The broad public debates on religion and ethics frequently suffer from empirical deficiencies. All sides tend to argue in a way one might call an “a priori” mode of argumentation. In contrast, this lecture offers some empirically grounded reflections. First, Hans Joas asks whether the morality of secularized societies could be a mere remnant or […]
American Catholic women rarely surface as protagonists in histories of the United States. Offering a new perspective, Kathleen Sprows Cummings places Catholic women at the forefront of two defining developments of the Progressive Era: the emergence of the “New Woman” and Catholics’ struggle to define their place in American culture. Cummings highlights four women: Chicago-based […]
Published in 1949, Paul Blanshard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power captured the attention of American intelligentsia with its claim that American Catholic citizens had to choose “between a church hostile to fundamentals of democracy and a state where contrary views are implicit under our Constitution.” John F. Kennedy’s famous speech to Protestant ministers in Houston on Sept. […]
David Nirenberg (University of Chicago) Cosponsored by the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies
In Sin: A History, Gary Anderson shows how changing conceptions of sin lay at the heart of the biblical tradition. Spanning two thousand years, the book demonstrates how sin, once conceived of as a physical burden, becomes, over time, eclipsed by economic metaphors. Transformed from a weight that an individual carried, this Jewish revolution in thought […]
Cosponsored by the Center for Law, Philosophy and Human Values This lecture considers several recent attempts by Catholic political philosophers working in the natural law tradition to give an account of law’s authority, and their success in answering some recent criticism. The difficulties in providing a successful natural law account of law’s authority gives us […]
Gyula Klima (Fordham University)
Published upon the heels of the global financial collapse of 2008, Benedict XVI’s social encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, has been received with great controversy in America. Conservatives have criticized the encyclical’s indictment of neoliberal policies while progressives have severed the encyclical’s social concerns from their origin in the sanctity of human life. This panel discussion of Caritas in Veritate will consider […]
It’s a good thing, almost everyone would say, to want to know things; that view is certainly bone-deep in our universities and colleges, as well as in the church. But there are different ways of coming to want to know things, different ways of training and forming the appetite for knowledge. It has been traditional […]
Tickets: $15 general, $5 students and seniors University of Chicago students free with ID Cosponsored by the France Chicago Center
This lecture will investigate the interpretation of the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse, in Origen and the Origenian tradition. Why does Origen accept this book, whereas many Origenian exegetes do not? What role does Millenarianism play in this choice, and what kind of exegesis does Origen apply in order to accept the Apocalypse? In answering these questions and others, the lecture looks to two […]
