Our Events

A lecture with Ada Palmer (University of Chicago) Cosponsored by the Department of History It is difficult today to imagine a world in which religious communities were deeply intertwined with the civic order and when a third of a town’s population might be priests, monks, and nuns. In Renaissance Florence the Dominican Monastery of San Marco was intimately tied to every aspect of city life, from commerce and patronage, to civil broils and foreign invasions, to education and medicine, to the great artists, architects and radical thinkers who earned the Florentine Renaissance its eternal fame. This lecture will explore the...

Due to unforeseen personal reasons, Carol Zaleski’s visit has been postponed. We hope to reschedule this event for a future date. Carol Zaleski (Smith College) REGISTER HERE cosponsored by the Medieval Studies Workshop and the Theology & Religious Ethics Workshop The idea of Purgatory – “that second kingdom,” as Dante puts it, “where the human soul is cleansed and made fit to ascend to Heaven” — is present in germ throughout world religions, fully articulated (and discriminated from ‘hell lite’) by the Catholic tradition, rejected by the Reformers, yet never wholly suppressed. Carol Zaleski will speak about the idea of...

Due to unforeseen personal reasons, Carol Zaleski’s visit has been postponed. We hope to reschedule this event for a future date. with co-authors Philip & Carol Zaleski REGISTER HERE $50 General/ $15 Student/ $500 Table Sponsorship At this luncheon event, authors Philip and Carol Zaleski will discuss their book The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. For three decades, C.S. Lewis (author of The Chronicles of Narnia), J.R.R. Tolkien (author of The Lord of the Rings), and their closest associates met weekly in Oxford pubs as a literary club known as the Inklings. This...

Due to unforeseen personal reasons, Carol & Philip Zaleski’s visit has been postponed. We hope to reschedule this event for a future date. Thursday, March 31, 7:00pm University of Chicago, Location TBA Carol & Philip Zaleski (Smith College) REGISTER HERE cosponsored by the Seminary Co-op Bookstore The literary historian, novelist and critic C. S. Lewis is the most widely read Christian writer of his century and ours; the philologist J.R.R. Tolkien our most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates (including the philosopher of language Owen Barfield and the eccentric fantasist Charles Williams) formed a literary club...

Due to unforeseen personal reasons, Carol Zaleski’s visit has been postponed. We hope to reschedule this event for a future date. At this luncheon event, students will read and discuss J.R.R. Tolkein’s essay “On Fairy-Stories” and C.S. Lewis’s essay “Transposition” with Carol & Philip Zaleski (co-authors ofThe Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings) REGISTER HERE This event is open to current University of Chicago students. Lunch will be served. Space is limited and offered on a first-come first-serve basis. PDFs of the readings will be provided.

REGISTER HERE This master class is open to graduate and undergraduate students, including non-University of Chicago students. Space is limited and offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Copies of the readings will be provided. Pope Benedict’s 2009 Encyclical-Letter, Caritas in veritate, breaks new ground in the tradition of Catholic social teaching by explicitly calling for a new theory of economic exchange. Whereas the traditional scholastic theory of the “just price” was focused on “the principle of the equivalence in value of exchanged goods” (par. 35), a new theory of exchange must focus instead on “a metaphysical understanding of the relations between persons”...

cosponsored by the Theology and Religious Ethics Workshop This lecture will address the potential changes in the Catholic Church’s approach to marriage and family life to result from the Extraordinary Synod on the Family convened by Pope Francis this month. It will examine what this synod reveals about the relationship between the doctrinal and the pastoral and the papacy and the episcopate.

When St. Augustine innocuously yet infamously stole some pears in his youth, he confessed that he did it simply because he was in love with his own ruin.  Have you ever looked at your sins as the way you destroy that which you do not like about yourself?  Fr. Meconi’s talk will draw from this Augustinian insight that sin is really a form of self-sabotage, a way of keeping ourselves away from an intimacy and a love we all know we in no way deserve.

Join us for a reception to celebrate the recently released book A Godly Humanism: Clarifying the Hope that Lies Within (CUA Press, 2015) by the late Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I. on the one-year anniversary of his passing. Finished by Francis Cardinal George, O.M.I. nine days before his death, A Godly Humanismoffers an account of the Catholic intellectual life by one of the most gifted thinkers to serve as bishop in the American Church. It draws on figures such as St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI to express a vision of the Church as a communion built...

The Inquisition is a subject of much cultural fascination, invoking images of book burnings and gruesome executions. Yet these were only a small part of the activities of a vast and complex organization, involved in many subtler aspects of society, from the regulation of prostitution and homosexuality, to the development of copyright, to prescribing differences between elite and lower class education.  This panel of experts on the history of the Inquisition will discuss the realities behind the myths about this vast effort at information control, torn between many different goals and powers, and staffed by members who were often scholars...