The Salvific Power of the Inner Life of Christ: The Witness of the Ecumenical Councils
Free and open to the public. Registration for in-person attendance is not required, but requested. Contact us with any questions. Note the time for this event has been changed from 4:30 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. This event is cosponsored by the Harvard Catholic Forum. Standard accounts of salvation in both East and West typically do not include a consideration of how Christ’s inner life-his thoughts, feelings, and intentions- are salvific. Such an omission is inconsistent with the witness of both the Scriptures and the ecumenical councils. In affirming the necessity for human salvation of Christ’s human mind and will, the ecumenical councils…
The Doctrine of Salvation in Nicholas Cabasilas’s “Life in Christ”
THIS IS AN IN-PERSON EVENT. Open to current graduate students and University of Chicago Undergraduates. Others who are interested in participating should contact us. Copies of Life in Christ will be provided for registrants. Life in Christ “originates in this life and arises from it. It is perfected, however, in the life to come, when we shall have reached the last day. It cannot attain perfection in men’s souls in this life, nor even in that which is to come without already having begun here.” So writes the 14th century Greek theologian Nicholas Cabasilas in The Life in Christ. This work is a classic, synthetic presentation…
Fall Non-Credit Course: “The Living Jesus at the Intersection of History and Faith”
REGISTER HERE 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. Jesus of Nazareth, a Galilean Jew crucified in a remote corner of the Roman Empire nearly 2,000 years ago, is considered one of the world’s greatest teachers and the founder of its oldest institution. More books and films have been produced about Jesus than any other historical person. This non-credit class will consider both what historical methods can ascertain about Jesus…
Master Class on Newman’s Oxford University Sermons
REGISTER HERE This event will be held online over Zoom. Open to current graduate students and faculty. Others interested in participating should contact us. More info TBA. Fr. Fields will also lead a summer seminar for graduate students on the thought of John Henry Newman at Merton College, Oxford this summer. More information can be found here.
The Theologian’s Vocation in the Academy Today: A Master Class for Graduate Students in Theology
Open to current graduate students in theology. Others interested in participating should contact us. A two-part, online master class for graduate students in theology on the vocation of the theologian in the contemporary academy. Dates: January 15 & February 12 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. CST via Zoom Overview: What is the vocation of the Catholic theologian in the academy today? The increasing focus within higher education toward producing economically successful citizens within late modernity’s secularized culture is well-known. Within the theological world itself, graduate programs in theology are deeply compartmentalized into distinct sub-disciplines that often take their self-understanding and academic culture…
Ecumenical Panel on “For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church”
Free and open to the public. This program will be held as a hybrid, in-person and online event. Presented by the Lumen Christi Institute and the Fordham Orthodox Christian Studies Center. Cosponsored by the Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion and the Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies. “As we make this journey towards full communion, we already have the duty to offer common witness to the love of God for all people by working together in the service of humanity” —Common Declaration of Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew and Pope Francis, May 2014. This panel will examine the recent social document For the Life…
Catholic Culture Series on “Catholic Literary Heritage”
The Lumen Christi Institute’s West Suburban Catholic Culture Series returns in 2021-22 with a monthly series on the theme of Catholic literary heritage. We will survey the history of literature written by Catholics from the early middle ages to the late twentieth century. What is Catholic literature? What is our Catholic literary heritage? St. John Henry Newman has informed us that Catholic literature is more than “religious literature” or “the literature of religious men.” Rather, Catholic literature is literature of “all subjects whatever, treated as a Catholic would treat them, and as he only can treat them.” Not only doctrine,…
Magis Series on Faith and Reason
Free and open to the public. Presented by the Lumen Christi Institute and Saint Ignatius College Prep. What does it mean to believe? Does one believe because of evidence? In spite of evidence? Is belief the beginning of wisdom or the opposite of science? For over two thousand years, the Catholic Church has defended the rich interrelation between faith and reason. As Pope John Paul II said in his encyclical, Fides et Ratio, “Faith and reason are like the two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.” Faith without reason leads to superstition. Reason without…
Negotiating Tragedy and the Tragic: Discursive, Performative, and Interpretive Strategies in Late Ancient Christian Literature
Free and open to the public. Early Christian authors rarely composed tragedies, but they did discern elements of “the tragic” both in the background of sacred history and in the foreground of mundane experience. As a rhetorical, literary, and even theological artform, the mimesis of tragedy took shape concurrently in biblical interpretation and preaching, in autobiographical and hagiographical writing, in the framing of Christian moral response to human anguish and indignities, and in theological reflection on interrelated issues of providence, freedom, fate, and hope. This lecture will sample each of these dimensions, concentrating especially on works of the Cappadocian Fathers, John…
The Theology of Nature and the Nature of Theology
A conference held by the University of Chicago Divinity School, cosponsored by the Lumen Christi Institute. Download of Conference Abstracts. For more information see the Divinity School’s conference webpage. Schedule: Wednesday, March 30 2:00pm-3:15pm Wesley Wildman (Boston University): “Prospects for a Naturalist, Critically Humanist, and Mystical Transreligious Understanding of Ultimate Reality” 3:30pm-4:45pm Karmen MacKendrick (LeMoyne College): “Out of Bounds: Collection, Division, Creation” 5:00pm-6:15pm Willemien Otten (University of Chicago Divinity School): “Double or Nothing: Creation and Gender in Eriugena, Hildegard, and Hadewijch” (the inaugural Dorothy Grant Maclear Lecture) Reception to follow Thursday, March 31 2:00pm-3:15pm William Schweiker (University of Chicago Divinity School): “How Natural is…