Time and Eternity in Milan Kundera
Our summer fiction reading group continues with Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. We will meet weekly to talk about Kundera’s understanding of erotic love, its relationship to human finitude, and his frequent reflections on theological themes. A free...
Jane Austen and the Moral Life
Jane Austen wrote romantic comedies about smart young women looking for good husbands. But her novels are also charged with moral significance, and offer guidance, both serious and hilarious, in the virtuous conduct of life. Her heroines learn about the importance...
Theology After Christendom
Theology After Christendom In 1850, nearing the end of his writing career, Soren Kierkegaard published the book that he regarded as his most personal and his most important. Training in Christianity was his summation of “what it meant to be a Christian.” It culminated...
Saved By Poetry
Saved By Poetry: The Message of T.S. Eliot T.S. Eliot’s poetry possesses exquisite music , formal experiment, and indelible images: “Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” He is arguably...
Can We Be Moral Without God
Although their view of reality does not seem to invite it, atheists often claim that they can be just as good and moral people as religious believers. Theists, on the other hand, will frequently claim the opposite. For them, it is not so much that we need the threat...
Women and the Intellectual Life
Is the twenty-first-century woman different from her male counterparts in any unique or substantial way? The feminist movement began with a radical claim: women are suited for every profession. Against this claim, opponents argued that women were capable of only one...
Issues in Medical Ethics
New medical developments conjoined with legal and cultural changes raise moral questions. Genetic engineering, cloning, physician-assisted suicide, body identity integrity disorder, and patient autonomy are a few of the controverted issues of our day. In this seminar,...
Has Liberalism Failed?
Has Liberalism Failed? Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents, on both the left and right, sometimes forget that...
Theology Amid the Revolution
Theology Amid the Revolution In the autumn of 1968, the world seemed on the verge of collapse. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, the growing American entanglement in Vietnam, and the assasinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy left the entire Western...
Thinking with Bad Feelings
Thinking with Bad Feelings Human life isn’t a safe space–and thankfully so. Bad feelings can lead to good thoughts, and losing one’s temper can be morally productive. This seminar will argue that human reactions like anger, hatred, envy, confusion, frustration,...
The First Conservative
The First Conservative The Thought of Edmund Burke Edmund Burke is often called the “first conservative.” His writings on the French Revolution and other political movements are widely understood to be the earliest articulation of modern conservatism, and have offered...
AI in a Human Context
AI in a Human Context Artificial Intelligence promises much. According to some, it will not only rival human intelligence but surpass it entirely, bringing with it incalculable gains in knowledge, power, and wealth. According to others, it will lead to a loss of human...