Join the IHE and Faith and Law for a discussion on nationalism and patriotism. RSVP here with Faith and Law and contact info@faithandlaw.org if you wish to attend.

Join Dr. Kevin Majeres and Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan for a virtual discussion of how psychology can be a tool for developing virtue through reframing daily challenges.

Register here

About the speakers:

Dr. Kevin Majeres: Dr. Kevin Majeres has served on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for the past decade, teaching cognitive behavioral therapy to psychiatrists-in-training at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He trained in medicine and psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, and completed a fellowship in cognitive behavioral therapy at the Beck Institute in Philadelphia. He maintains a private practice in Harvard Square, is a co-founder of OptimalWork.com, and has a weekly podcast called “The Golden Hour.”

Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan: Brandon Vaidyanathan, Ph.D. in Sociology, is an Associate Professor of Sociology at The Catholic University of America. His research spans several countries and examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial, medical, and scientific institutions. His ongoing work aims to improve the ability of faith communities to better recognize and respond to mental health needs. He is the founder of Beauty at Work.

Join Catholic University’s Busch School of Business, Institute for Human Ecology, and Center for Religious Liberty for a seminar examining the focus on diversity and equity in today’s corporate world, by EEOC Commissioner Andrea Lucas.

This in-depth discussion will consider the legal risks that may accompany corporate DEI programs, as well as shed light on common blind spots employers often have in this area. Commissioner Lucas’s significant experience counseling employers combined with her work at the EEOC gives her unique insight into the practical and legal implications of the development and implementation of these programs, as well as the potential for DEI to conflict with an employer’s legal obligations under Title VII and other employment discrimination statutes.

Please RSVP here for both virtual and in-person attendance.

Join the IHE for a panel discussion on Thomas Pfau’s Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (Notre Dame Press, 2022)

Incomprehensible Certainty presents a sustained reflection on the nature of images and the phenomenology of visual experience. Taking the “image” (eikōn) as the essential medium of art and literature and as foundational for the intuitive ways in which we make contact with our “lifeworld,” Thomas Pfau draws in equal measure on Platonic metaphysics and modern phenomenology to advance a series of interlocking claims. First, Pfau shows that, beginning with Plato’s later dialogues, being and appearance came to be understood as ontologically distinct from (but no longer opposed to) one another. Second, in contrast to the idol that is typically gazed at and visually consumed as an object of desire, this study positions the image as a medium whose intrinsic abundance and excess reveal to us its metaphysical function—namely, as the visible analogue of an invisible, numinous reality. Finally, the interpretations unfolded in this book (from Plato, Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene via Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and Nicholas of Cusa to modern writers and artists such as Goethe, Ruskin, Turner, Hopkins, Cézanne, and Rilke) affirm the essential complementarity of image and word, visual intuition and hermeneutic practice, in theology, philosophy, and literature. Like Pfau’s previous book, Minding the Modern, Incomprehensible Certainty is a major work. With over fifty illustrations, the book will interest students and scholars of philosophy, theology, literature, and art history.

Panelists: 

Thomas Pfau is the Alice Mary Baldwin Professor of English, with a secondary appointment in the Divinity School at Duke University. He has published some fifty essays on literary, philosophical, and theological subjects ranging from the 18^th through the early 20^th  century. In addition to two translations, of Hölderlin and Schelling (SUNY Press, 1987 and 1994), he has also edited seven essay collections and special journal issues and is the author of four monographs: Wordsworth’s Profession  (Stanford UP 1997), Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, Melancholy, 1790-1840  (Johns Hopkins UP 2005),   Minding the Modern: Intellectual Traditions, Human Agency, and Responsible Knowledge  (Notre Dame UP, 2013), and Incomprehensible Certainty: Metaphysics and Hermeneutics of the Image (Notre Dame UP, 2022). He in the early stages of a new book project focused on the relationship between poetry and theology from 1800 to the present.

D.C. Schindler is Professor of Metaphysics and Anthropology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute. He is concerned above all with shedding light on contemporary cultural challenges and philosophical questions by drawing on the resources of the classical Christian tradition.  His principal thematic focus is metaphysics and philosophical anthropology, but he also works in political philosophy, phenomenology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of religion, and philosophical theology.  His main historical areas are ancient Greek philosophy (especially Plato and Neoplatonism), German philosophy (especially Hegel and Heidegger), and Catholic philosophy (especially Aquinas and 20^th Century Thomism).

Msgr. Robert Sokolowski is a priest of the Archdiocese of Hartford, Connecticut. He was a Basselin Scholar in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, studied theology at the American College in Louvain, Belgium, and was ordained in 1961. He obtained his doctorate in philosophy at Louvain in 1963. He has taught in the School of Philosophy since then, with visiting positions at the Graduate Faculty of the New School University in 1969-1970, the University of Texas at Austin in 1978, Villanova University in 1983, and Yale University in 1992. He also served as a consultant at the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1981-1989 and gave the Oppenheimer Memorial Lecture in 1996. He was appointed the Elizabeth Breckenridge Caldwell Professor at The Catholic University in 2001.

Join the Ciceronian Society for their 2023 conference.

Featured speakers include the IHE’s Executive Director, Joseph Capizzi, IHE Fellow, Jennifer Frey, and IHE Media Fellow, James Patterson.

The conference will be held at Belmont Abbey College. Learn more and view the conference schedule here.

The IHE and its Program in Catholic Political Thought are proud to co-sponsor a conference in honor of Catholic University professor David Walsh. Please RSVP to attend. A schedule is available here.

Join the IHE and its Program in Catholic Political Thought for a public lecture by philosopher David Walsh. The lecture concludes the first day of a two-day conference in honor of his work. Please RSVP to attend. A livestream link will be available at a later date.

The title of the lecture comes from St. Thomas’s analysis of what it means to be a person, an analysis he hammered out within his reflection on the persons of the Trinity. Even though he did not apply it to persons more generally there is enough to suggest the path he might have taken. The paradox of a figure like Thomas is that his own intense interior life largely eludes the philosophical means at his disposal. To know a person, and to know what it means to be a person, is to know what is going on within them. The development of that understanding of persons from the inside is largely the fruit of a later philosophical revolution, toward which he may have pointed and might well have welcomed. As such it remains the task we have inherited and the one in which the modern world distills what is best within it.