Are you morally responsible to help a drowning child? Is being a vigilante good or bad? Would you eat your cat? The university’s newly-formed Junto (pronounced “hoon-toh”) Club is a place for students to debate these tough questions.
“[Junto Club is] like a modern philosophy club, where we take philosophies that might be from Plato or Aristotle or something way back in the day, and put a modern spin to it and have a modern problem that we’re trying to answer,” said Daniel De Lude ’25, a leadership, ethics and organizational sustainability (LEO) major, who formed the club last semester.
The first junto club was formed in Philadelphia in 1727 by Benjamin Franklin. Its 12 members met every week to discuss moral, political and intellectual issues. There was wide variation in the occupations and interests of the members, who pledged that they would be dedicated to truth and to respecting one another.
Over two centuries later, St. Joe’s Junto Club takes a similar approach, with eight to 10 club members gathering every other Monday in Barbelin Hall.
“Our motto is, ‘A group of like-minded individuals in the pursuit of knowledge,’” said De Lude, who serves as the club’s president. “We like introspection and thinking about the world through a new lens.”
De Lude was president of the Junto Club at St. John’s College High School in Washington D.C. When he realized there wasn’t anything similar at St. Joe’s, he decided to start one himself.
“To start a club, you have to have 50 people sign a paper of interest, so I passed it around my friend group and a few random people,” De Lude said. “I had to get a secretary and treasurer and a social media manager, and they were all down and onboard so that helped me not only start the club, but once I had the idea and we had a few meetings, they helped it grow.”
The meetings consist of De Lude guiding the conversation with slide presentations, providing a starting point for the discussion by posing a moral question or problem.
Eddie Dolan ’25 joined the club at the start of this semester and said he appreciates how the club makes him think differently.
“As a math major, I see the world in very logical ways … there’s no thinking besides just doing what you’re told,” Dolan said. “I thought it’d be fun to do something more interpretive, looking at ethics and morality where the answers aren’t set in stone.”
Dolan said the nature of the club is for members to have differing opinions. While that can lead to conflict, everyone is respectful, he said.
“The whole point is that it was sort of like a debate,” Dolan said. “But it didn’t reach the point where people were yelling at each other, like, ‘your opinion is wrong.’ We just had a thoughtful discussion.”
Mary Pucci ’24, a political science major and the club’s secretary, said she joined the club after seeing a poster advertising it in Claver House. Pucci recalled one time when there was significant disagreement among some of the members.
“There was something math related, and they were heatedly doing math problems on the board trying to outsmart each other,” Pucci said. “But otherwise, it’s been pretty much smooth sailing.”
Moving forward, De Lude said he would like to see the club utilize its budget to venture out into Philadelphia.
“We want to take a trip somewhere in Philadelphia because our club’s roots are in Benjamin Franklin … so something related to him within the city like a museum about Benjamin Franklin or an outdoor meeting somewhere,” De Lude said.
