Fr. Benedict Ashley’s life at the University of Chicago in the 1930’s included Trotskyite activism and participation in the first Great Books Seminar led by President Robert Maynard Hutchins. His lecture will consider liberal education in light of this history and the life of scholarship and inquiry it inspired.
The work of Pierre Hadot and, in his later years, Michel Foucault on the ancient pagan and Christian practices of askesis, or “spiritual exercise,” has proven to be of interest not only to scholars of the late classical and early Christian era, but to a much broader range of humanists working across a variety of disciplines. One reason for this interest is the possibility that religious and non-religious contemporary academics might be able to incorporate the techniques and aims of spiritual exercise into their own scholarly work, thus imbuing their academic teaching and writing with an ethical, if not religious,...
Professor Paul Griffiths (Duke University) led a seminar on Augustine’s seminal later works, De Trinitate and De Civitate Dei at the University of St. Mary of the Lake Conference Center in Mundelein, Illinois.
