The Morningside Institute

Are some books “great” in a way others are not? Can a core curriculum represent all the members of a university community? What should students get out of their classes in the Core? How should we justify liberal education today? These questions shaped many universities' curricula, including Columbia's Core, and today are at the center of debates about the purpose of education and the university.

On Friday, February 3, 2023, the Morningside Institute hosted a conversation between Roosevelt Montás (Columbia) and Zena Hitz (St. John’s College), moderated by Emmanuelle Saada (Columbia).

Zena Hitz is a tutor at St. John's College and the author of Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. Roosevelt Montás directed Columbia's Center for the Core Curriculum for ten years and is the author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation.  The Morningside Institute brings scholars and students together to examine human life beyond the classroom and consider its deepest questions through the life of New York City. For more information about upcoming events, please visit https://www.morningsideinstitute.org.

As American politics descends into a battle of anger and hostility between two groups called "left" and "right," people increasingly ask: What is the essential difference between these two ideological groups? In The Myth of Left and Right, Hyrum Lewis and Verlan Lewis provide the surprising answer: nothing. As the authors argue, there is no enduring philosophy, disposition, or essence uniting the various positions associated with the liberal and conservative ideologies of today. Far from being an eternal dividing line of American politics, the political spectrum came to the United States in the 1920s and, since then, left and right have evolved in so many unpredictable and even contradictory ways that there is currently nothing other than tribal loyalty holding together the many disparate positions that fly under the banners of "liberal" and "conservative."

On Tuesday, January 24, 2023, the Morningside Institute and Elm Institute hosted Verlan Lewis (Harvard, Utah Valley University) and Hyrum Lewis (Brigham Young University-Idaho) to discuss the shortcomings of the political spectrum.

Many scholars have held that Christianity created a new kind of religious belief and devotion, unlike the ritualistic, legal, and cultural religious practice widespread throughout the Roman Empire. But in a new book, Jacob Mackey (Occidental) draws on cognitive theory to argue that, despite having little to do with faith or salvation, real belief underlay every aspect of Roman religious practices and helped create and maintain Rome’s social reality. In a deep sense, no man could count as an augur and no act of animal slaughter as a successful offering to the gods, unless Romans collectively shared appropriate beliefs about these things.

The Morningside Institute hosted Professor Jacob Mackey of Occidental College on November 1, 2022. The Morningside Institute brings scholars and students together to examine human life beyond the classroom and consider its deepest questions through the life of New York City. For more information about upcoming events, please visit https://www.morningsideinstitute.org.

In the past, a lawyer might have taken for granted, as one ABA report explained, that “one of the highest services the lawyer can render to society is to appear in court on behalf of client whose causes are in disfavor with the general public." But not today, when lawyers across the profession increasingly face boycotts, protests, and public shaming campaigns for zealously advocating on behalf of unpopular clients and causes. Are fundamental norms—including professional independence, commitment to service pro bono publico, access to justice, and the adversary system as a truth-seeking process—thereby under attack? Or is it appropriate that lawyers should be held to account in some way for the broader impact of their legal work?

The Morningside Institute and the Columbia Law School Center on Law and Liberty hosted this panel with the Hon. Richard J. Sullivan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Professor Philip Hamburger of Columbia Law School, and Erin E. Murphy, Esq., Partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Clement & Murphy, LLC on October 13, 2022. The Morningside Institute brings scholars and students together to examine human life beyond the classroom and consider its deepest questions through the life of New York City. For more information about upcoming events, please visit https://www.morningsideinstitute.org.

In this talk, Prof. Veronica Ogle (Assumption University) helps us understand how Augustine sees the earthly city as parodying the city of God, a process that produces illusions and lies that entrap its inhabitants in a nihilistic dreamworld. She explores how Augustine’s critique of the earthly city uncovers the self-love and lust for domination that drove Roman thought and history. But Augustine places his unmasking of Rome’s injustice within a broader framework aimed at reorienting this self-love to a love of God. He argues that we can live in the political sphere without participating in the earthly city—as good neighbors whose purified loves make them better citizens.

Quotes referred to during the lecture:

"We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love, the earthly city was created by self-love reaching to the point of contempt for God, the Heavenly City by the love of God carried as far as contempt of self."

Augustine, City of God 14.28

"He refused to be subject to his Creator, and in his arrogance supposed that he wielded power as his own private possession and rejoiced in that power. And thus, he was both deceived and deceiving because no one can escape the power of the Omnipotent. He has refused to accept reality and in his arrogant pride presumes to counterfeit an unreality.

Augustine, City of God 11.13

“Pride is a perverted imitation of God. For Pride hates a fellowship of equality under God, and seeks to impose its own dominion on fellow men, in place of God's rule. This means that it hates the just peace of God and loves its own peace of injustice.”

Augustine City of God, 19.12

“I know how great is the effort needed to convince the proud of the power and excellence of humility, an excellence which makes it soar above all the summits of this world, which sway in their temporal instability, overtopping them all with an eminence not arrogated by human pride, but granted by divine grace.”

Augustine, City of God 1.pr

Veronica Roberts Ogle is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Assumption University. This lecture was presented at the Morningside Institute on April 19, 2022. The Morningside Institute brings scholars and students together to examine human life beyond the classroom and consider its deepest questions through the life of New York City. For more information about upcoming events, please visit https://www.morningsideinstitute.org.

As our society continues to fracture, writers across the political spectrum have repeatedly invoked the classical concept of the common good. Thinkers such as Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon offered robust accounts of the common good in a pluralistic, democratic society. Yet frequently, today’s invocations of the common good dodge questions about pluralism and pass over these accounts or reject them outright. Were these earlier thinkers naïve? Do their accounts still offer us valuable insights, or were they better suited to a time that has now passed? How can we genuinely promote the common good in a society with so much disagreement about what it is? 

Ross Douthat is a New York Times Opinion columnist. This lecture was presented at the Morningside Institute on February 24, 2022. The Morningside Institute brings scholars and students together to examine human life beyond the classroom and consider its deepest questions through the life of New York City. For more information about upcoming events, please visit https://www.morningsideinstitute.org.

For a video recording of this lecture, please visit: https://youtu.be/QnxhVXKs_9w

It seems as though our cultural and moral debates in America and Europe take place between a secular side and a traditional, frequently religious, side. Secular liberalism is seen as consciously moving away from religious convictions of the past toward a more fair and objective viewpoint. But some scholars argue that the framework of secular liberalism is rooted in Judaism and Christianity and still operates with their metaphysical and ethical categories—albeit in an unacknowledged way. In this talk, Eric Nelson (Harvard) explores the theological framework of secular society and the ways in which liberal thinking is inescapably religious.

Eric Nelson is the Robert M. Beren Professor of Government at Harvard University. This lecture was presented at the Morningside Institute on November 4, 2021. The Morningside Institute brings scholars and students together to examine human life beyond the classroom and consider its deepest questions through the life of New York City. For more information about upcoming events, please visit https://www.morningsideinstitute.org.

African American literature has a rich tradition of both using and discarding the classics. In the 20th century, the Black feminist poet Audre Lorde argued that, “[t]he master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” and Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, was inspired by Black Arts Movement poets to de-colonize her artistic practice systematically by eschewing poetic forms and modes of European origin. In this talk, Prof. Chiyuma Elliott (Berkeley) will explore a different pole on that creative continuum: contemporary poets (herself included) for whom classical authors are key touchstones and interlocutors. She will focus on several contemporary poems about peace and violence that allude to Homer’s epics in meaningful ways, including Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Latitudes,” Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s “Even Homer Nods,” and her own Black Lives Matter poem “Dear Ilium”. Her core argument is that exploring the different ways these poems are in sustained conversation with the classics tells us something about how contemporary authors are imagining Black selfhood, American history, and what it means to belong in this nation and on this planet.

Chiyuma Elliott is Associate Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. This lecture was presented at the Morningside Institute on November 10, 2021. The Morningside Institute brings scholars and students together to examine human life beyond the classroom and consider its deepest questions through the life of New York City. For more information about upcoming events, please visit https://www.morningsideinstitute.org.

The problem of relativism has presented itself ever since Herodotus introduced his readers to the astounding variety of religious beliefs and moral judgements among human communities. Philosophers soon began to consider the proposition that there is no objective truth and falsity, right and wrong, but that all of these are products of different conventions and cannot apply beyond the contexts in which they originated. Indeed, relativism seems to be an intuitive response to the fact of cultural diversity. But it also seems to carry troubling implications for promoting justice, negotiating disagreements, and leading one's life with purpose and integrity. In this series we will consider relativism in relation to two questions. First, is relativism ultimately the reality of the human condition, or are there realities and moral norms that we can discern as objectively true? And second, is there a way to maintain robust philosophical, religious, and moral convictions in a way that navigates between relativism and ideology?

Contemporary defenders of moral relativism often cite anthropological literature for support. They contend that cultural differences among the practices of human groups are often a source of fundamental and therefore irresolvable moral conflict. In this seminar, Prof. Michele Moody-Adams (Columbia) will draw on her book Fieldwork in Familiar Places to respond to these claims.

This lecture was presented at the Morningside Institute on November 8, 2021. The lecture was briefly interrupted due to connectivity issues, and the interruptions are evident in the recording. We apologize for the inconvenience and hope you will enjoy Prof. Moody-Adams’ wonderful lecture nonetheless.

In August 410 Alaric, King of the Goths, entered Rome with his army, and proceeded to carry out a rather impressive version of a “sack”: murder, mayhem, theft, and desecration of churches and consecrated virgins. St. Augustine, then the bishop of Hippo Regius in North Africa, soon received a large number of refugees, both pagan and Christian. These refugees grumbled that Christianity failed to protect the City. After all, what are gods good for if they cannot guarantee the temporal safety and prosperity of Rome? Four months later, Augustine preached a sermon outlining the true lessons of this catastrophe. Within the next year he wrote the first of twenty-two books of the City of God, which is a blueprint for the main moral and spiritual lessons of disaster. Indeed, Book I represents one of the most profound themes of the entire work: Human history is a trial and test of the just and the unjust. The trial is best understood in a comparison of two heroes, one biblical and the other worldly. Namely, Job and Cato.

Francis Russell Hittinger is the Warren Chair of Catholic Studies and Research Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa. He is on the governing council of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas and a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences. He has been on the faculties of Catholic University of America and Fordham University, and has served as a visiting professor at Princeton University and New York University. This lecture was given at the Morningside Institute on October 27, 2021. The Morningside Institute brings scholars and students together to examine human life beyond the classroom and consider its deepest questions through the life of New York City. For more information about upcoming events, please visit https://www.morningsideinstitute.org.