derogatory and redeem it?” Cool had asked earlier in the evening. The Necessary Society raises a toast and says, “Why not?”
