News & Media

From 2012 to 2020, Fr. Paul Mankowski, SJ delivered hundreds of lectures and master classes at the Lumen Christi Institute. Seeking to share the depth of his scholarship, this podcast offers many of his lectures (edited for coherence and quality) to the public in digital format for the first time. The first season will feature a course that Fr. Mankowski gave on Joseph Ratzinger’s Jesus of Nazareth and dozens of lectures centered around the books of the Bible (including Genesis, many of the prophets, the Gospel of Matthew, and St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans). Episodes will be released on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from September through December. To conclude the season, we’ll offer one or two interviews with people who knew Fr. Mankowski well and can offer an entry point to his person and scholarship.

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October 30, 2025

Magis Lecture | Why Do We Need Saints and Miracles?

Please join the Lumen Christi Institute, the Bollandist Society, and St. Ignatius College Preparatory School as we welcome the acclaimed Yale scholar, Carlos Eire. Eire's 2023 book, They Flew: A History of the Impossible, explores how historians have grappled with
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October 29, 2025

A History of the Impossible: Carlos Eire on They Flew

In his history of the impossible, They Flew, award-winning historian Carlos Eire mines the firsthand accounts and archival evidence of the miraculous and demonic in early modern Europe. How did an increasingly skeptical and scientific culture account for events deemed
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October 15, 2025

Our Hearts Are Restless: Augustine’s Confessions and Modern Anxiety – Ever Ancient, Ever New: The Sources of Pope Leo XIV | West Suburban Catholic Culture Series

In this lecture, Prof. Moringiello will introduce the Confessions, one of the greatest books in the Western canon, and one especially dear to Pope Leo’s heart. He will talk about his experience teaching it to undergraduates at Villanova University and
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September 25, 2025

A Spiritual Manual for the Technological Age: A Discussion of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine

We all experience how the rapid advance of technology, especially AI, has affected the way we live, think, and experience the world. But has it also changed who we are? In his new book, Against the Machine: on the Unmaking
A Catholic Vision of Culture in the 21st Century | West Suburban Catholic Culture Series
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May 14, 2025

A Catholic Vision of Art: Beauty – The Highway to God – A Catholic Vision of Culture in the 21st Century | West Suburban Catholic Culture Series

Beautiful art reflects the glory of the living, incarnate God, Jesus Christ, whether or not explicitly religious in subject matter. Art is not only an instrument and expression of culture, but also has a prophetic capacity to “prepare the way
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May 9, 2025

What Can We Say About God? An Interview with David Novak on God-Talk

The Judeo-Christian tradition has long grappled with how man speaks of God and how God speaks of of himself. In his new book, God-Talk, the distinguished Jewish philosopher David Novak offers a new perspective on how the Jewish people and
A Catholic Vision of Culture in the 21st Century | West Suburban Catholic Culture Series
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April 24, 2025

Christianity, Culture, and Sport: From Play to Virtue – A Catholic Vision of Culture in the 21st Century | West Suburban Catholic Culture Series

Drawing on Brown’s exegetical exploration of Wisdom’s paideia in the Book of Wisdom, Clark Power explores the relationship between Christianity and culture (following Remi Brague) with a focus on sports and more specifically youth sports. He argues that sports is
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March 27, 2025

Polarization, Social Cohesion, and the Economy

With polarization on the rise around the globe, scholars have pointed to a broader fragmentation of social cohesion. Economics, sociology, theology and philosophy offer different entry points for exploring these problems. How might we better understand this global moment? This
A Catholic Vision of Culture in the 21st Century | West Suburban Catholic Culture Series
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March 20, 2025

A Philosophy of Work, Leisure, and Catholic Culture – A Catholic Vision of Culture in the 21st Century | West Suburban Catholic Culture Series

In his well-known and influential essay, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper claims that we in modern western society have come to inhabit a “world of total work,” and that an essential precondition for escape is recapturing a more
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February 27, 2025

Gender, The Body, and Holiness in the Middle Ages

A symposium on Rachel Smith's (Villanova University) book, Excessive Saints: Gender, Narrative, and Theological Invention in Thomas of Cantimpré’s Mystical Hagiographies. Rachel Smith will outline the major themes of her work. Then, Willemien Otten (University of Chicago), Bernard McGinn (University
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January 30, 2025

The Human Person and Biotechnology: Artificial Intelligence and its Limitations

Artificial intelligence is increasingly interfacing with all aspects of human life, raising particular ethical challenges in medicine and biotechnology. The ethical challenges of AI must be grounded in the limits of the discipline it is applied to. Medicine has seen