News & Media
The Sister Thea Bowman Foundation has opened a search for a new executive director
Lumen Christi’s strategic partner the Sister Thea Bowman Black Catholic Education Foundation is seeking an executive director who is an experienced fundraiser-administrator to direct its Chicago office. This must be a person of vision with non-profit experience and a knowledge of Catholic higher education, the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the African American intellectual tradition. The individual must be faith-filled and one who exhibits an ability to work with, advise and mentor African American college students.
To view job qualifications and learn where to submit an application, click here or here.
“Science and Religion: A Dialogue of Cultures” will educate students, faculty, and the public through lectures, panel discussions, master classes, and summer seminars
To view this press release as a PDF, click here.
The Lumen Christi Institute is launching a new project to combat the perception of fundamental and necessary conflict between scientific theories and religious worldviews. “Science and Religion: A Dialogue of Cultures,” which will run from February 2019 to January 2020, is made possible by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation. The project will be co-led by Thomas Levergood, the Executive Director of the Lumen Christi Institute, and Michael Le Chevallier, the Assistant Director of the Lumen Christi Institute.
“The Lumen Christi Institute has for many years sponsored popular lectures and panel discussions by scientists, philosophers, and theologians who promote a sounder understanding of the relationship between science and religion,” Levergood said. “Thanks to the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, we are excited to be formalizing and greatly expanding our science and religion programming, and reaching a much broader and more diverse audience, through ‘A Dialogue of Cultures.’”
Founded in 1987 by Sir John Templeton, an American-born British investor, banker, fund manager, and self-described “enthusiastic Christian,” the Templeton Foundation supports projects aimed at advancing human flourishing and spiritual progress through asking Big Questions, promoting character development, and encouraging people to aspire to a deeper understanding of the universe. In 2017 it granted nearly $100 million across six funding areas. “Science and Religion: A Dialogue of Cultures” is made possible by a grant awarded through the Foundation’s “Science & the Big Questions” Public Engagement area, which funds endeavors that advance the Templeton Foundation’s mission beyond the academy.
“A Dialogue of Cultures” will engage students, faculty, scientists, and the public in conversations about pressing topics at the intersection of science and religion. Through summer seminars for undergraduate and graduate students, non-credit courses, and public lectures and panel discussions hosted at the University of Chicago, the project will communicate the depth and breadth of the Catholic intellectual tradition’s contribution to the dialogue between scientific inquiry, methods, and conclusions and philosophical and theological perspectives on anthropology, creation, cosmology, and the reasonableness of faith.
Project partners will include Steve Barr, professor of physics at the University of Delaware and president and founder of the Society of Catholic Scientists; Fr. Nicanor Austriaco, a professor of biology at Providence College who will join Barr to lead a weeklong summer seminar on modern science and Catholic faith for graduate students; and Dr. Chris Baglow, Director of the Science & Religion Initiative at the University of Notre Dame’s McGrath Institute for Church Life, who will join Barr in leading a weeklong summer seminar for undergraduate students in New Orleans.
The first “A Dialogue of Cultures” program funded by the Templeton Foundation was a day-long conference hosted at the University of Chicago titled “Science, Creation, and the Catholic Imagination.” On February 23, 2019 it gathered over seventy high-school students from two dozen schools in four states for Mass, seminar discussions, fellowship, and presentations by leading scholars on the topics of faith and reason, creation and cosmology, and the Catholic imagination.
The first public event of the program will be a panel discussion held on March 13 at the University of Chicago on the topic of Science & Wonder, featuring evolutionary biologist Michael Coates, Field Museum Poet-in-Residence Eric Elshtain, astrophysicist Robert Scherrer, and religious ethicist Lisa Sideris.
Founded by Catholic scholars at the University of Chicago in 1997, the Lumen Christi Institute enriches academic communities at the University of Chicago and across the nation with the wisdom of the Catholic intellectual and spiritual traditions. As a leading center for academic programming situated at one of the world’s elite research universities, Lumen Christi brings the depth and breadth of the Catholic tradition into conversation with the best of secular thought for the sake of renewing the academy and the culture.
Lumen Christi executes more than 120 annual academic events across four program areas. The University Program brings leading scholars and teachers to the University of Chicago for an ongoing conversation about the Catholic intellectual tradition’s many dimensions. The Cultural Forum fosters deliberate discourse on American institutions and the role and place of Catholic doctrine, thought, and practice in their formation and operation. The Catholic Scholars Program, which includes Lumen Christi’s renowned Summer Seminars in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, contributes to the renewal of Catholic academic thought by creating the occasion for exchange and collaboration between, and the formation of, Catholic scholars both established and rising. Finally, the Program in Catholic Social Thought catalyzes and supports reflection on Catholic social thought in order to address social, economic, and political problems facing national and global societies.
Inquiries about “Science and Religion: A Dialogue of Cultures” can be directed to project co-director and Lumen Christi Institute Assistant Director Michael Le Chevallier.
Lumen Christi’s 2018 Summer Seminars, offered for the tenth consecutive year, afforded 67 doctoral students and junior faculty the opportunity to gather at prestigious academic institutions for discussion of important texts and topics from the Catholic intellectual tradition. Attracting first-rate applicants from an international pool, the seminars are unique learning experiences that prepare young scholars for life as Catholic academics who will bring the light of Christ into the contemporary university.
This summer Lumen Christi hosted four seminars. The first, taking place from June 10 to 13 and hosted in partnership with several organizations at the University of Notre Dame and the Catholic Research Economists Discussion Organization (CREDO), was the third annual iteration of “Economics and Catholic Social Thought: A Primer.” Led by a team of scholars comprising Martijn Cremers (Notre Dame), Andrew Yuengert (Catholic University), Mary Hirschfeld (Villanova), and Msgr. Martin Schlag (University of St. Thomas – MN), the seminar drew twenty doctoral students and faculty from fields such as finance, economics, history, political philosophy, and moral theology to the University of Notre Dame for three days of discussion. The Primer is designed to help participants better understand foundational principles of Catholic social teaching and to apply these principles to considerations involving topics common in economics, business, and finance. To that end the primary texts covered by the syllabus included social encyclicals such as Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (the 1891 encyclical on the conditions of workers, considered the font of Catholic social doctrine), secondary literature, and case studies.
The seminar drew participants from elite institutions such as MIT, New York University, Northwestern, and University of Florida. Schlag celebrated daily Mass for the group and Cremers hosted several meals at his home near campus.
Asked about their experiences at the seminar, one participant called it a “wonderful gift from God.” Another said, “I found the seminar instructive and enjoyable in every way.” A third reported, “The seminar was really outstanding. I thought the format, the topics chosen, the management of our time, and the cross-section of participants to be excellent.”
Participants also said they would put what they learned at the seminar to use in their own teaching. One attendee planned to incorporate aspects of the seminar into the managerial economics class he teaches for MBA students; another wanted to integrate Catholic social thought into his teaching in the University of Chicago’s core program; several said they would structure their courses on Catholic social teaching to reflect seminar conversations.
Two weeks later, from June 27 to July 3, Lumen Christi hosted “St. Thomas Aquinas on Free Choice,” a seminar led by Fr. Stephen Brock (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome), an expert on the thought of Thomas Aquinas and veteran leader of Aquinas seminars (this being his fourth for Lumen Christi). Held this year at the University of Chicago, the seminar gathered seventeen humanities PhD students for discussion of the Angelic Doctor’s writings on free choice and free will, comparing and contrasting them to modern philosophical accounts of those topics. The syllabus included ten 2.5-hour sessions and consisted mostly of selections from Aquinas’ corpus, but also included supplementary material by Plato, Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and Elizabeth Anscombe. Sessions were interspersed with daily morning Mass at nearby St. Thomas the Apostle Parish and by evening meals and socials.
The participants hailed from institutions like Princeton, Ohio State, Baylor, Saint Louis University, and University of Chicago. They spoke highly of the seminar’s influence on their thinking and research. One attendee, working toward his doctorate in philosophy, reported, “this seminar is certainly one of the highlights of my career to date.” Another, a student of systematic theology at University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College, said the seminar “was easily one of the highlights of my graduate studies.” A third said, “rarely have I enjoyed such intense and intelligent discussion of quite difficult philosophical topics.”
Perhaps Lumen Christi’s most celebrated seminar, “The Thought of John Henry Newman,” met July 7 to 14 for the sixth straight year in Oxford’s Merton College. Led by Fr. Ian Ker, an English priest and the world’s leading Newman authority, this seminar brought fifteen doctoral students and faculty to the setting of Newman’s early academic career for an immersive exploration of the life and thought of the man whom Pope Benedict XVI beatified in 2010 and who has been an inspiration for countless converts to Catholicism since his own Roman homecoming in 1845.
Student participants, gathered together from institutions such as Yale, University of Virginia, and the Catholic Institute of Paris and representing disciplines as diverse as English, healthcare ethics, philosophy, and medieval studies, enjoyed a week of Oxford-style sessions—in which a participant prepares a short paper summarizing an assigned text and then leads discussion after fielding feedback from Ker. They also visited Newman’s old rooms in Oriel College and his retreat and study at nearby Littlemore College, the site of his conversion. Daily Mass was celebrated at Merton’s beautiful chapel, built in the thirteenth century, and in Newman’s private chapel at Littlemore. Participants also had ample time to explore Oxford’s many sights and to take in England’s World Cup semifinals match from local pubs.
Students were amazed by Oxford’s storied beauty and the serene, retreat-like quiet of the seminar, which introduced them to the major works and themes of Newman’s long career as both an Anglican and Catholic thinker. Calling it “exceptional in every sense” and “a truly superior academic experience,” several reported that they would use what they had learned in undergraduate courses they teach at their home institutions. One student said, “coming from a secular university, these sorts of opportunities are vital for my development as a Catholic scholar, and I am extremely grateful to Lumen Christi for the opportunity.”
“Coming from a secular university, these sorts of opportunities are vital for my development as a Catholic scholar.”
Finally, from July 21 to 28, longtime seminar leader Russell Hittinger (University of Tulsa and co-chair of Lumen Christi’s Program in Catholic Social Thought) led his eighth consecutive seminar, this time alongside Fr. Michael Sherwin, OP (University of Fribourg) on the topic “Truth and Authority in Augustine’s City of God,” which Hittinger had last taught in 2014. The seminar treated fifteen humanities doctoral students and several faculty auditors to a fine-combed analysis of the theological and philosophical themes of Augustine’s most comprehensive work, De Civitate Dei, with an eye toward how truth and authority function in the bishop of Hippo’s arguments. Students from Cambridge, Notre Dame, Harvard, and Florida State gathered at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology and then the University of California, Berkeley, for ten sessions.
One PhD student from Baylor studying historical theology said of the seminar that it “was Christian academic learning at its best— careful reading and argument amongst a community of friendship and shared living. This is a rare but necessary kind of educational enterprise.”
In 2019 Lumen Christi will expand its seminar programming to include an undergraduate, Hittinger-led seminar in California on Augustine; a seminar titled “Business and Catholic Social Thought: A Primer” at Notre Dame; a doctoral seminar in France on René Girard; and several more. The 2019 seminar offerings will be available early in the new year on Lumen Christi’s website.