REGISTER HERE This event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact dstrobach@lumenchristi.org. A wine and cheese reception will follow. This event is cosponsored by the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Medieval Studies Workshop. Often praised for its evocative treatment of […]
Is there a future for Christian Art? Can beauty save a “modern” world? This symposium features a presentation by Fr. Stephen Fields, SJ (Georgetown) in which he distinguishes between modernity and previous periods of the Western Christian experience and draws upon the work of Hans Urs von Balathasar to argue that Christians must reconceive the […]
Free and Open to the Public The familiar expression “American Catholicism” often evokes mainly the presence and heritage of Euro-American Catholics and how this group defines religion, culture and politics in our nation. Though narrow and de facto blind to the contributions of many other groups that have been central to defining the American Catholic […]
Free and open to the public. Cosponsored by the Theology and Ethics Workshop at the Divinity School and the Midwest Province of the Society of Jesus. Sexual and financial scandals are prompting Catholics to ask hard and painful questions about church government. Who is in charge? How is responsibility and accountability for governance distributed in […]
Free and open to the public. Cosponsored by Martin Marty Center for the Public Understanding of Religion at the Divinity School, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Medieval Studies Workshop. This program was made possible in part by a grant from the Our Sunday Visitor Institute. Copies of The Life of Saint Teresa of […]
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 […]
Cosponsored by the Theology and Religious Ethics Workshop While theology and biological science often seem to be at odds, there are productive ways of telling the Christian story of who we are as human beings which resonate with newer evolutionary theories. This lecture will argue that the most convincing theological approach is theo-drama, where insights […]
A lecture with Ada Palmer (University of Chicago) Cosponsored by the Department of History It is difficult today to imagine a world in which religious communities were deeply intertwined with the civic order and when a third of a town’s population might be priests, monks, and nuns. In Renaissance Florence the Dominican Monastery of San […]
Lawrence Cunningham (University of Notre Dame) cosponsored by Calvert House and the Chicago Chapter of the International Thomas Merton Society Among the most well-known spiritual figures of the 20th Century, Thomas Merton (1915-1968) was an aspiring poet and writer before his conversion and eventual entrance into a Trappist Monastery in 1941. It took time for Merton […]
By 1851, the poet Charles Baudelaire had become obsessed — in contrast to his previous anarchist position — with the views of the reactionary and fiercely Catholic Joseph de Maistre. Maistre argued that Original Sin “explains everything,” a perspective that Baudelaire was to adopt, and which markedly changed his poetry. This lecture will consider Baudelaire’s […]
Cosponsored by the University of Chicago Ethics Club The presence of two Catholic candidates for vice-president have raised questions about Catholic social thought and American free market economics. In this symposium, an economist and a theologian consider how the Church's teaching bears on contemporary economic questions. The questions to be explored will include: What does the […]
Cosponsored by the Department of Music and the Medieval Studies Workshop While it is easy to recognize traditional forms of sacred music: Gregorian chant, classical polyphony, organ music, choral music, and vernacular hymns it is difficult to pinpoint what it is that makes music sacred? This lecture will reflect upon the relation of the sacred and […]
