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Logical to the Bitter End: Absurdity, Suicide, and Hope in Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus

David Lyons, University of Chicago

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, moreover, never will. Given this absurdity, Camus thus identifies suicide as the “one truly serious philosophical problem.” Why, Camus poses, do we bother to go on living once we recognize the absurdity of life? How, in the face of absurdity, can one embrace the struggle...

Bernard of Clairvaux: Writing a Biography of the Difficult Saint

Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture 1025 E 58th St. Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL

A lecture with Professor Brian Patrick McGuire, author of Bernard of Clairvaux: An Inner Life (Cornell University Press, 2020). Free and open to the public. Registration is required. Cosponsored by the Bollandist Society, Cornell University Press, the Medieval Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago, and the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion. Contact us with any questions. From the presenter: This lecture will be a combination of biography and autobiography: my various attempts at writing a biography of Bernard of Clairvaux and the history of my own life. I think it is important for historians to be aware of the...

Friendship and Community: The Monastic Experience, 350-1250

Gavin House 1220 E 58th St., Chicago, IL

A master class with Brian Patrick McGuire (Roskilde University). Open to current graduate students, faculty, and advanced University of Chicago undergraduate students. Others interested in participating should contact us. Registrants will receive copies of the prepared reading. Friendship has been apparent in our culture as a concern ever since the time of the Greeks. Today it is often ignored or taken for granted. Some readings of the Gospels would indicate that friendship is secondary. We are saved not because of our friendships but because we find how to love our enemies. For Augustine, the architect of friendship, converting to the Christian...

Descartes and Pascal on the Proofs of the Existence of God

Gavin House 1220 E 58th St., Chicago, IL

A final Lumen Christi Master Class, with Jean-Luc Marion. Open to current graduate students, faculty, and advanced University of Chicago undergraduate students. Others interested in participating should contact us. Registrants will receive copies of the prepared reading. Texts: Descartes, Méditations on first philosophy, a latin-english edition by J. Cottingham, Cambridge, 2013, or the bare latin text. (With focus on book 3 & 5) Pascal, Pensées, ed. R. Ariew, Hackett, 2005. (Entirety, but especially Chapter 3) Marion, Jean-Luc On descartes’ metaphysical Prism, Chicago U.P., 1999, Chapter 3 (ch.IV & V optional).

The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry

Ruth Lake Country Club 6200 South Madison Street, Hinsdale, IL
James Matthew Wilson, University of Saint Thomas, Houston

Part of our Western Suburban Catholic Culture Series. This event will be live streamed on Zoom. At the turn of the twentieth century, the American Historian Henry Adams wrote admiringly of the Catholic mind as it found expression in the medieval world. It was beautiful, it was good, but, alas, could not be true. Within a generation, younger American writers were impelled by that same beauty but dared to ask whether they might be equally impelled by the Catholic vision of the world as true. Thus began a great literary adventure, as American poets entered into the Catholic tradition and sought...

Lunch Discussion on “The Vocation of the Poet: Humanism, Christianity, and Verse”

Gavin House 1220 E 58th St., Chicago, IL
James Matthew Wilson, University of Saint Thomas, Houston

Open to current students and faculty. Others interested in joining should contact us. Lunch will be served. Join us for a lunch discussion with poet and professor James Matthew Wilson (University of St. Thomas, Houston) Poetry is, at best, a marginal art form in contemporary America, and yet its craft, technique, and tradition are all provocations to reconsider what it means to live a whole, formed life and what it means to encounter, contemplate, and understand reality. In this informal conversation, Professor Wilson will share his own experience of discovering the craft and vocation of verse and we'll consider what poetry has to...

Master Class on T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”

Gavin House 1220 E 58th St., Chicago, IL
James Matthew Wilson, University of Saint Thomas, Houston

A master class with poet and professor James Matthew Wilson (University of St. Thomas, Houston). Open to current graduate students, faculty, and advanced University of Chicago undergraduate students. Others interested in participating should contact us. Registrants will receive copies of the prepared reading. Generally regarded as the greatest poem of the twentieth century, T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets is not only an important poem but a masterful modern contribution to the long Christian-Platonist tradition of the West. It is at once a work of art and a suggestive vision of Christian humanist metaphysics, ethics, and mystical theology, one to which perhaps only Dante's Divine...

Recovering Hymnography Symposium

University of Chicago–TBA N/A, Hyde Park, IL
Jeffrey Wickes, University of Notre Dame | Cappella Romana, Vocal Ensemble | Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Brown University | Fr. Brian Dunkle, SJ, Boston College School of Theology and Ministry | Ashley Purpura, Purdue University | Rev. Andrew Summerson, University of St. Michael’s College

The Lumen Christi Institute, The Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies, and the Fordham Center for Orthodox Christian Studies Present: Recovering Hymnography Symposium May 15-16, 2022 | University of Chicago Free and open to the public. Please note you must register for each day separately. This symposium will explore the tradition of hymnography as both prayer and pedagogy, sharing insights about how biblical interpretation, ethical injunction, and theological reflection are combined with ritual reenactment in the texts they consider. Papers on early Christian liturgical hymnography in the Greek, Syriac, and Latin traditions will be shared and discussed with expert respondents....

Icons of Sound: Concert with Cappella Romana

Cappella Romana, Vocal Ensemble

The internationally renowned musical group Cappella Romana presents their concert “Icons of Sound” featuring pieces composed by the 9 th century nun Kassia and interpretations of medieval Byzantine chant for the feast of the Holy Cross in Constantinople Leading scholar of late-antique Christian poetry Susan Ashbrook Harvey will precede the concert at 4PM with a keynote address to begin our two-day symposium, “Recovering Hymnography.” The Recovering Hymnography program, including this concert, is made possible through a Vital Worship Grant from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, Grand Rapids, Michigan, with funds provided by Lilly Endowment Inc. This program is presented by the Lumen...

The Vocation of the Patristic Theologian: Inheriting the Voice of Early Christians

University Club of Chicago 76 E Monroe St Chicago, IL 60603, Downtown, IL
Ellen Scully, Seton Hall University | Bogdan Bucur, St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary | John Cavadini, University of Notre Dame | Lewis Ayres, Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas - Angelicum, Rome

This forum and reception, following the annual meeting of the North American Patristics Society, is co-sponsored by the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame. This forum invites graduate students and scholars of patristics to reflect on the nature of the craft and its relationship to contemporary theological studies, the academy, and church today. A panel of scholars, featuring John Cavadini, Lewis Ayres, Ellen Scully, and Bogdan Bucur, will speak on the nature of the vocation of the Patristic theologian and the challenges and opportunities one faces in research, scholarship, and teaching. We will further attend to the...

Seminar

Economics and Catholic Social Thought: A Primer

University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556, Notre Dame, IN

APPLY HERE Now in its fifth year, this seminar is designed as an introduction and immersion into Catholic social thought for graduate students and junior faculty in economics, finance, or related fields. Participants will cover foundational principles in Catholic social thought, starting with the human person, dignity, freedom, subsidiarity, solidarity, and the common good, and moving toward applications of these principles to conceptual understandings and ethical considerations involving economic topics such as utility theory, firm and business ethics, wages, markets, globalization, poverty, and development. Participants will delve into social encyclicals, secondary sources, and relevant economics texts. This seminar is sponsored...