The Morningside Institute

The translation of Avicenna and other writers of the Islamic Golden Age into Latin was one of the most formative events in the history of Western Philosophy. Professor Therese Cory (Notre Dame) provides a glimpse of the “detective story” of how knowledge was transmitted from Muslim scholars to the European scholastics. She also discusses (24:48) how one particular idea from Averroes played an important part in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and continues to influence Christian theology today. As it turns out, the familiar claim that medieval scholastic philosophy was simply a rehash of Aristotle’s cannot be further from the truth.

This lecture was presented at the Morningside Institute on October 27, 2020.

In 1930 the Catholic priest and physicist Georges Lemaître published a revolutionary view of the cosmos as one with a finite age and a definite beginning. But how he got there is as interesting a story as the idea of the Big Bang itself, and reveals just how profoundly this one man of faith and science set the stage for modern cosmology, the study of the universe’s origin and evolution.

Jonathan I. Lunine, David C. Duncan Professor in the Physical Sciences and chair of the department of Astronomy at Cornell University, tells the story of this extraordinary adventure. This lecture was given at the Morningside Institute on December 2, 2020.

This is the final lecture in a four-part series by Prof. William Carroll (Oxford) titled “Evolution, Cosmology, and Creation: From Darwin and Hawking to Aquinas”. This lecture explores recent developments in cosmology and the problems that would follow from identifying the concept of creation with that of a beginning. These lectures were presented from September 23 to October 14, 2020 at the Morningside Institute.

This is the third lecture in a four-part series by Prof. William Carroll (Oxford) titled “Evolution, Cosmology, and Creation: From Darwin and Hawking to Aquinas”. This lecture explores whether it is possible to have an idea of God as providential (i.e. as someone whose Will is never frustrated) in the context of an evolving universe of contingency and chance. These lectures were presented from September 23 to October 14, 2020 at the Morningside Institute.

This is the second lecture in a four-part series by Prof. William Carroll (Oxford) titled “Evolution, Cosmology, and Creation: From Darwin and Hawking to Aquinas”. This lecture explores whether the autonomy of natural processes is compatible with God being the complete cause of all that is. These lectures are presented from September 23 to October 14, 2020 at the Morningside Institute.

This is the first lecture in a four-part series by Prof. William Carroll (Oxford) titled “Evolution, Cosmology, and Creation: From Darwin and Hawking to Aquinas”. This lecture explores the challenges that evolutionary biology offers to the traditional doctrine of creation, and whether there can be a metaphysical view of creation distinct from the natural-scientific view. This series was presented from September 23 to October 14, 2020 at the Morningside Institute.

The second of two lectures by critic in architecture, Prof. Kyle Dugdale (Yale and Columbia). It is a commonplace of urban history to assert that the cities of antiquity belonged to their gods, and that those gods belonged to their cities. Athens belonged to Athena, and Athena to Athens, just as Babylon belonged to Marduk, and Marduk to Babylon. The city’s architecture reinforced those claims. But what of the modern city? Who are its tutelary deities, and where are its temples? In this two-part lecture series, Kyle Dugdale (Columbia and Yale) will explore how a city’s architecture reflects and shapes its ultimate concerns, setting the familiar realities of our contemporary urban environment against the backdrop of a longer historical narrative. Unfortunately we cannot publish Prof. Dugdale’s slides due to image copyrights, and we apologize for the poor audio quality.

The first of two lectures by critic in architecture, Prof. Kyle Dugdale (Yale and Columbia). It is a commonplace of urban history to assert that the cities of antiquity belonged to their gods, and that those gods belonged to their cities. Athens belonged to Athena, and Athena to Athens, just as Babylon belonged to Marduk, and Marduk to Babylon. The city’s architecture reinforced those claims. But what of the modern city? Who are its tutelary deities, and where are its temples? In this two-part lecture series, Kyle Dugdale (Columbia and Yale) will explore how a city’s architecture reflects and shapes its ultimate concerns, setting the familiar realities of our contemporary urban environment against the backdrop of a longer historical narrative. Unfortunately we cannot publish Prof. Dugdale’s powerpoint slides for the talk due to image copyrights.

Lecture by Prof. Sarah Byers (Boston College).

What happened, exactly, in Augustine’s famous “conversion scene”? Professor Byers will show that Augustine is drawing on Stoic and Platonic epistemology and action theory to understand how divine grace acts on, and with, the human mind.

Novelist Randy Boyagoda, a professor of English at the University of Toronto, talks about what it means to create art and tell stories about pursuing the good as fallen persons. He discusses recent and classic examples of this phenomenon, and propose that there’s something distinctively possible to good storytelling in Catholic thought and practice.