Despite flaws in his biology, Aquinas' writings offer us guidance in our approach to 21st century biotechnology. Aquinas' notion of a Just War provides us with a way for thinking about biotechnology, since both use morally ambiguous means to address evils in an imperfect world. A comparison of these two disparate issues can yield criteria […]
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn left a vast body of work, an inestimable influence on Russian culture, and a deeply divided public opinion. He documented the Soviet prison system, developed forms of literary representation for describing the experiences of prisoners, and was courageous in the face of repression. But doubts linger about him as artist, thinker and person, […]
Prof. Corey Barnes (Oberlin College) led a seminar on Aquinas’s Christology in his Summa theologiae at the University of St. Mary of the Lake Conference Center in Mundelein, Illinois.
Deeply ingrained assumptions about the nature of historical change prevent an adequate comprehension of the transformations that have created the contemporary Western world over the past half-millennium. Departures from traditional Christianity since the sixteenth century, and related attempts to ground truth claims in scripture or reason alone yielded unintended pluralisms via Protestantism and modern philosophy […]
Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the Trinity is crucial to James Joyce’s presentation of the artist in both Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses. Now, Joyce’s deployment of Trinitarian themes is not strictly orthodox of course. But the Trinity does provide a model, an exemplar, for a proper understanding of artistic fecundity and a subtle critique […]
This conference addresses the following questions: What constitutes the image of God? How are we to understand Augustine’s claim that human beings come to understand both who they are and who they have been only through relationship with God? How do St. Thomas Aquinas and Blaise Pascal remain within or depart from the Augustinian tradition? […]
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 […]
