Lumen Christi Institute

Representation vs. Direct Realism in Modern Philosophy
2010-04-05 16:30 (America/Chicago) | University of Chicago, 5801 S Ellis Ave Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
Gyula Klima (Fordham University)

The Authority of Law in Recent Catholic Political Philosophy
2010-03-02 16:30 | Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture, 1025 E 58th St. Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
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 reason to rethink the sort of explanatory ambitions of new natural law theorists.

Symposium on Gary Anderson’s Sin: A History
2010-02-24 17:30 | Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture, 1025 E 58th St. Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
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 shaped the way the Christian church understood the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Shakespeare’s Jewish Questions
2010-02-09 17:30 | Ida Noyes Hall, Library, 1212 E 59th St. Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
David Nirenberg (University of Chicago)
Cosponsored by the Chicago Center for Jewish Studies

Are Catholics Unreliable from a Democratic Point of View? Reflections on the 60th Anniversary of Paul Blanchard’s American Freedom and Catholic Power
2009-11-04 17:30 | University of Chicago, 5801 S Ellis Ave Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
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. 12, 1960 was in many respects a response to Blanshard’s thesis. Today Blanshard’s bigotry may not be explicitly defended in educated circles, but questions remain about what made his book so compelling. Patrick Brennan considers whether Blanshard was onto something about the incompatibility of Catholic principles and American democratic philosophy.

A Colloquium on Kathleen Sprows Cummings’s New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era
2009-10-19 16:30 | University of Chicago, 5801 S Ellis Ave Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
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 journalist Margaret Buchanan Sullivan; Sister Julia McGroarty, SND, founder of Trinity College in Washington, D.C., one of the first Catholic women’s colleges; Philadelphia educator Sister Assisium McEvoy, SSJ; and Katherine Eleanor Conway, a Boston editor, public figure, and antisuffragist. Cummings uses each woman’s story to explore how debates over Catholic identity were intertwined with the renegotiation of American gender roles. By examining female power within Catholic religious communities and organizations, she challenges the widespread assumption that women who were faithful members of a patriarchal church were incapable of pathbreaking work on behalf of women.

Does Secularization Lead to Moral Decline?
2009-10-13 16:30 | Classics 110, 1010 E 59th St. Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
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 reverberation of religious traditions. Secondly, he briefly investigates with regard to tribal societies whether religion should be considered to be constitutive for morality at all. Thirdly, he uses an example from Christian missionary work to look at the interaction of new religion and traditional morality. And lastly he brings together these reflections by claiming that normative regulations have a double origin and he will mark the precise point where he sees a present danger of moral regression caused by secularization.

Imago Dei: Philosophical Approaches to the Human Being as Image of God
2009-10-09 16:30 - 2009-10-10 17:00 | University of Chicago, 5801 S Ellis Ave Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
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? What role do Aristotelian and Platonic (or neo-Platonic) conceptions of human identity and the soul play? Lastly, as Genesis offers an essentially relational account of “Imago Dei,” in what way can we discover or participate in such relationship with God through social relationships?

Vestiges of the Trinity: Joyce on the Artist as Imago Dei
2009-10-09 16:30 | University of Chicago, 5801 S Ellis Ave Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
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 of popular romantic conceptions of artistic self-expression. Whatever his intentions, Joyce’s treatment suggest ways in which the Thomistic doctrine of the Trinity and the Imago Dei can contribute to a fresh understanding of artistic activity.

Against Nostalgia: Catholicism, History and Modernity
2009-10-06 16:30 | Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture, 1025 E 58th St. Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
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 that remain pervasively influential today. Catholicism continues to offer an intellectually viable alternative–provided one does not subscribe to inadequate views of how the past became the present.
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Seminar: Summa theologiae
2009-09-05 23:00 - 2009-09-10 23:00 | University of Saint Mary of the Lake, 1000 East Maple Avenue Mundelein, IL 60060, Mundelein, IL
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.

The Contemplation of God in Medieval Literature
2009-03-05 17:30 | Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture, 1025 E 58th St. Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL

The Solzhenitzyn Question
2008-11-19 17:30 | University of Chicago, 5801 S Ellis Ave Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
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, and thus prompt us to raise the Solzhenitsyn question.

Thomas Aquinas, Scientist: How Might He Approach 21st Century Biotechnology
2008-11-12 17:30 | University of Chicago, 5801 S Ellis Ave Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
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 for an ethics of biotechnology.

Sketch of a Phenomenological Concept of Sacrifice
2008-05-29 16:30 | University of Chicago, 5801 S Ellis Ave Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
In this lecture, Jean-Luc Marion advances a phenomenological notion of sacrifice that is distinct from the notion of sacrifice typically discussed in Sociology or even Religious Studies. He argues that sacrifice restores the gift from the side of the givee, much as he has argued previously that forgiveness restores the gift from the side of the giver. He develops both notions within the framework of a phenomenology of givenness, advancing the thesis that sacrifice requires neither destruction, nor restitution, nor even exchange, and still less contract. Sacrifice surpasses all this because sacrifice does not arise as an economic notion (one that would make an economy of the gift), but rather from the gift itself. The function of sacrifice is only to permit acknowledgment of the giver and thereby the entire process of givenness, by reducing the given.

Faith, Reason and the Eucharist
2008-05-14 16:30 | Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture, 1025 E 58th St. Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
Between doubts about “natural theology” and post-modern polemics against “modernity”, an older view that the existence of God can be known “by the natural light of reason” gets little hearing. Perhaps it is time to revisit these older views in light of Aquinas’ understanding of the rational powers as “bodily presence”, analogous to the power of signification found in music and, more profoundly, in the Eucharist; only within this broader conception of human reason can we speak of the existence of God as demonstrable by rational proof.

The Christian Identity of Europe
2008-04-17 16:00 | Kent Hall, Room 120, 1020 E 58th St. Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
Europe is suffering from a spiritual identity crisis. Some countries rejected the historical preambulum to a European Constitution because Christianity was mentioned as one of the founding elements of the union… At the heart of the crisis is the loss of the spiritual basis on which the Continent had been united, mostly the idea of a Christian civilization. This address investigates the growth of this idea through the centuries as well as the causes of its recent decline and, in some areas, even loss. Can a European union survive without its founding idea? Are other models available, such as for instance that of a United States of Europe, on a purely economic basis? What is the difference between Europe and the USA in this respect? Louis Dupré is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor Emeritus in Yale University’s religious studies department.

Reason & Regensburg: Pope Benedict and the Dialogue of Cultures
2008-04-08 16:30 | University of Chicago, 5801 S Ellis Ave Chicago, IL 60637, Hyde Park, IL
To bridge the cultural rift between Islam and the West, there is an urgent need to reestablish the mutually reinforcing dialogue between faith and reason in the West, and to support moderate Muslim scholars attempting to retrieve a non-voluntarist interpretation of Islam, often at risk to their own lives.
