Emily Austin on October 16, 2024 at Ruth Lake Country Club.

The challenges of our times can make Christians feel embattled and besieged. But the Catholic intellectual tradition, at its best, equips us to look with openness for the Truth, incarnate in the world around us. In this lecture, Prof. Emily Austin shared her perspective as a classicist, reading within a literary tradition. To read within a tradition requires patience and attentiveness, allowing each text to teach you how to read anew. She argued that a Catholic literary culture requires—and fosters—humility. The pursuit of Truth is most productively sought, in a literary context, within a community of friends.

Professor Denys Turner on April 11, 2204 at the University of Chicago.

Praised for its evocative treatment of heaven and hell, Dante’s "Commedia" is a significant work of theology. Denys Turner explains how Dante accomplishes by means of poetry what the formal theological treatises of the Middle Ages demonstrate through prosaic inference and proof. Poetry, Turner argues, is the most natural language to articulate the “journey of the soul into God,” and a point of entry into the mystery of the divine. Dante’s poetry discloses the theological significance of hope in the pilgrim’s journey towards the “abiding city.”

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Cosponsored by the University of Chicago Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, and the Medieval Studies Workshop.

Kenneth Woodward and Professor Denys Turner on April 10, 2024 at the University Club of Chicago.

Dante Alighieri was a great poet. But Denys Turner insists that he was also a great theologian—and that what makes his theology great is his poetry. Turner argues, Dante was able to write his masterpiece only after he had personally journeyed through Hell and Purgatory like Dante, the pilgrim character in The Divine Comedy. Is this the case?

Ken Woodward, former Newsweek religion editor and Lumen Christi’s Writer-in-Residence, asked all these questions during an interview with Denys Turner. Their interview reveals original and creative insight into Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.

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It was presented by J. Warren Smith of Duke Divinity School on January 26, 2023, at the University of Chicago's Swift Hall.

This lecture is entitled The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry.

It was presented by James Matthew Wilson of the University of St Thomas, Houston on May 11, 2022, at the Ruth Lake Country Club.

This lecture is entitled Discursive, Performative, and Interpretive Strategies in Late Ancient Christian Literature.

It was presented by Paul Blowers of Milligan University on March 30, 2022, at the University of Chicago's Classics 110.

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It was presented by Zena Hitz of St John's College and Erin Walsh of the Universty of Chicago on February 2, 2022, at the University of Chicago's Swift Hall.

This lecture is entitled Singing the Sacred: Music and the Holy in Ancient Christianity.

It was presented by Susan Ashbrook Harvey of Brown University on May 15, 2022, at the University of Chicago's Rockefeller Chapel.

This lecture is entitled Michelangelo's Women: Feminine Genius in the Frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.

It was presented by Elizabeth Lev of Duquesne University on November 17, 2021, at the University of Chicago's Social Sciences Building.

This lecture is entitled Conscience And Human Rights In Thomas Aquinas And Some Predecessors.

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