REGISTER BELOW
6:00 – 7:30 p.m. | Dinner Provided
This event is designated for University of Chicago graduate students. Other students interested in attending should contact William Hurley at whurley@lumenchristi.org. Students will receive a copy of the texts.
This project is made possible through the support of In Lumine Tuo: Expanding and Sustaining the Catholic Intellectual Tradition Nationwide (grant #63614) from the John Templeton Foundation and the generous support of our donors.
In our Information Age, we are constantly bombarded by a deluge of new knowledge, whether it be academic works, social media alerts, or 24/7 news blasts. In the academy in particular, we are taught from an early age that the ideal student is the one with insatiable curiosity – a never-ending appetite for knowledge in whatever guise it may come. And yet if we are honest, this ceaseless quest for total knowledge often leaves us more distracted and anxious than ever before. St. Augustine would have a surprising diagnosis for our age – we suffer from the vice of curiositas, a kind of malformed appetite for knowledge that prizes novelty and control over the intrinsically true, good, and beautiful.
In the Vice of Curiosity and Intellectual Appetite, esteemed theologian Paul J. Griffiths outlines an Augustinian critique of the modern academy’s ways of knowing, including the history of how modernity turned curiosity from vice into virtue, a theological criticism of patent law, and analysis of why plagiarism is not in fact theft. In this five week reading group, we will dive into the thought of both St. Augustine and Griffiths as we seek to understand what a properly catechized intellectual appetite looks like and how we can rightly desire knowledge as students.
Schedule:
- Oct 13 – Week 1: Introduction (Optional Reading, Intellectual Appetite: 9-18 of Introduction)
- Oct 20 – Week 2: The Vice of Curiosity, p. 1-21 (Optional: I.A. p. 19-22 & 75-91)
- Oct 27 – Week 3: V.C., p. 22-41 (Optional: I.A. p. 139-162)
- Nov 3 – Week 4: V.C., p. 41-59 (Optional: I.A. p. 163-186)
- Nov 10 – Week 5: V.C., p. 60-79 (Optional: I.A. p. 125-138)