Walker Percy on the Pursuit of Happiness in Apocalyptic Times
Jennifer FreyUniversity of South Carolina
This virtual event is free and open to the public. This virtual event will be livestreamed on Zoom. For more information about the in person event, please contact us.
The in-person event will take place at Ruth Lake Country Club in Hinsdale, Illinois.
In Walker Percy's novel, Love in the Ruins, the narrator, a wealthy and successful denizen of American suburbia, admits that " everyone is happy, but our hearts broke with happiness." In this lecture, Dr. Jennifer Frey will discuss what Percy's novel can teach us about the pursuit of happiness in contemporary American life, and why the novel's biting satire is relevant to our contemporary political and religious moment.
Jennifer Frey is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. She was previously a Collegiate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts and an affiliated faculty in the philosophy department. Frey holds a PhD from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.A. from Indiana University-Bloomington. She has published widely on action, virtue, practical reason, and meta-ethics, and has recently co-edited an interdisciplinary volume, Self-Transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology (Routledge, 2018). Her writing has also been featured in First Things, Fare Forward, Image, Law and Liberty, Plough, The Point, and USA Today.
