The Lumen Christi Institute's West Suburban Catholic Culture Series returns in 2021-22 with a monthly series on the theme of Catholic literary heritage. We will survey the history of literature written by Catholics from the early middle ages to the late twentieth century. What is Catholic literature? What is our Catholic literary heritage? St. John […]
Open to current students and faculty. Others interested in joining should contact us. Lunch will be served. Is John Wick only a guilty pleasure? Or is there, at the heart of these movies, a desire for justice—however roughly delivered? This lecture proposes that at the heart of the movies is indeed the desire for retributive […]
Free and open to the public. Presented by the Lumen Christi Institute and Saint Ignatius College Prep. What does it mean to believe? Does one believe because of evidence? In spite of evidence? Is belief the beginning of wisdom or the opposite of science? For over two thousand years, the Catholic Church has defended the […]
Free and open to the public. Cosponsored by the University of Chicago Division of the Humanities, the Illinois Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts. The outstanding female contingent of Schola Antiqua presents a concert of medieval and early modern music by and for women in the convent. Their program "Music in Secret" includes works by […]
A conference held by the University of Chicago Divinity School, cosponsored by the Lumen Christi Institute. Download of Conference Abstracts. For more information see the Divinity School's conference webpage. Schedule: Wednesday, March 30 2:00pm-3:15pm Wesley Wildman (Boston University): "Prospects for a Naturalist, Critically Humanist, and Mystical Transreligious Understanding of Ultimate Reality" 3:30pm-4:45pm Karmen MacKendrick (LeMoyne College): "Out […]
Free and open to the public. Early Christian authors rarely composed tragedies, but they did discern elements of “the tragic” both in the background of sacred history and in the foreground of mundane experience. As a rhetorical, literary, and even theological artform, the mimesis of tragedy took shape concurrently in biblical interpretation and preaching, in […]
Open to current students and faculty. Box lunches will be served. Prof. Blowers will also give a lecture on "Negotiating Tragedy and the Tragic: Discursive, Performative, and Interpretive Strategies in Late Ancient Christian Literature" on March 30. For all events held at Gavin House, the Lumen Christi Institute follows Chicago Department of Public Health Guidance for […]
This weekly non-credit course is open to current Chicago area students and faculty. Others interested in attending should contact us. Registrants are free to attend as many sessions as they choose. Sessions do not presuppose previous attendance or prior knowledge of the subject. If the new Cosmic story, that started with the Big Bang about 13.8 billion years, […]
Due to circumstances outside our control, this event has been canceled. We hope to schedule events with Fr. Fields in future quarters. Open to current students. Others interested in participating should contact us. Lunch will be provided for registrants. What does theology have to say about erotic love? Better yet, what is love? How can one […]
A symposium on The Light that Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of Natural Law by Fr. Stephen L. Brock (Wipf and Stock, 2020). Free and open to the public. Registration is required. Cosponsored by Wipf and Stock Publishers, the Department of History at the University of Chicago, and the Seminary Co-op Bookstore. Contact us with any […]
Does the absurdity of life dictate death? Can one find hope—can one truly live—in an absurd universe? These are the questions Albert Camus labors mightily to answer in his seminal work, The Myth of Sisyphus. Acknowledging the basic human impulse to seek meaning to existence, Camus nevertheless holds that existence provides us with no answer and, […]
