Master Class on “Saint Thomas Aquinas on the Metaphysics of Evil”
Registration Required. Open to current students and faculty. Copies of the readings will be provided. To view photos of the master class, visit Lumen Christi’s Facebook page. Saint Thomas Aquinas’s general conception of evil is very well known, and very simple. Evil, he holds, is nothing other than privation of due good. This conception has sometimes been criticized, as not adequate to our experience of evil or to certain types of evil. It is also connected with other controversial positions of his, such as that no one directly intends evil. And it is not easy to square with his own…
Plato’s Bedroom: Desire, Union, and Procreation
Free and open to the public. Cosponsored by the Department of Philosophy. Plato found philosophy in some of the same erotic anxieties that permeate contemporary life, and even explored themes central to Catholic conceptions of sexuality. This lecture will be based on central themes from Plato’s Symposium, drawing on David O’Connor’s Plato’s Bedroom: Ancient Wisdom and Modern Love. ABOUT Plato’s Bedroom Plato’s Bedroom is a book for people who want to be better at falling in love and being in love, with all the ecstasies and dangers erotic life can bring. It is also an inviting book for readers who…
Master Class on “Plato’s Leaky Myths: How the Erotic Dialogues use Plato’s Literary Predecessors”
Registration Required. Open to current students and faculty. This seminar will look at striking examples of how in the Symposium and Phaedrus Plato read and re-wrote the myths available in the literary culture of his time. We will be especially interested in how the literary templates that seem to underlie the dialogues complicate their surface “doctrine.” SCHEDULE 1:30pm Coffee & Pastries 2:00pm Session I 3:25pm Break 3:35pm Session II 5:00pm End, wine and cheese reception To view photos of the master class, visit Lumen Christi’s Facebook page.
Body, Eros, and Eucharist
Free and open to the public. Cosponsored by the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion. About The Wedding Feast of the Lamb: In The Wedding Feast of the Lamb, Emmanuel Falque links philosophy and theology in an original fashion that allows us to see the full effect of theology’s “backlash” against philosophy. By attending closely to the incarnation and the eucharist, Falque develops a new concept of the body and of love: By avoiding the common mistake of “angelism”―consciousness without body―Falque considers the depths to which our humanity reflects animality, or body without consciousness. He shows the…
The Future of Liberalism: Relativism Confronts St. Augustine
Free and open to the public. Cosponsored by the Theology Club at the Divinity School. The future of political liberalism is a topic much discussed in recent scholarly books and popular journals. This lecture will integrate the recent argument of Patrick Deneen in Why Liberalism Failed, beginning where the book leaves off by addressing the following question: If it is true, as many have argued, that liberalism has become morally corroded, then can reasonable people still make a case for our continued cooperation with it? Discussing thinkers like Richard Rorty and John Rawls, this lecture will critically examine efforts to…
Athens, Jerusalem—and Alexandria: Christian Wisdom between the Bible and Greek Philosophy
A lecture by Rémi Brague with a response by Jean-Luc Marion. Free and open to the public. Cosponsored by the Ethics Club at the Divinity School. This lecture will be audio and video recorded and accessible via this webpage shortly after the event. Persons with disabilities who need an accommodation in order to participate in this event should contact us by email or call 773-955-5887. Christian wisdom could work its way through the Hebrew Bible and Greek philosophy and produce some sort of “Alexandrian” synthesis by focusing on the Logos, a concept explicitly central to Greek philosophy and implicitly fundamental to…
Elizabeth Anscombe on Living the Truth
Elizabeth Anscombe was one of the most important and influential analytic philosophers of the twentieth century. One of the last lectures she delivered was titled “Doing the Truth.” In it, she set out to identify and clarify a specifically practical mode of truth as the proper goal of a specifically practical mode of reasoning and knowledge. This talk will explore how Anscombe understands practical truth by relating it to her influential theory of the intentionality of action; its ultimate suggestion is that “doing the truth” just is living a good human life–i.e., knowingly performing actions in accordance with true judgments of right…
What is Freedom? Some Reflections on Augustine
You can subscribe to the Lumen Christi Institute Podcast via our Soundcloud page, iTunes channel, Stitcher, TuneIn, ListenNotes, Podbean, Pocket Casts, and Google Play Music. To view photos of the symposium, visit Lumen Christi’s Facebook page. A lecture by Olivier Boulnois with responses by Jean-Luc Marion and Willemien Otten, and moderated by Ryan Coyne. Free and open to the public. Cosponsored by the Theology Club at the Divinity School. This lecture will be audio and video recorded and accessible via this webpage shortly after the event. Persons with disabilities who need an accommodation in order to participate in this event should contact us by email or call 773-955-5887.
Master Class on “Jacques Maritain, Étienne Gilson, and the Thomist Renewal in the 20th Century: Academic and Spiritual Approaches”
Open to current university students and faculty. PDFs of the assigned readings will be provided for those who register. For the Blessed Paul VI, Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) was a master “in the art of thinking and praying”. In 1975, Paul VI sent a letter to Etienne Gilson (1884-1978) to thank him for his whole life devoted to the search of truth and wisdom. In “Fides et Ratio” (1998, n.74), Saint John Paul II suggested Maritain and Gilson, among other names, as models of thinkers to reconcile philosophy and theology, reason and the word of God. What are the lessons taught…
Non-Credit Course on “Faith, Crisis, Christ”
6:00 Dinner | 6:30 Lecture This weekly non-credit course is open to current students and faculty. Registrants are free to attend as many sessions as they choose. Sessions do not presuppose previous attendance or prior knowledge of the subject. The project of fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding) is not reserved to professional theologians but is the prerogative of every thinking person, and can be especially pressing when the claims of religion—and rationality itself—are viewed with suspicion or contempt. The twentieth century and the first decades of our own have erected formidable systems of skepticism yet also brought into the field notable…