Our Events

Featured Events & News

Views Navigation

Event Views Navigation

Today

Filters

Changing any of the form inputs will cause the list of events to refresh with the filtered results.

The Theology of Nature and the Nature of Theology

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

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 of Bounds: Collection, Division, Creation" 5:00pm-6:15pm Willemien Otten (University of Chicago Divinity School): "Double or Nothing: Creation and Gender in Eriugena, Hildegard, and Hadewijch" (the inaugural Dorothy Grant Maclear Lecture) Reception to follow Thursday, March 31 2:00pm-3:15pm William Schweiker (University of Chicago Divinity School): "How Natural is...

Negotiating Tragedy and the Tragic: Discursive, Performative, and Interpretive Strategies in Late Ancient Christian Literature

Classics 110 1010 E 59th St. Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL

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 autobiographical and hagiographical writing, in the framing of Christian moral response to human anguish and indignities, and in theological reflection on interrelated issues of providence, freedom, fate, and hope. This lecture will sample each of these dimensions, concentrating especially on works of the Cappadocian Fathers, John...

Finding Tragedy in the Bible with Its Early Christian Interpreters

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

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 in-person gatherings. Please see here for the city’s most up-to-date guidelines. These are guidelines subject to change. If you have any questions, please contact us.

Non-Credit Course – Faith, Science, and Reason

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, were likened to a 30-volume encyclopedia, each volume consisting of 450pp., each page the equivalent of a million years, modern humans appear on the last page of the last volume. Are we humans a random consequence of evolving mindless matter or the crowning achievement of God’s...

Lunch Discussion on “Theology and the Erotic: Has the Internet Killed Love?”

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

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 distinguish between good loves and bad? In this lunchtime discussion, Fr. Stephen Fields (Hackett Professor of Theology, Georgetown University) will offer some brief reflections on the nature of love from the perspective of philosophy and theology. Then we will open the floor for a wide-ranging...

Symposium on “The Light that Binds: A Study in Thomas Aquinas’s Metaphysics of Natural Law”

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

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 questions. ABOUT THE BOOK If there is any one author in the history of moral thought who has come to be associated with the idea of natural law, it is Saint Thomas Aquinas. Many things have been written about Aquinas's natural law teaching, and from...

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...