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 ancient notion of “leisure” (in Greek: scholê, in Latin: otium). While much has been said in support of this claim, especially in Catholic intellectual circles, the focus has typically centered on the nature of leisure, which much of this dialogue takes as the starting point. In this lecture, Prof. Blaschko, who studies the philosophy of work at Notre Dame, will proceed in a different direction, asking “What kind of culture, and what kind of work culture, would we create if we wanted to incorporate genuine leisure into our lives?”
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 ancient notion of “leisure” (in Greek: scholê, in Latin: otium). While much has been said in support of this claim, especially in Catholic intellectual circles, the focus has typically centered on the nature of leisure, which much of this dialogue takes as the starting point. In this lecture, Prof. Blaschko, who studies the philosophy of work at Notre Dame, will proceed in a different direction, asking “What kind of culture, and what kind of work culture, would we create if we wanted to incorporate genuine leisure into our lives?”
Applications Open for the 2025 Summer Seminars
In their seventeenth year, the Lumen Christi Institute Summer Seminars in the Catholic Intellectual Tradition introduce participants to central themes, figures, and texts from the Catholic tradition. Please see the Event Calendar for details and application requirements. Please direct any questions to seminars@lumenchristi.org The Thought of René Girard – University of Southern California, June 15 to June 21, (Cynthia Haven, Grant Kaplan, Trevor Merrill) Catholic Social Thought in Business Education – University of Notre Dame, June 16 to June 19, (Jeffrey Burks, Lloyd Sandelands, Martin Schlag, Andreas Widmer) Dionysius the Areopagite: The Corpus and Legacy – University of Toronto, June 22 to…
CANCELLED FEBRUARY 27th: A Catholic Vision of Culture in the 21st Century | West Suburban Catholic Culture Series
As the Church has faced struggles in recent years, Pope Francis has repeatedly emphasized the role that journalists can play in the reform and renewal of the Church. But the mission of Catholics journalists is not always clear: they face the prophetic call of truth, and, at the same time, the common Christian vocation of the Great Commission. Can those work together? Can journalism be a form of evangelization? And can the Catholic Church teach the press something about the vocation of truth-telling in a polarized world? Reflecting on the work of Catholic journalism amid the Church’s challenges, Pillar editor JD Flynn considers those questions.
Reason & Regensburg: Pope Benedict and the Dialogue of Cultures
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.
Faith, Reason and the Eucharist
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.
Vestiges of the Trinity: Joyce on the Artist as Imago Dei
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.
Imago Dei: Philosophical Approaches to the Human Being as Image of God
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?
Against Nostalgia: Catholicism, History and Modernity
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. You can subscribe to the Lumen Christi Institute Podcast via our Soundcloud page, iTunes channel, or by searching for our…
Symposium on Gary Anderson’s Sin: A History
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.