A one-day symposium on the theology of the priesthood organized by the Centre de Recherche et d’Anthropologie des Vocations, the Thomistic Institute, the Institute for Human Ecology, and Theological College.

This symposium aims to find the horizon of the priesthood in its two forms of participation, baptismal and ministerial, and to elaborate the dignity and complementarity of each sacramental vocation (marriage, ministerial priesthood, consecrated life) within civil society and in its service.

This event is free and open to the public. Please register in advance below. Travel, meals, and lodging are not provided by the sponsoring organizations.

Please RSVP here. 

Join The Lamp and the Institute for Human Ecology for a discussion on what role government should play in family policy after the fall of Roe v. Wade. A recording is available here.

Panelists:
Matthew Walther, The Lamp

Tom Shakely, Americans United for Life

Megan McArdle, The Washington Post

Humanum Review and the IHE invite you to a lecture on “The Human Figure in Art” by art historian and independent scholar, Dr. Sarah Bond. A cocktail reception will follow.

Register through Eventbrite here.

Sarah Bond is an art historian and independent scholar with a PhD in Medieval Art from Harvard University.

Join the IHE for a conversation about the spread of assisted suicide in the Western world, from the Netherlands to Canada, as well as its causes, its consequences, and how an age of euthanasia might be resisted. A recording of the event is here.

Panelists are:

Ross Douthat–Columnist, The New York Times; Media Fellow, Institute for Human Ecology

Ari Schulman–Editor, The New Atlantis

Leah Libresco–Writer and Author

Charlie Camosy–Professor of Medical Humanities, Creighton University School of Medicine

Could a deep understanding of the liberal arts improve the decisions that foreign-policy elites must make, curbing tendencies to hubris and leading to more realistic assessments of American capabilities and foreign threats? Drawing on the educational views of Alexis de Tocqueville and Irving Babbitt, Dr. Foster will argue that liberal education is capable of both instilling a love of greatness and of fostering humility.

Speaker: Luke Foster– Postdoctoral Research Scholar, University of Notre Dame

Register 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.

A livestream through Zoom 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 recording is available here.

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.

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.

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

A livestream is available here.

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 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 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 us for a lecture by George Weigel on his book, To Sanctify the World: The Vital Legacy of Vatican II. Book sale and signing to follow. A livestream is available here.

Join William Saunders, J.D., Director of the M.A. in Human Rights, and Mark Rienzi, J.D., President of Becket Law, as they discuss this one-year program and answer your questions.

Part-time options and scholarships are available.

Register for the info session: https://cua.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_a7lbkvlYStyQu-IHjtcEaA

Learn more: MAhumanrights.com

The IHE is proud to host a book panel on Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth Century French Politics (Harvard Press, 2021) by Sarah Shortall (Notre Dame).

Secularism has been a cornerstone of French political culture since 1905, when the republic formalized the separation of church and state. At times the barrier of secularism has seemed impenetrable, stifling religious actors wishing to take part in political life. Yet in other instances, secularism has actually nurtured movements of the faithful. Soldiers of God in a Secular World explores one such case, that of the nouvelle théologie, or new theology. Developed in the interwar years by Jesuits and Dominicans, the nouvelle théologie reimagined the Church’s relationship to public life, encouraging political activism, engaging with secular philosophy, and inspiring doctrinal changes adopted by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s.

Nouveaux théologiens charted a path between the old alliance of throne and altar and secularism’s demand for the privatization of religion. Envisioning a Church in but not of the public sphere, Catholic thinkers drew on theological principles to intervene in political questions while claiming to remain at arm’s length from politics proper. Sarah Shortall argues that this “counter-politics” was central to the mission of the nouveaux théologiens: by recoding political statements in the ostensibly apolitical language of doctrine, priests were able to enter into debates over fascism and communism, democracy and human rights, colonialism and nuclear war. This approach found its highest expression during the Second World War, when the nouveaux théologiens led the spiritual resistance against Nazism. Claiming a powerful public voice, they collectively forged a new role for the Church amid the momentous political shifts of the twentieth century.

The panel will take place on Wednesday, January 11 at 3:00 p.m. A livestream is available here.

Panelists:

Dr. Sarah Shortall is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. is an intellectual and cultural historian of modern Europe, with a particular interest in modern France, Catholic thought, and the relationship between religion and politics.  She teaches courses on modern French history, the history of Catholicism, and European intellectual history.  In addition to these themes, her research also explores the history of science, secularization theory, human rights, decolonization, and the global circulation of religious ideas.

Shortall’s first book, Soldiers of God in a Secular World: Catholic Theology and Twentieth-Century French Politics (Harvard University Press, 2021), has received several awards, including the Laurence Wylie Prize in French Cultural Studies and the Giuseppe Alberigo Award from the European Academy of Religion.  The book examines the impact of Catholic theology on French politics after the separation of Church and state in 1905, showing how the continuing role of theology in an ostensibly secular public sphere disrupts prevailing ideas about the nature and scope of the political in the modern world. Shortall is currently at work on a second book, tentatively called Planetary Catholicism.  It explores how Catholics have imagined the global as a theological, ecological, and political problem since the Second World War, and asks how these religious visions have interacted with other forms of global consciousness rooted in international law, science, politics, and the economy.

In addition to these projects, Shortall has co-edited a volume of essays titled Christianity and Human Rights Reconsidered (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and her work has appeared in Past & Present, Modern Intellectual History, Journal of the History of Ideas, Boston Review, Commonweal, and The Immanent Frame.  Prior to joining the faculty at Notre Dame, Shortall was a Junior Research Fellow at Oxford University.

Dr. Russell Hittinger is a leading scholar of Catholic political and social thought. From 1996-2019, Dr. Hittinger was the incumbent of the William K. Warren Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he was also a Research Professor in the School of Law. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Fordham University, Princeton University, New York University, Providence College, and Charles University in Prague. In January 2020, Dr. Hittinger gave the Aquinas Lecture at Blackfriars, Oxford.

Since 2001, he is a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, to which he was elected a full member (ordinarius) in 2004, and appointed to the consilium or governing board from 2006-2018. On 8 September 2009, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Dr. Hittinger as an ordinarius in the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, in which he finished his ten-year term in 2019.

He is currently a Fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America, where he also serves as the inaugural co-Director of the Program in Catholic Political Thought.

Dr. Peter Casarella is Professor of Theolgy at Duke Divinity School. His primary field of study is systematic theology followed by world religions and world church. He was appointed to the faculty of Duke Divinity School as of July 1, 2020. Formerly, he was an associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame from 2013-2020 and served as director of the Latin American North American Church Concerns (LANACC) project in the Kellogg Institute for International Studies. He served as professor of Catholic Studies from 2007-2013 at DePaul University, where he was also the founding director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology. He has published ninety-one essays in scholarly journals or books on a variety of topics including medieval Christian Neoplatonism, contemporary theological aesthetics, intercultural thought, and the Hispanic/Latino presence in the U.S. Catholic Church. He served as president of The American Cusanus Society, The Academy of Catholic Hispanic Theologians in the U.S. (ACHTUS), and the Academy of Catholic Theologians (ACT).

He is currently serving a second five-year term on the International Roman Catholic-Baptist World Alliance Ecumenical Dialogue and served also on the Roman Catholic-World Communion of Reformed Churches Dialogue. He has published a monograph, Word as Bread: Language and Theology in Nicholas of Cusa (2017) and a collection of his own essays, Reverberations of the Word: Wounded Beauty in Global Catholicism (2020). He has also edited or co-edited: Cuerpo de Cristo: The Hispanic Presence in the U.S. Catholic Church (1998), Christian Spirituality and the Culture of Modernity: The Thought of Louis Dupré (1998), Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance (2006), A World for All? Global Civil Society in Political Theory and Trinitarian Theology (2011), and, most recently, The Whole is Greater than its Parts: Ecumenism and Inter-religious Encounters in the Age of Pope Francis (2020). He is currently working on a book titled: The God of the People: A Latinx Theology.

The Institute for Human Ecology and the Catholic Information Center are hosting a panel discussion to celebrate the life and legacy of Pope Benedict XVI.

The discussion will focus on Pope Benedict’s intellectual legacy, his engagement with modernity, and his teaching on religious freedom as both a human right and avenue for evangelization. The panel will also consider the Pope’s pastoral care and development of Church reforms.

A livestream is available here.

Moderator:

Joseph Capizzi

Joseph Capizzi, Ph.D. in Theology, is the Executive Director of the Institute for Human Ecology and an Ordinary Professor of Moral Theology at The Catholic University of America. He has published widely on just war theory, bioethics, the history of moral theology, and political liberalism. Dr. Capizzi worked as a research fellow at the VADM James B. Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the U.S. Naval Academy from 2013 to 2014.

Panelists:

Ed Condon

Ed Condon is the co-founder and editor of The Pillar, the online Catholic news site. Previously the DC editor of the Catholic News Agency and an associate editor of the Catholic Herald magazine, his writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Review, the Washington Examiner, the Spectator, the Bulwark, First Things, as well as several academic and legal journals. He is also a canon lawyer, having practiced in dioceses across three continents and the Holy See. Previously he spent nearly ten years working in professional politics in the United Kingdom.

Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau

A native of Louisiana, Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau became Catholic University of America’s Chaplain and Director of Campus Ministry in the summer of 2022. He entered the Dominican Province of St. Joseph in 2005. After several years of pastoral work in New York City, Fr. Guilbeau began doctoral studies in moral theology at the University of Fribourg, where he completed a dissertation on St. Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the common good. In addition to his teaching, Fr. Guilbeau serves as senior editor of Aleteia.org (English edition).

Andrea Picciotti-Bayer

Andrea PIcciotti-Bayer is Director of the Conscience Project. A Stanford-educated lawyer, she has dedicated her legal career to civil rights and appellate advocacy. She got her start in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. Andrea is a legal analyst for EWTN News, a regular columnist for the National Catholic Register and frequent guest on EWTN’s News Nightly. In 2021, Andrea received First Place for Best Coverage — Religious Liberty Issues from the Catholic Media Association. Andrea’s writing has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, National Review, Newsweek, CNN en Espanol and other well-regarded publications. Andrea is a Media Fellow and Strategic Consultant at the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. Andrea lived in Colombia for over a decade. She has ten children and lives in the Washington, DC area.

Join the IHE for a panel discussion on “Catholicism and Nationalism: Are They Compatible?”

A recording is available here.

Panelists:

Ross Douthat is a columnist at The New York Times and IHE Media Fellow.

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a Senior Writer at National Review Online.

R. R. Reno is Editor at First Things.

Jennifer Frey is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Carolina and an IHE Scholar.

V. Bradley Lewis is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America and IHE Scholar.

Join the IHE and the Busch School of Business for a screening of “The Hong Konger,” a film about Jimmy Lai’s freedom struggle.

A reception and discussion with Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal will follow.

Watch the trailer here.

Join the IHE and The Lamp for a discussion on “The Catholic Imagination: An Incoherent Idea?” with Matthew Walther, Jaspreet Singh Boparai, Jane Clark Scharl, and James Matthew Wilson.

A livestream is available here.

Matthew Walther is editor of The Lamp.

Jaspreet Singh Boparai is a former academic and a frequent contributor to The Lamp. He was trained initially as a classicist and was the final student of the late Professor Philip Ford; his was the last-ever PhD awarded in the Department of neo-Latin at Cambridge. He was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; the Courtauld Institute of Art; the Warburg Institute; the École normale supérieure in Paris; and Clare College, Cambridge, where he completed a dissertation on the history of classical scholarship.

Jane Clark Scharl is a poet, essayist, and playwright. Her work has been featured on the BBC and in many journals and magazines, including The Hopkins Review, The New Ohio Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and, of course, The Lamp. Her first play, a verse drama in which St. Ignatius of Loyola, John Calvin, and Francois Rabelais must solve a Mardi Gras murder before Lent begins, will open as a staged reading in New York this year. She lives in Detroit with her husband and their two children.

James Matthew Wilson has published eleven books, including his most recent book of poems, The Strangeness of the Good (Angelico, 2022). He is Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature at the University of Saint Thomas, in Houston, where he founded the MFA program in Creative Writing, the first such program to be rooted fully in the Catholic intellectual and literary tradition. He serves also as Poet-in-Residence for the Benedict XVI Institute, Editor of Colosseum Books, and Poetry Editor of Modern Age magazine.

Guests must register here for the event: https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/events/just-war-theory-roundtable-discussion

Join us for a virtual event on the topic, “Is the Intellectual Life too Intellectual?”

The link for the event is available here.

Jason Paone is an IHE Graduate Scholar and Editor at Word on Fire Academic

Kevin Kambo is an IHE Faculty Scholar and Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Dallas.

The Master of Arts in Human Rights will be offering a virtual information session on Wednesday, November 2.

Program Director William Saunders and MA in Human Rights Alum Elizabeth Kirk will give a presentation on the program and be available to answer questions.

Register at: MAhumanrights.com

William Saunders, Program Director, MA in Human Rights 

Elizabeth Kirk, Research Assistant with RFI’s Freedom of Religious Institutions in Society Project

Samuel Pomeroy will speak on the topic of “Early Christianity, National Pluralism, and International Law.”

Samuel Pomeroy (Ph.D, Leuven, 2019) is an Alexander von Humboldt Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Münster (Germany) working at the Origen Research Center (Forschungsstelle Origenes). His book Chrysostom as Exegete (Brill) won the Lautenschlaeger Award for Theological Promise in 2022. He previously studied in the School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews (2013). He is a graduate of the Honors Program at Baylor University (2012) where he studied Philosophy and Great Texts.

Jack Butler, IHE Media Fellow and Submissions Editor at National Review, will speak on the promises and perils of national conservatism.

A livestream is available here.

Father Kevin Flannery, S.J., will deliver the fifth annual Human Rights Lecture. He will examine the concept of conscience and its basis in synderesis, looking especially at the work of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas More.

A livestream is available here.

Communism is perhaps the greatest threat humanity has ever faced. It has murdered more innocent people than any political system in history and has imprisoned millions more. In the last century, it threatened to engulf the world, but even today it controls the world’s largest nation and threatens to spread. Join Dr. William Saunders of the IHE and Dr. Lee Edwards who founded the Victims of Communism Museum to discuss the lessons we can learn from resistance to communism in the past in order to confront and defeat it in the present.

This event is co-sponsored by Faith and Law.

Dr. Lee Edwards is adjunct professor of politics at the Catholic University of America and co-founder of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington, D.C.

His books include biographies of Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, William F. Buckley, Jr. and Edwin Meese III as well as histories of The Heritage Foundation and the American conservative movement. His most recent works include “A Brief History of the Cold War” (2016), written with Elizabeth Edwards Spalding, and his autobiography, “Just Right: A Life in Pursuit of Liberty” (2017).

Edwards was the founding director of the Institute of Political Journalism at Georgetown University and a fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is a past president of the Philadelphia Society and a media fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Edwards received a doctorate in world politics from Catholic University as well as a doctor of humane letters degree from Grove City College. He did graduate work at the Sorbonne in Paris. He holds a bachelor of arts degree in English from Duke University.

William Saunders is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, who has been involved in issues of public policy, law and ethics for thirty years. A regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Mr. Saunders has written widely on these topics, as well as on Catholic social teaching. He has given lectures in law schools and colleges throughout the United States and the world. He is the Director of the Program in Human Rights for the Institute for Human Ecology.

The IHE’s First Annual Lecture on Catholic Political Thought will be delivered by Professor Russell Hittinger, who has recently joined the IHE and The Catholic University of America. The lecture is entitled “How to Inherit a Kingdom: Reflections on the Situation of Catholic Political Thought.”

This event will take place on Thursday, October 6 at 3:30 p.m. at Heritage Hall, Catholic University of America.

A reception with refreshments will follow.

A livestream is available here.

Dr. Russell Hittinger is a leading scholar of Catholic political and social thought. From 1996-2019, Dr. Hittinger was the incumbent of the William K. Warren Chair of Catholic Studies at the University of Tulsa, where he was also a Research Professor in the School of Law. He has taught at the University of Chicago, Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, Fordham University, Princeton University, New York University, Providence College, and Charles University in Prague. In January 2020, Dr. Hittinger gave the Aquinas Lecture at Blackfriars, Oxford.

Since 2001, he is a member of the Pontifical Academy of St. Thomas Aquinas, to which he was elected a full member (ordinarius) in 2004, and appointed to the consilium or governing board from 2006-2018. On 8 September 2009, Pope Benedict XVI appointed Dr. Hittinger as an ordinarius in the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, in which he finished his ten-year term in 2019.

He is currently a Fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America, where he also serves as the inaugural co-Director of the Program in Catholic Political Thought.

Join the IHE for a ceremony celebrating the conferral of the Society of Catholic Social Scientist’s Pope Pius XI Award, its highest honor, upon Brad Wilcox. Dr. Wilcox will deliver a speech on “The Paradox of Marriage.” A reception with light refreshments will follow the event.

Catholic University’s Department of Sociology and Society of Catholic Social Scientists will co-sponsor the event.

October 4 at 5:00 PM. Happel Room, Caldwell Hall, Catholic University of America.

Unguarded explores a revolutionary Brazilian prison system centered on the full recovery and rehabilitation of the person.

A panel will follow the screening. Panelists:

Hannah Chesterton (Department of Sociology)

Michael Massey (National School of Social Service)

Mary Graw Leary (Columbus School of Law)

Jim Blum (Founder and Director of “My Father’s House”)

Simoneta d’Italia Wiener (Director of Unguarded)

The Center for Law and the Human Person and the Office of the Provost are co-sponsoring this event.

Join the IHE for the Third Annual Constitution Day Lecture. The lecture will focus on the importance of the Constitution on college and university campuses and will consider the implications of constitutional law for educational institutions today.

Join the IHE for a round-table discussion of Just War Theory and its relevance for foreign policy.

Panelists include:

• Congressman Jerry McNerney
• Joe Capizzi, Catholic University
• Eric Patterson, Religious Freedom Institute
• Paul Miller, Georgetown
• Melissa Moschella, Catholic University
• Maryann Cusimano Love, Catholic University
• Marc Livecche, Providence Magazine

The IHE is proud to co-sponsor Baylor in Washington’s 2022 Summer Workshop.

Each summer, Baylor in Washington hosts an academic seminar in our nation’s capital examining key issues at the intersection of faith, ethics, and public policy. These discussion-based seminars are designed for young professionals and rising academics seeking to integrate their beliefs with questions they encounter in their intellectual and professional endeavors. This summer, our seminar is entitled “Political Theology: What Does Christianity Teach About Politics?”

Applications are due May 20 and are available here.

The Civitas Dei Summer Fellowship, sponsored by the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America and the Thomistic Institute at the Dominican House of Studies, offers competitive fellowships for graduate students (and a few advanced undergraduates) in the sciences, humanities, and law. Accepted fellows attend a fully-funded, week-long seminar in Washington, DC where, under the leadership of distinguished scholars, they engage core questions of culture and public life in light of Catholic thought.

More information here.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine along with retaliatory Western sanctions has caused a reassessment of America’s foreign policy. Is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine the end of the Pax Americana, or is the unified Western response a sign of resilient American strength? Are we facing a new Cold War or a multipolar conflict between civilizations? Do the United States have a grand strategy – and do we need a new one?

Join us on Thursday, May 5 at 6:30 p.m. for a discussion.

A livestream is available here.

Ross Douthat is a Media Fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology. He joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed Columnist in 2009. Previously, he was a Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism (Simon and Schuster, 2018), Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, (Simon and Schuster, 2012), and Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005). He is the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (Doubleday, 2008). Mr. Douthat is also the Film Critic for National Review.

Elbridge Colby is co-founder and principal of The Marathon Initiative, a policy initiative focused on developing strategies to prepare the United States for an era of sustained great power competition. He is the author of The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (Yale University Press), which The Wall Street Journal selected as one of the top ten books of 2021. Previously, Colby was from 2018-2019 the Director of the Defense Program at the Center for a New American Security, where he led the Center’s work on defense issues.

Jakub Grygiel is a professor at the Catholic University of America (Washington, D.C.). In 2017-2018 he was a senior advisor in the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. Department of State. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis and on the faculty of SAIS-Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of Return of the Barbarians (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Great Powers and Geopolitical Change (JHU Press, 2006), and co-author with Wess Mitchell of The Unquiet Frontier (Princeton University Press, 2016).

Rebeccah Heinrichs is a senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based think tank Hudson Institute and the director of its Keystone Defense Initiative. She specializes in US defense policy with a focus on strategic deterrence.
She is also a contributing editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy and an adjunct professor of nuclear policy at the Institute of World Politics.

The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, first published in March 1972, was the longest-running and best-known underground periodical in the former Soviet Union. For 17 years, Catholic priests and nuns published The Chronicle as a way of documenting religious persecution and other human rights violations perpetrated by Soviet authorities. In total, 81 issues were produced clandestinely and smuggled abroad, shining a light on human rights violations in Lithuania and elsewhere in the USSR. English translations reached a wide audience among democratic governments, Catholic bishops and religious, the foreign press, international organizations, and the audiences, including in Lithuania, of radio networks such as Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Vatican Radio.

2022 is the Year of The Chronicle of the Catholic Church in Lithuania, as declared by the Parliament of Lithuania, in recognition of the publication’s role in defending religious freedom during Soviet occupation and in informing the public at home and abroad about Soviet human rights abuses.

This webinar will contribute to this commemoration of The Chronicle, shedding light on the idea behind its publication, the role of the Catholic resistance, and the contribution it made to the Soviet-era human rights movement.

The panel will be led by H.E. Gintaras Grušas, Archbishop of Vilnius, joined by leading Lithuanian intellectuals. It will be introduced by Dovydas Špokauskas, Deputy Chief of Mission of the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania to the United States of America, and moderated by Gerard Powers, professor and director, Catholic Peacebuilding Network, University of Notre Dame.

The event will live stream from the event page at 12:00 pm EDT/ 7:00 pm EEST on Wednesday, May 4.

Hosted by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, Keough School of Global Affairs, University of Notre Dame in partnership with the Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania, Washington DC, the Catholic Peacebuilding Network, and the Institute for Human Ecology .

A livestream can be accessed from the event page.

Dovydas Špokauskas
Deputy Chief of Mission, Embassy of the Republic of Lithuania to the United States of America

H.E. Gintaras Grušas
Archbishop of Vilnius

Donatas Puslys
Head of Media and Democracy Programme, Vilnius Institute of Policy A

Prof. dr. Arūnas Streikus
Director, Department of Contemporary History, University of Vilnius (Lithuania)

Prof. dr. Irena Vaišvilaitė
Professor of Church and Art History, University of Vilnius

Gerard Powers
Professor and Director, Catholic Peacebuilding Studies, University of Notre Dame

In their recent book, Permanent Crisis, Chad Wellmon and Paul Reitter argue that the modern humanities have always understood themselves in crisis, even as crisis discourse does not serve the humanities well and is perhaps best abandoned. Join us for a discussion of the history and fate of the modern humanities, and how we can move from a state of crisis to one of flourishing.

Tuesday, April 26 at 6:30 p.m at the Vincent P. Walter Room in Curley Hall, Catholic University of America.

A recording will be made available after the event.

 

Jennifer Frey is an associate Professor of Philosophy and Peter and Bonnie McCausland Fellow at the University of South Carolina, as well as a fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America. She has published widely on action, virtue, practical reason, and meta-ethics. Her writing has also been featured in Breaking Ground, First Things, Fare Forward, Image, Law and Liberty, The Point, and USA Today. She lives in Columbia, SC, with her husband, six children, and six chickens.

 

 

Zena Hitz is a Tutor at St. John’s College and founder and president of the Catherine Project (www.catherineproject.org).  Trained as a scholar in classical philosophy, her 2020 book, Lost In Thought, has been widely discussed, including in the Wall St. Journal, Chicago Tribune, Commonweal, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.   Her essays in defense of learning for its own sake have appeared in New Statesman, Modern Age, The Chronicle Review, The Tablet (UK), and the Washington Post.

 

 

Chad Wellmon is Professor of German Studies, with appointments in History and Media Studies, at the University of Virginia, where he teaches and writes about the history of knowledge and information, the history of technology and universities, and media and social theory. He has written or edited books on the history of anthropology, the modern research university, the history of reading and print, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Max Weber. His most recent book is Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. He is currently finishing a book titled After the University.

When a person is asked if their parish is accessible, one often says ‘yes’ if an elevator or ramp is available. While these items are helpful, they might not help a person who experiences mental illness, sensory needs, or an intellectual disability. When one realizes how broad the category of disability is, parish accessibility can be overwhelming.

Join Michele Chronister, Meghan Concagh, and Kelly Mantoan as they discuss ways to make a parish is accessible to people of all abilities. They will explore how accessibility not only requires physical, liturgical, and catechetical adaptions, but also the conversion of every parishioner to see Christ in others – so that all members of the Body of Christ truly belong.

The IHE is proud to cosponsor this event with the National Catholic Partnership on Disability.

Join the Institute for Human Ecology and the Center for Law and the Human Person at the Columbus School of Law for the third in a three-part lecture series, “The Future of Roe v. Wade?: Dobbs v. Jackon Women’s Health Organization.”

The series examines the legal, philosophical, and social dimensions of Dobbs v. Jackson and its relationship to Roe v. Wade.

Helen Alvaré, the Robert A. Levy Endowed Chair in Law and Liberty at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, will deliver the third lecture, “It’s More Complicated Than You Think: Abortion and Women’s Freedom.”

This event will take place in room 211 of Columbus School of Law at Catholic University of America.

A livestream is available here.

The use of artificial intelligence is growing across the military, where it is becoming an essential component of the contemporary warfighter’s toolbox. While the ethics of autonomous weapons have rightly gained much attention, it is just as important to consider the ethics of human-machine interactions. Research has shown that automated systems can affect character and decision-making, aspects of human action that belong to the category of virtue ethics.

This conference will explore how military AI systems can foster virtuous action. Because of the complex nature of these problems, the conference brings together both scholars and practitioners: philosophers, theologians, military experts, policy-makers, and programmers. Interdisciplinary discussion will allow the development of new pathways for guiding the ethical use of this rapidly progressing technology.

Click here for more details.

Watch the recordings on the IHE YouTube Channel by clicking the session titles in the schedule below.

SCHEDULE

Faith and Law hosted an event with the IHE on Dobbs with William Saunders and Helen Alvare.

Please join us on 8 March for the 2022 First Things Annual Lecture given by Professor Josh Mitchell of Georgetown University. The title this year is “By the Sweat of Your Brow You Shall Labor.”

Identity politics — the politics of innocence and transgression — has become a fever in America.  It is the reigning orthodox on this left, to which conservatives have no clear answer.  In this lecture Dr. Josh Mitchell will survey longer developments in the conservative movement and more recent politics, with a view to clarifying the crisis in which American citizens now find themselves.  Dr. Mitchell will then consider an alternative to the politics of innocence and transgression, namely, the politics of competence, and explain why a healthy American future may be built around it.

Co-sponsored by First Things magazine.

You can access a livestream here.

Dr. Josh Mitchell is currently professor of political theory at Georgetown University. He has been Chairman of the Government Department, and was on the start-up team for Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service in Doha, Qatar. During the 2008-10 academic years, Dr. Mitchell took Leave from Georgetown, and was the Acting Chancellor of The American University of Iraq – Sulaimani. His research interest lies in the relationship between political thought and theology in the West. He has published widely, and his books include, Not By Reason Alone: Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Thought (1993); The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future (1995); Plato’s Fable: On the Mortal Condition in Shadowy Times (2006); Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age (2013); and most recently, American Awakening: Identity Politics and Other Afflictions of Our Time (2020). In addition to teaching at Georgetown University, Dr. Mitchell writes extensively about contemporary American politics, and is an avid conservationist, committed to stewardship on his small farm on the Eastern Shore.

Join the Institute for Human Ecology and the Center for Law and the Human Person at the Columbus School of Law for the second in a three-part lecture series, “The Future of Roe v. Wade?: Dobbs v. Jackon Women’s Health Organization.”

The series examines the legal, philosophical, and social dimensions of Dobbs v. Jackson and its relationship to Roe v. Wade.

David Crawford, J.D., S.T.D., Dean and Associate Professor of Moral Theology and Family Law at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family Studies will deliver the second lecture, “Abortion and the Meaning of Life: Some Implications of the Viability Standard.”

To watch the recording of the event, click here.

Modern political thought tends to ignore the place of spiritedness in the psychology of political life, although it was explicitly thematic in For 2000 years–prior to the birth of the modern state–thumos, or spiritedness, was a core theme in the psychology of political life. Between the intellect and the emotions, this third component of man pertained to the realm of desire.

Yet, modern political thought largely ignores the role of thumos in politics. Even Francis Fukuyama, the modern champion of its importance, underexamines the place of thumos in the soul and its impact on political society by reducing it to the soul’s craving for recognition, dignity, and esteem.

Is thumos best understood as the fire animating tribal identity, self-assertion, and an increasingly divisive and belligerent polity? Can this power be confined to the level of consciousness, or is its place in the psyche of man more complex?

Through the lens of a Platonic-scholastic psychology, our panelists (Joe Capizzi, Matthew Crawford, Mark Shiffman, and Adrian Walker) will delve deeper into the role of thumos in the modern soul. Particular attention will be given to questions regarding the relationship between thumos and work, economic competition, violence, and political legitimacy.

A recording is available here.

This is the first annual event hosted by the Institute for Human Ecology in honor of Saint Scholastica on a theme relating to the Benedictine motto “Ora et labora.” Our discussion this year, which is co-hosted by the Catholic Information Center, will focus on how to bring holiness into both work and prayer in the home.

The Church calls our homes to be “the Church in miniature.” How do we go about making the home a space that fosters holiness in the everyday? Our panelists will discuss how to live liturgically the different facets of home life. From how to effectively feast and fast to creating a “little oratory” in your home to bringing to life the different seasons of the Church through art, the panelists will offer practical wisdom that you can use to bring the beauty of the Faith into your daily home life

A recording is available here.

The Panelists:

Michaela Harrison and Jeremiah Harrison founded the website Liturgy of the Home, a website which offers resources to Catholic families to help bring the liturgy alive through beautiful hand-drawn works of art highlighting the saints and seasons of the Church. They live with their children in Oklahoma, where they are inspired by the Benedictine monks living near them.

Leila Marie Lawler is a wife, mother of seven, and grandmother of many, living in central Massachusetts. Leila practices “kitchen-sink philosophy” at her popular blog, Like mother, Like daughter, a website offering practical and theoretical insight into all aspects of daily life. She has authored a number of books including her three-volume work The Summa Domestica: Order and Wonder in the Home and served as coauthor of The Little Oratory: A Beginner’s Guide to Praying in the Home. Lawler encourages all audiences to commit to the renewal of family life.

Jay W. Richards is the William E. Simon senior research fellow in Heritage’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society. He is the author of numerous books including Eat, Fast, Feast: Heal Your Body While Feeding Your Soul. Dr. Richards’ work has been covered by many media outlets including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the National Catholic Register. His research areas include public policy, economics, and culture, as well as the environment, natural science, and technology.

Joel Alicea (Columbus School of Law) lectured on Dobbs and the future of constitutional interpretation.

Americans are increasingly skeptical of markets and commerce. Many call for a reorientation of capitalism towards the common good. Free enterprise alone cannot give human persons their due, the argument goes, and policies and institutions must therefore be reoriented towards a substantive vision of human flourishing.

How should the public respond to the growing popularity of “common good capitalism?” What are its prospects and perils? Most importantly, what resources exist within the Christian intellectual tradition to evaluate it?

This event is co-sponsored by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

The event is in-person. A livestream can be accessed here.

Kevin Augustyn is a visiting fellow with the Mercatus Center’s Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange. Previously, Augustyn worked as a program officer at the Charles Koch Foundation. Prior to that, he served as the Director of Development, College of Humanities and Social Sciences and an Adjunct Professor at George Mason University.

Augustyn’s work with Mercatus focuses on liberalism and pluralism in religious thought.

Augustyn has a M.Phil (Master of Philosophy/PhD-ABD) in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from The Catholic University of America, an MDiv. in Pastoral Theology and S.T.B. in Sacred Theology from Saint John Vianney Theological Seminary and a B.A. in Philosophy from the Franciscan University of Steubenville.

Dr. Samuel Gregg is research director at the Acton Institute. He has written and spoken extensively on questions of political economy, economic history, ethics in finance, and natural law theory. He has an M.A. from the University of Melbourne, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in moral philosophy and political economy from the University of Oxford.

Gregg oversees Acton’s research program and team of scholars and is responsible for oversight of research international programing, including budgeting, management, personnel, publishing, and program development and implementation.

Dr. Mary Hirschfeld is Associate Professor of Economics and Theology in the Department of Humanities at Villanova University. A professor at Villanova since 2011, Dr. Hirschfeld regularly teaches the Humanities gateways Society and God, and honors ACS seminars (ancients and moderns). She completed a Ph.D. in economics (Harvard University) under the direction of Lawrence Summers and Jeffrey Williamson, and a Ph.D. in Moral Theology (University of Notre Dame) under the direction of Jean Porter. Her research is on the boundary between economics and theology, culminating in her book Aquinas and the Market: Toward a Humane Economy (Harvard University Press, 2018).

Dr. Alexander William Salter is Comparative Economics Research Fellow at the Free Market Institute and Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business Administration at Texas Tech University.

Dr. Salter earned his B.A. in economics from Occidental College and his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University. In addition to conducting scholarly research, Dr. Salter is a senior fellow with the American Institute for Economic Research’s Sound Money Project, and serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Private Enterprise.

Today everybody claims to be for human rights. People radically disagree, however, about what human rights there are. Can disagreements of this sort be adjudicated? Professor George argues that it requires an examination of the moral presuppositions of human rights discourse itself.

Co-sponsored by Faith and Law

Dr. Robert P. George is McCormick Professorship of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.

He has several times been a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. He has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the President’s Council on Bioethics. He has also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. He was a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.

A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Swarthmore, he holds the degrees of J.D. and M.T.S. from Harvard University and the degrees of D.Phil., B.C.L., D.C.L., and D.Litt. from Oxford University, in addition to twenty-one honorary doctorates. He is a recipient of the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, the Canterbury Medal of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, the Bradley Prize, the Irving Kristol Award of the American Enterprise Institute, and Princeton University’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching.

His books include Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality and In Defense of Natural Law (both published by Oxford University Press).

 

William Saunders is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, who has been involved in issues of public policy, law and ethics for thirty years. A regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Mr. Saunders has written widely on these topics, as well as on Catholic social teaching. He has given lectures in law schools and colleges throughout the United States and the world. He is the Director of the Program in Human Rights for the Institute for Human Ecology.

Federal law protects the civil rights of medical conscience and religious freedom in health care. These defend the rights of medical professionals, clinics, hospitals, and other health care entities who refuse to participate in specific medical procedures or health care activities, based on moral objections or religious beliefs. In recent years, advocates and politicians have been trying to pressure health-care providers to compromise their convictions and compel them to perform procedures or activities they believe are immoral or unethical.

In this talk, Louis will demonstrate that medical conscience and religious freedom, defended by a culture of life, is necessary for just healthcare, particularly for those who have been historically marginalized – the unborn, racial minorities, and the disabled.

Introduction and discussion by William Saunders, Director of the Program in Human Rights at the Institute of Human Ecology.

Co-sponsored by Faith and Law.

 

William Saunders is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, who has been involved in issues of public policy, law and ethics for thirty years. A regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Mr. Saunders has written and spoken widely on these topics. He is the Director of the Program in Human Rights for the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. (For information about his innovative Master of Arts in Human Rights, go to mahumanrights.com) Saunders works closely with Chinese dissident and CUA Distinguished Fellow, Chen Guangcheng, on human rights issues, and he is co-director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Columbus School of Law.

Mr. Saunders’ new book, Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases Under Scrutiny, was published in 2019.

 

Louis Brown received an undergraduate degree from Michigan State University and a Juris Doctorate from Howard University School of Law. After law school, he first worked as a private practice attorney for a firm where he practiced labor law and commercial litigation including representing, second chair, a major municipal employer in its labor arbitrations with police unions. He later served as associate director of social concerns, for a state Catholic conference where he advocated for the unborn, the materially impoverished, and immigrants at the state legislature. While at the conference, his work included advocacy on health care, co-leading a coalition in favor of housing non-discrimination legislation, advocating for in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants (legislation which successfully passed into law), and seeking to protect the social safety net for the poor. Brown went on to become a congressional staffer on Capitol Hill where he served as a California Congressman’s legislative counsel and his liaison to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary. As one of the Congressman’s advisors on Judiciary Committee matters, Brown worked on issues ranging from the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act to oversight of the U.S. Department of Justice. Additionally, he was the Congressman’s primary health care staffer and advised him on the Affordable Care Act as well as on Medicare.

In 2014, Brown joined the Christ Medicus Foundation (CMF), a Catholic health care nonprofit whose mission is to share the healing love of Jesus Christ through defending religious freedom and making Catholic health care accessible to the poor and most vulnerable. In 2017, Brown began serving at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights. During his time at HHS, Brown enforced vital federal civil rights laws to protect and defend the civil rights of patients and human service recipients. Brown returned to CMF in 2019 and serves as its Executive Director. Brown is admitted to practice law in the State of Michigan, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and the U.S. District Courts of Michigan. Brown has served in volunteer advisory capacities or as a board member for several organizations. He has been blessed to serve in an advisory capacity on the steering committee of Marisol Health (a Colorado based medical provider) and on the advisory board of the Levin Center at Wayne State University Law School (a center named after former U.S. Senator Carl Levin and dedicated to improving government oversight).

 

“If only you knew what was in my heart!” 

So exclaimed Saint Margaret of Castello (1287-1320) many times throughout her life as a Dominican tertiary. Only after her death was this saying of hers elevated to supernatural stature: her autopsy revealed, embedded in her heart, three miniature pearls upon which were engraved images of Christ, the Blessed Mother, and Saint Joseph.

An integral member of her community in Castello, Italy; a fearless catechist, prophet, and minister to prisoners; a woman born with blindness and a physical disability; a newly canonized Saint: Who was this extraordinary woman with pearls in her heart?

Join the National Catholic Partnership on Disability and the Institute for Human Ecology on 11 November 2021 for our virtual panel discussion, “In My Heart: The Life of Saint Margaret of Castello.”

Panelists will discuss Saint Margaret’s life and legacy, her experience of disability in the Body of Christ, and how devotion to her can shape and challenge our understanding of the universal call to holiness.

FR. BERNARD TIMOTHY O.P.

Fr. Bernard Timothy is a Dominican priest of the Province of St. Joseph. He currently serves as pastor of St. Louis Bertrand Church in Louisville, KY, where a shrine to St. Margaret of Castello is dedicated. Fr. Bernard was born in Jakarta, Indonesia and met the Dominicans when he was studying at the State University of New York in Buffalo, NY. He was ordained to the priesthood in 2013.

SISTER THERESA PAUL, O.P.

Sister Theresa Paul, O.P., is a Dominican Sister of the Mary Immaculate Province in Houston, Texas. She serves as a catechetical leader in the Diocese of Fort Worth. Sister recently wrote an NCPD blog post where she discusses contracting polio at a young age. She reflects on the life of Saint Margaret from this perspective.

Sister Kathleen Schipani, who is a member of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, is Director of the Office for Persons with Disabilities and the Deaf Apostolate of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Sister Schipiani is the past chair of the board of the National Catholic Partnership on Disability and the National Catholic Office for the Deaf. (CNS photo/courtesy Sister Kathleen Schipani)

Online Location Instructions

Please register for the online seminar via e-mail to zfm-sekretariat@ku.de.

Description

The Migration Studies Summer Academy (MSSA) highlights current research on migration at Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt (KU) and The Catholic University of America (CUA). By developing collaborations between Catholic universities and providing expertise among faculty and graduate students, the MSSA advances international research in migration studies.

The program includes professors‘ and research assistants‘ presentations across the fields of Economics, Communication Science, and Sociology from both Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt and The Catholic University of America.

Students and faculty are warmly invited to attend. Please register for the online seminar via e-mail to zfm-sekretariat@ku.de. Please indicate your name, institution, and position at your respective university. Upon registration, we will send you the participation instructions.

Join Angela Knobel (IHE Fellow; University of Dallas), David Elliot (Catholic University), and William Mattison (University of Notre Dame) for a panel discussion on Dr. Knobel’s new book, Aquinas and the Infused Moral Virtues (Notre Dame Press, 2021).

From the description: This study locates Aquinas’s theory of infused and acquired virtue in his foundational understanding of nature and grace.

Aquinas holds that all the virtues are bestowed on humans by God along with the gift of sanctifying grace. Since he also holds, with Aristotle, that we can create virtuous dispositions in ourselves through our own repeated good acts, a question arises: How are we to understand the relationship between the virtues God infuses at the moment of grace and virtues that are gradually acquired over time? In this important book, Angela McKay Knobel provides a detailed examination of Aquinas’s theory of infused moral virtue, with special attention to the question of how the infused and acquired moral virtues are related. Part 1 examines Aquinas’s own explicit remarks about the infused and acquired virtues and considers whether and to what extent a coherent “theory” of the relationship between the infused and acquired virtues can be found in Aquinas. Knobel argues that while Aquinas says almost nothing about how the infused and acquired virtues are related, he clearly does believe that the “structure” of the infused virtues mirrors that of the acquired in important ways. Part 2 uses that structure to evaluate existing interpretations of Aquinas and argues that no existing account adequately captures Aquinas’s most fundamental commitments. Knobel ultimately argues that the correct account lies somewhere between the two most commonly advocated theories. Written primarily for students and scholars of moral philosophy and theology, the book will also appeal to readers interested in understanding Aquinas’s theory of virtue.

This event is cosponored by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Attendees are eligible to receive a 30% discount on the book.

In a nation sharply divided along ideological lines, the depth and complexity of Catholic social teaching still offers a constant challenge to our partisan categories. Is the fuller application of Catholic ideas to our political debates a potential cure for polarization, as Matthew Walther argued in a provocative essay for The New York Times this summer? Walther, the editor of The Lamp magazine, joins New York Times columnist and IHE Media Fellow Ross Douthat and former Commonweal editor Paul Baumann for a conversation about what the universal church might have to offer the American republic.

LIVESTREAM: https://livestream.com/catholicuniversity/events/9881771

 

 

Ross Douthat is a Media Fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology. He joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed Columnist in 2009. Previously, he was a Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism (Simon and Schuster, 2018), Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Simon and Schuster, 2012), and Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005). He is the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (Doubleday, 2008). Mr. Douthat is also the Film Critic for National Review.

 

 

Matthew Walther is editor of The Lamp magazine and a former national correspondent of The Week. His writing on faith, literature, and politics has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

 

Paul Baumann was editor of Commonweal from 2003-2018. He is now the magazine’s senior writer. Baumann was educated at Wesleyan University and Yale Divinity School. He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Washington Monthly, The Nation, First Things, and National Review. With Patrick Jordan, he is the editor of Commonweal Confronts the Century: Liberal Convictions, Catholic Tradition–Celebrating Seventy-Five Years from the Pages of Commonweal (Touchstone). He lives in Fairfield, Conn.

As part of the Saint John Henry Newman Undergraduate Program, the IHE will host its second annual Constitution Day Lecture, sponsored by the Jack Miller Center.

This year’s speaker is Mark Rienzi.

Professor Rienzi is the President of the Becket Fund. He splits his time as Professor at The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law, and as Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School. Rienzi teaches constitutional law, religious liberty, torts, and evidence. He has been voted Teacher of the Year three years in a row by the Law School’s Student Bar Association.

Rienzi has broad experience litigating First Amendment religious exercise and free speech cases. He has represented the winning parties in a variety of Supreme Court First Amendment cases including Hobby Lobby, Little Sisters, Wheaton College, and Holt. In January 2014, Rienzi argued before the Supreme Court in McCullen v. Coakley, a First Amendment challenge to a Massachusetts speech restriction outside of abortion clinics. The Justices ruled in favor of his clients 9-0. Rienzi also led a successful eight-year litigation battle against Governor Blagojevich’s effort to force religious pharmacists to distribute the morning-after and week-after pills.

Rienzi’s academic writing focuses on the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and has appeared in a variety of prestigious journals, including the Harvard Law Review.

Rienzi is a widely sought after speaker on constitutional issues, particularly concerning abortion and the First Amendment. Professor Rienzi has been invited to discuss these issues at Harvard Law School, Columbia University Law School, Georgetown University Law Center, Boston College Law School, Notre Dame Law School, the National Press Club, and the Capitol. He has been quoted on constitutional law issues on NPR, in the Washington Times, The New York Daily News, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Rienzi has also been featured on the Kelly File, Fox News Sunday, Your World with Neil Cavuto, Geraldo at Large, CNN Tonight, CNN Live, Andrea Mitchell Reports, and Wall Street Journal Live.

Prior to joining Becket, Rienzi served as counsel for the litigation department and the intellectual property litigation practice group of WilmerHale LLP. His practice focused on complex civil and appellate litigation with a particular emphasis on intellectual property and First Amendment issues. Prior to joining WilmerHale, he served as law clerk to the Hon. Stephen F. Williams, senior circuit judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Prior to that, Rienzi was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, and earned his J.D. from Harvard Law School and B.A. from Princeton University, both with honors.

This lecture is sponsored by the Jack Miller Center, an organization dedicated to reinvigorating education in America’s founding principles and history to promote thoughtful and engaged citizenship.

This year, the Society of Catholic Social Scientists will award Mary Eberstadt the Pope Pius XI Award, which each year recognizes a scholar whose efforts have contributed to building up a true Catholic social science. Join the IHE, SCSS, and the Catholic University Department of Sociology for Eberstadt’s award reception and lecture, “The Cross Amod the Chaos.”

The event will be held in the Happel Room in Caldwell Hall, followed by a reception.

Mary Eberstadt

Mary Eberstadt holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center, and is a Senior Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute. Her latest book is Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics, with commentaries by Rod Dreher, Mark Lilla, and Peter Thiel. Other books include It’s Dangerous to Believe (2016); How the West Really Lost God (2013); and Adam and Eve after the Pill (2012). Mrs. Eberstadt’s writing has appeared in many magazines and journals. Her 2010 novel The Loser Letters, about a young woman in rehab struggling with atheism, was adapted for stage, and premiered at Catholic University in fall 2017. Seton Hall University awarded Mrs. Eberstadt an honorary doctorate in humane letters in 2014. She is married to author Nicholas Eberstadt; they have four children. Updates about her work can be found on her website, maryeberstadt.com.

Catherine Pakaluk

Catherine Pakaluk, Ph.D. in Economics, is an IHE Fellow and an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Busch School of Business. Her primary areas of research include economics of education and religion, family studies and demography, Catholic Social Thought and political economy. Dr. Pakaluk is the 2015 recipient of the Acton Institute’s Novak Award, a prize given for “significant contributions to the study of the relationship between religion and economic liberty.”

Join IHE Fellow and CUA Sociology Chair, Brandon Vaidyanathan, for an interdisciplinary panel discussion on Measuring Well-Being: Interdisciplinary Perspectives from the Social Sciences and the Humanities, a new book by the Harvard Flourishing Program.

Speakers:

Brandon Vaidyanathan (IHE Fellow; Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology, The Catholic University of America) (Moderator)

Matthew T. Lee (Director of Empirical Research at Human Flourishing Program, Harvard University) (Editor of Measuring Well-Being)

Matt Bloom (Research Professor, Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame)

Jennifer Frey (IHE Fellow; Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of South Carolina)

Catherine R. Pakaluk (IHE Fellow; Assistant Professor and Director of Social Research, The Catholic University of America)

Beau Weston (Van Winkle Professor of Sociology, Centre College)

In what way is Saint Joan of Arc a hero for our age? What do her life and her depictions in art and popular culture reveal to us about how we should understand and emulate our heroes?

In honor of Saint Joan of Arc‘s feast day (May 30) and just one year after the centenary of her canonization, join IHE Fellow Dr. Nora Heimann (a leading scholar on the image of Joan of Arc in French art and culture, and associate professor of art history at The Catholic University of America) and Dr. Jennifer Paxton (medievalist and director of the Catholic University Honors Program) for a reflection on Saint Joan of Arc, her legacy, and her incredible influence on the peoples of France and America.

This event is cosponsored by The Catholic University of America Honors Program.

Nora Heimann is an Associate Professor and the Chair of the Art Department. Dr. Heimann is a specialist in European and American modern and contemporary art history, and in the relationship between art, religion, and national identity. Her work experience includes curating exhibitions at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (DC), the Knights of Columbus Museum (New Haven), and the Chapin Rare Book Library (Williamstown); and working for curatorial and education departments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), the Minneapolis Museum of Art, and the Städische Sammlung Schweinfurt (Germany).  Her publications include two books: Joan of Arc: Her Image in France and America (2006), and Joan of Arc in French Art and Culture (1700-1855): From Satire to Sanctity (2005), and a variety of exhibition catalogue entries and articles on European and American art from the 19th to the 21st centuries.

Jennifer Paxton is the Director of the University Honors Program and a Professor of History at The Catholic University of America. She was previously a Professorial Lecturer in History at Georgetown University, where she taught for more than a decade. She holds a doctorate in history from Harvard University, where she has also taught and earned a Certificate of Distinction. Professor Paxton is both a widely published award-winning writer and a highly regarded scholar, earning both a Mellon Fellowship in the Humanities and a Frank Knox Memorial Traveling Fellowship. She lectures regularly on medieval history at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, Virginia, and has also been invited to speak on British history at the Smithsonian Institution and the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, DC. Her research focuses on England from the reign of King Alfred to the late 12th century, particularly the intersection between the authority of church and state and the representation of the past in historical texts, especially those produced by religious communities.

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a global mental health crisis, with significant increases in anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and suicidal ideation. Religious communities are a vital source of social and emotional support for many Americans, and considerable research attests to the positive relationship between religiosity and mental health. But pandemic-related lockdowns have severely restricted religious participation and community gatherings. It is therefore crucial to understand the mental health impact of the pandemic on faith communities. Between October and December 2020, Brandon Vaidyanathan and colleagues surveyed more than 1,600 members in diverse faith communities to assess the effect of the pandemic on their religiosity and well-being. In this webinar, we will present key highlights of their findings, and discuss the implications for faith leaders and for scholarship on religion and mental health. This project is supported by a grant from The John Templeton Foundation.

Presentation:

Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at The Catholic University of America. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Business Administration from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and HEC Montreal respectively, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. His research examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial, medical, and scientific institutions. His research has been published in journals such as Business and Society, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Social Forces, Social Problems, Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, and Work, Employment, and Society. He is the author of Mercenaries and Missionaries: Capitalism and Catholicism in the Global South (Cornell University Press, 2019) and co-author of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019).

Responses:

Dr. Scott Thumma is a Professor of Sociology of Religion and director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut. He has published numerous research reports, website documents, articles, and chapters on religious life in the United States in addition to co-authoring three books, The Other 80 Percent, Beyond Megachurch Myths and Gay Religion. He has researched and written on megachurches, evangelicalism, gay religious life, congregational studies, the rise of nondenominational churches, and the changing religious landscape. Scott is the PI for a Lilly Endowment Thriving in Ministry grant and a grant to study the impact of the pandemic on churches. He co-leads the Faith Communities Today national research project which in 2020 surveyed over 15,000 congregations. He has conducted 7 national studies of megachurches as well as a 50,000 person survey of megachurch attenders and 3 national studies of nondenominational churches.

Elisa Gilmore is a life-changing mental health awareness educator, speaker and transformation life coach whose mission is to communicate the importance of mental health to bring healing and wholeness to all. She is committed to sharing hope, healing and wholeness through transformative work and is an active ministry leader at First Baptist Church of Glenarden, where she serves as the Director of the Mental Health Support Ministry. Her unique approach equips and empowers individuals through training, coaching, workshops and seminars. Mrs. Gilmore has more than 20 years of experience in mental health education and is a sought after speaker who presented to audiences on national platforms, including television appearances on WBGR TV.  As founder of Divine Exchanges, LLC, Gilmore specializes in mental health awareness to support and educate individuals, organizations and churches through life challenges, distresses and crises, including mental health, recovery and restoration coaching.   Elisa received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Administration from the Southern University in Louisiana.Lisa Ziv is the chief strategy officer and interim executive director at the Blue Dove Foundation, a nonprofit organization that addresses mental illness and addiction in the Jewish community. Ziv is an innovator, author, and thought leader on the intersection of faith, family and Judaism’s connection to mental health. Her lived experience as a parent of children with mental health challenges forms the basis for her advocacy and educational work to build more supportive schools and communities. Ziv advises the National Alliance on Mental Illness FaithNet National Committee and manages an online support group of 21,000 parents of children with anxiety and depression. Her reflections on Jewish holidays and mental health were published by eJewish Philanthropy, Prizmah, and the Times of Israel. She has an MBA and advises organizations on healthcare financial management, operations and strategic planning.

Dr. Mark McMinn is Professor Emeritus and Scholar-in-Residence in the George Fox University Graduate School of Clinical Psychology. His enduring interest throughout his career has been finding creative ways for the church and psychology to partner together in meaningful and helpful ways. Dr. McMinn is a fellow and former president of APA’s Division 36 and is board certified in clinical psychology through the American Board of Professional Psychology. He has authored a number of books, the latest of which (with his daughter, Megan Anna Neff) is, Embodying Integration: A Fresh Look at Christianity in the Therapy Room.

The popular saying “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” indicates a commonly-held assumption that all art is merely subjective.

In this webinar, IHE Fellow Margarita Mooney will consider an alternative tradition of thought with the Catholic poet and philosopher James Matthew Wilson: art makes a claim on how we should live. Their dialogue will engage with philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Burke, Russell Kirk and Jacques Maritain and writers like Dante and Umberto Eco, all of whom provide guides for how our experiences of beauty can lead to carefully considered and rational judgments which result in personal and communal flourishing.

Event organized and cosponsored with the Scala Foundation.

James Matthew Wilson is Professor of Humanities and the Founding Director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing , at the University of Saint Thomas, Houson. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on all manner of subjects secular and divine, and especially on those where we see the two in their intrinsic relation, as truth, goodness, beauty, and being disclose themselves in art and culture, in the political and intellectual life, in our quest for self knowledge and the contemplation of God. His scholarly work especially focuses on the meeting of aesthetic and ontological form, where the craftsmanship of art-work discloses the truth about being. He has published ten books, including six books and chapbooks of poetry. Among his volumes are: The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (CUA, 2017); the major critical study, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (Wiseblood, 2015); and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014).  His most recent books are The Strangeness of the Good (Angelico, 2020) and the poetic sequence, The River of the Immaculate Conception (Wiseblood, 2019). He was educated at the University of Michigan (B.A.), the University of Massachusetts (M.A.), and the University of Notre Dame (M.F.A., Ph.D.), where he subsequently held a Sorin Research Fellowship.

Margarita Mooney is an Associate Professor of Practical Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary, where she teaches classes such as philosophy of social science; aesthetics and education; and resilience, vulnerability and suffering. She is the Founder and Executive Director of Scala Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Princeton, New Jersey, that works to offer meaning and purpose in American education by restoring a classical liberal arts education. Professor Mooney received her B.A. in Psychology from Yale University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. Prior to returning to Princeton, she was on the faculty of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Yale University. She is the author of The Love of Learning: Seven Dialogues on the Liberal Arts (Cluny Media, 2021) and Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora (University of California Press, 2019). In addition to her scholarly publications, she has written for publications that reach wide audiences both inside and outside academia such as Real Clear Policy, Scientific American, Chronicle of Higher Education, First Things, Public Discourse, Hedgehog Review, National Catholic Register, and Church Life Journal. Much of her work can be found at www.margaritamooney.com.

How are Catholic hospitals, hospices, and health care systems coping with the challenge of providing morally sound palliative and hospice care?

IHE Director of the M.A. Program in Human Rights William Saunders, J.D., leads a discussion on this topic between Dr. Joseph Meaney (National Catholic Bioethics Center) and Dr. Kerrianne Page (Catholic Health of Long Island). Various approaches and examples will be discussed, with a particular focus on the efforts of Catholic Health located on Long Island, NY. This event is cosponsored by the National Catholic Bioethics Center and is the second collaboration between the NCBC and the IHE on Catholic palliative and hospice care.

William Saunders, J.D., is a graduate of the Harvard Law School who has been involved in issues of public policy, law and ethics for thirty years. A regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Saunders has written widely on these topics, as well as on Catholic social teaching. He is affiliated scholar with the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Ethics at the Georgetown University School of Medicine, a member of the boards of the International Association of Catholic Bioethicists, and the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. In addition to speaking and writing frequently on bioethics topics, Mr. Saunders has submitted testimony to the President’s Council on Bioethics, as well as to UNESCO’s Committee on Bioethics, and has briefed Congressional staff and state legislatures. He is a regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly. He has given lectures in law schools and colleges throughout the United States and the world. He is the Director of the M.A. Program in Human Rights for the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America.

Joseph Meaney, Ph.D., is president of the National Catholic Bioethics Center. He received his Ph.D. in bioethics from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome. His doctoral program was founded by the late Elio Cardinal Sgreccia and linked to the medical school and Gemelli teaching hospital. His dissertation topic was Conscience and Health Care: A Bioethical Analysis. He was director of international outreach and expansion for Human Life International (HLI) and is a leading expert on the international pro-life and family movement, having traveled to eighty-one countries on pro-life missions over the last twenty-five years. He was general editor of the English edition and co-author with his father, Dr. Michael Meaney, of a chapter in the Pontifical Council for the Family’s Lexicon: Ambiguous and Debatable Terms Regarding Family, Life, and Ethical Questions and has published in a number of scholarly journals. He has also written many popular articles and has been interviewed by newspapers, radio, and television in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. His popular articles have appeared in the National Catholic Register, Crux, Inside Catholic, Crisis Magazine, Inside the Vatican, and many other publications.

Kerrianne Page, MD, HMDC, is Chief Medical Officer for Hospice, Palliative Care, & Home Care Services and Senior Vice President at Catholic Health, Long Island, New York. Dr. Page has over 20 years of experience as a medical director and clinician with expertise in enhancing the care of people dealing with a serious and life-limiting illness. She is the Medical Director for Good Shepherd Hospice, which provides hospital based and community based palliative care services as well as traditional home hospice and inpatient hospice services, serving over 550 patients each day. She also serves as the Medical Director for Catholic Home Care, the health system’s certified home health agency. After earning her medical degree from the New York University School of Medicine, Dr. Page completed her residency in Internal Medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, and was chosen to serve as a Chief Resident in the Department of Medicine. She is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at Columbia. She is board certified in Internal Medicine, Hospice and Palliative Medicine, and was among the first group of physicians to attain Hospice Medical Director Certification in 2014.

In the first event of the IHE’s new initiative on Catholic Political Thought, spearheaded by IHE Fellow V. Bradley Lewis, join Professor John von Heyking and IHE Fellow David Walsh for a lively discussion of Walsh’s latest book, The Priority of the Person: Political, Philosophical, and Historical Discoveries.

IHE Fellow David Walsh, Ph.D. in Government, is an Ordinary Professor of Politics at The Catholic University of America. His teaching and research are in the field of political theory broadly conceived. His focus has been on the question that the modern world poses for itself at its deepest level: does our civilization possess the moral and spiritual resources to survive?

John von Heyking is Professor of Political Science at the University of Lethbridge, in Alberta, Canada, where he teaches political philosophy and religion and politics. He is author of Augustine and Politics as Longing in the World (2001), and coeditor of Friendship and Politics: Essays in Political Thought (2008) and Civil Religion in Political Thought (2010), as well as two volumes of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. The topics of his scholarly articles include friendship, cosmopolitanism, liberal education, multiculturalism, empire, civil religion, political representation, citizenship, republicanism, just war, Islamic political thought, leadership, America as symbol, and religious liberty in Canada. He is currently at work on a book-length study on the political significance of friendship.

IHE Fellow V. Bradley Lewis specializes in political and legal philosophy, especially in classical Greek political thought and in the theory of natural law. He holds a B.A. from the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. from the University of Notre Dame. He has published scholarly articles in Polity, History of Political Thought, the Southern Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Communio, the Josephinum Journal of Theology, the Pepperdine Law Review, the Oxford Journal of Law and Religion, and the Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, as well as chapters in a number of books.  He is currently working on a book project provisionally titled “The Common Good and the Modern State.” He is also a fellow of the Institute for Human Ecology and serves as associate editor of the American Journal of Jurisprudence.

When Pope Pius XII instituted the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker in 1955, he was attempting to honor both the chaste spouse of our Lady and all those who emulate him by his spirit of selfless work.

But how do we define work, which Saint John Paul II described in Laborem exercens as “a fundamental dimension of man’s existence on earth” and “a key, probably the essential key, to the whole social question”? What does it mean to say that work is a source of “human toil and suffering, and also of the harm and injustice which penetrate deeply into social life” and simultaneously, in the words of Pope Francis, “a necessity, part of the meaning of life on this earth, a path to growth, human development and personal fulfilment”?

In the first collaboration between The Lamp magazine and the IHE, moderated by Joseph Capizzi, panelists Eve Tushnet, Rob Wyllie, Nick Cotta, and IHE Fellow Adrian Walker will discuss the meaning of work and its relationship to both natural law and the saints from a variety of overlapping Catholic perspectives in response to the Holy Father’s call for us to arrive at “a correct understanding of work.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a renewed societal focus on issues related to sickness and death. But how do we best care for the sick and for the dying? How do we appropriately provide palliative care and hospice care?

In the first collaboration between the National Catholic Bioethics Center and the Institute for Human Ecology, listen to a panel discussion, moderated by IHE Director of the M.A. Program in Human Rights William Saunders, J.D., with ethicists Dr. Jozef Zalot (National Catholic Bioethics Center) and Dr. Myles Sheehan (Pellegrino Center for Clinical Ethics; Georgetown Medical School), on the definition and scope of palliative and hospice care from a Catholic perspective.

Christian doctrine on human dignity has always affirmed the goodness of the body and the fittingness of our vulnerability in the good order of God’s creation. To paraphrase Saint Thomas Aquinas, as incarnate intellectual creatures formed in the image and toward the likeness of triune God, those gifts are among the natural goods that predicate our greatest good and final perfection.

In this lecture, Dr. Miguel J. Romero (Salve Regina University) asks what difference it would make if those doctrinal claims were treated as integral to the work of Catholic moral theology. Drawing upon the anthropological and moral outlook of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Romero proposes that the breadth and depth of this challenge is struck in high relief when we consider how the topic of “disability” is conceived and navigated, engaged and avoided, in contemporary Catholic systematic, moral, and ethical discourse. IHE Executive Director Joseph Capizzi will moderate the conversation.

Special attention will be given to concerns and priorities expressed in the Pastoral Statement of U.S. Catholic Bishops on Persons with Disabilities and the USCCB Guidelines for the Celebration of the Sacraments with Persons with Disabilities.

This event is cosponsored with the National Catholic Partnership on Disability.
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Miguel J. Romero is an assistant professor of Religious & Theological Studies at Salve Regina University (RI) and an NCPD Board member. His writing on moral theology, theological method, and the thought of Thomas Aquinas has appeared in The Thomist, Nova et Vetera, The Journal of Moral Theology, and National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly. Romero’s forthcoming book is entitled Destiny of the Wounded Creature: St. Thomas Aquinas on Disability. 

Paul Gondreau teaches and has published widely in the areas of moral theology, with an emphasis on human sexuality and marriage, Christology, and sacraments, and specializes in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. The father of a child with special needs, he has also published on the moral theology of disability. He is associate editor of the journal Nova et Vetera and is the author of The Passions of Christ’s Soul in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Aschendorff, 2002; reprinted Cluny Media, 2018). He is currently working on a monograph on a Thomistic account of the meaning and purpose of human sexuality.

Joseph Capizzi is an ordinary professor of moral theology at The Catholic University of America. He teaches in the areas of social and political theology, with special interests in issues in peace and war, citizenship, political authority, and Augustinian theology. He has written, lectured, and published widely on just war theory, bioethics, the history of moral theology, and political liberalism, including his book entitled, Politics, Justice, and War: Christian Governance and the Ethics of Warfare. Dr. Capizzi is the Executive Director of the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, a Masters in Theological Studies from Emory University, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. He lives in Maryland with his wife and six children.

A broad consensus has formed for improved instruction in American history and civics.  Multiple studies and assessments indicate that Americans have an appallingly deficient understanding of their history and their governing process.  And, of course, the events of political violence over the last year exacerbate those concerns.   But what should such an effort look like?  Should it be based within the states? Should Congress adopt a national strategy? If so, should that be overseen by the federal bureaucracy and implemented by the states?

For a Faith and Law Friday Forum, join IHE Director of the Program on the Constitution and Catholic Social Doctrine Emmett McGroarty for a conversation on U.S. civics and history education with Stanley Kurtz (Ethics and Public Policy Center) and Bill McClay (Liberty University).

Stanley Kurtz is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. On a wide range of issues, from K-12 and higher education reform, to the challenges of democratization abroad, to urban-suburban policies, to the shaping of the American left’s agenda, Mr. Kurtz is a key contributor to American public debates. Mr. Kurtz has written on these and other issues for various journals, particularly National Review Online (where he is a contributing editor). Mr. Kurtz has published two influential books on President Obama’s political history and policy agenda: Radical-in-Chief: Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism (Threshold) and Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities (Sentinel). His latest book, The Lost History of Western Civilization (National Association of Scholars), offers both a critique of deconstructionist history and a new way of looking at America’s cultural conflicts. Mr. Kurtz received his undergraduate degree from Haverford College and his Ph.D. in social anthropology from Harvard University. He later taught at Harvard, winning several teaching awards for his work in a Great Books Program.

Wilfred McClay is the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. His research interests focus on the intellectual and cultural history of the United States, with particular attention to the social and political thought of the 19th and 20th centuries, the history of American religious thought and institutions, and the theory and practice of biographical writing. A recipient of many teaching awards and honors, he has been the recipient of fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Academy of Education. Mr. McClay previously served on the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities. His book, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America, won the 1995 Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians for the best book in American intellectual history. Besides Land of Hope, he is the author of The Student’s Guide to U.S. History, and co-editor of Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in America and Why Place Matters: Geography, Identity, and Public Life in Modern America.

Emmett McGroarty studies public policies that promote the principle of subsidiarity and that undermine the constitutional structure. He is the co-author of Deconstructing the Administrative State: The Fight for Liberty. He is also co-author of Controlling Education from the Top: Why Common Core Is Bad for America (Pioneer Institute 87, May 2012) and Cogs in the Machine: Big Data, Common Core, and National Testing (Pioneer Institute 114, May 2014). Mr. McGroarty is cofounder of truthinamericaneducation.com, a nationwide network of individuals and organizations that sheds light on the Common Core system and the collection of private data on children and their families. His published works have appeared in, among others, Breitbart.com, Christian Post, Crisis, Daily Caller, The Federalist, FoxNews.com, New York Post, Public Discourse, The Hill, Townhall, USA Today, and The Washington Times.  He has testified before state and federal committees and commissions. Mr. McGroarty received an A.B. from Georgetown University and a J.D. from Fordham School of Law.

Continuing the discussion from our panel series on the idea of a university in the time of COVID-19, join IHE Executive Director Joseph Capizzi, IHE Fellow Margarita Mooney (professor of theology and sociology at Princeton Theological Seminary), and IHE Fellow Michael Gorman (professor of philosophy and systematic theology at The Catholic University of America) for an in-depth discussion of competing university curricula and how university curricula will be or should be affected by the crisis posed to the existence and mission of the university in the time of COVID-19.

This event is cosponsored by the Scala Foundation.

Joseph Capizzi is an ordinary professor of moral theology at The Catholic University of America. He teaches in the areas of social and political theology, with special interests in issues in peace and war, citizenship, political authority, and Augustinian theology. He has written, lectured, and published widely on just war theory, bioethics, the history of moral theology, and political liberalism, including his book entitled, Politics, Justice, and War: Christian Governance and the Ethics of Warfare. Dr. Capizzi is the Executive Director of the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, a Masters in Theological Studies from Emory University, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. He lives in Maryland with his wife and six children.

Margarita Mooney is an Associate Professor of Congregational Studies at Princeton Theological Seminary, where she teaches classes on philosophy of social science, research methods, religion and resilience, and sociology of religion. She received her B.A. in Psychology from Yale University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. Prior to returning to Princeton in 2016, she held faculty positions at the University of North Carolina and Yale University. Her research, which has been funded by more than $3 million in grants from the John Templeton Foundation, lies at the intersection of social sciences, moral philosophy and contextual theology. Her first book, Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora explores how religious beliefs and practices contribute to the resilience of Haitian immigrants in Miami, Montreal and Paris. Her book manuscript in progress, tentatively entitled “Living a Broken Life, Beautifully,” explores the dignity of young adults who have suffered traumatic life events. In addition to her books and more than 20 published articles, she contributes posts to the Black, White and Gray blog, on happiness, virtues, and freedom. Dr. Mooney has also led a variety of extra-curricular student reading groups and seminars exploring topics such as happiness, academic freedom, personalism and social science, faith and science, and women in leadership.

Michael Gorman is an ordinary professor of philosophy at the Catholic University of America. After serving as assistant professor of Catholic Studies at Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia from 1997 to 1999, he joined the faculty of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, where he has taught ever since. His philosophical research focuses on questions of metaphysics and human nature, and he has a special interest in the idea that concepts in these areas are irreducibly normative. He is the author of Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union (Cambridge, 2017) and over thirty scholarly articles. Dr. Gorman earned his B.A. at St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto, his Ph.D. in philosophy the State University of New York at Buffalo, and his Ph.D. in theology at Boston College.

In an increasingly polarized age, people are confused about when civility is appropriate, and what it entails. In a conversation moderated by David Corey (Baylor in Washington), join Dr. Cornel West (Union Theological Seminary), Dr. Teresa Bejan (Oxford University), and Dr. Andrew Sullivan (The Weekly Dish) to explore these questions, as well as the role of religious faith in the practice of civility.

The IHE is pleased to cosponsor this event with Baylor in Washington as a program of the Joint Initiative on Faith and the American Commonwealth.

Cornel West is a prominent and provocative democratic intellectual. He is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He has also taught at Union Theological Seminary, Yale, Harvard, and the University of Paris. Cornel West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. He has written 20 books and has edited 13. He is best known for his classics, Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and for his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. His most recent book, Black Prophetic Fire, offers an unflinching look at nineteenth and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.

Teresa Bejan is Associate Professor of Political Theory and Fellow of Oriel College at the University of Oxford. Before coming to Oxford, she taught at the University of Toronto and as a Mellon Research Fellow in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University. In 2021, she will hold the Fulbright Visiting Research Chair in Constitutional and Political Theory at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Dr. Bejan received her M.Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge (2007) and her Ph.D. in Political Science with distinction from Yale (2013). Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association’s 2015 Leo Strauss Award for the best dissertation in political philosophy. Dr. Bejan’s first book, Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration (Harvard University Press, 2017; paperback 2019) was called “penetrating and sophisticated” by The New York Times and has been widely reviewed in scholarly and popular publications. In addition to her many articles in academic journals and edited volumes, she writes regularly for popular publications, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. Dr. Bejan is currently on research leave from Oxford, supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, to finish her second book, First Among Equals: The Practice and Theory of Early Modern Equality, under contract with Harvard University Press.

Andrew Sullivan is a British-American author, editor, and blogger. He attended Reigate Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took a First in Modern History and Modern Languages. In 1984, he won a Harkness Fellowship to Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and earned a Masters degree in Public Administration in 1986. He then went on to get a Ph.D. from Harvard’s Government Department with a doctorate called Intimations Pursued: The Voice of Practice in the Conversation of Michael Oakeshott. It won the Government Department Prize for a dissertation in political science and was published in 2008. From 1991 – 1996, he was the editor of The New Republic, winning three National Magazine Awards in his tenure. Mr. Sullivan has written extensively on marriage equality for gay couples. In 1995, he published his first book, Virtually Normal, a case for marriage equality, which was translated into a five languages. He lives with his husband and two hound dogs in Washington, D.C., and Provincetown, Massachusetts.

David Corey is the Director of Baylor in Washington and  a professor of Political Science focusing on political philosophy in the Honors Program at Baylor University.  He is also an affiliated member of the departments of Philosophy and Political Science. He is the author of two books, The Just War Tradition (with J. Daryl Charles) (2012) and The Sophists in Plato’s Dialogues (2015).

Catholic schools have long been a vital part of America’s K-12 school choice landscape, and COVID-19 has created a resurgence of parent interest. Religiously-affiliated schools of all kinds are also expected to continue to flourish following the landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue.

We invite you to join us for a discussion on Pioneer Institute’s new book, A Vision of Hope: Catholic Schooling in Massachusetts. At a time when Catholic secondary schools are closing all across the country, A Vision of Hope reviews the successes of the Massachusetts model and offers recommendations to help Catholic schools increase student enrollment. Parents of all faiths and beliefs are drawn to the unrelenting focus on achievement, classic liberal arts education, discipline, and values that are part of a Catholic education.

This webinar will feature presentations and commentary from papal biographer George Weigel; Kendra Espinoza, Lead Plaintiff of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue; co-editor of A Vision of Hope, Cara Candal; Patrick Wolf, Distinguished Professor of Education Policy at the University of Arkansas; and and IHE Director of the Program on the Constitution and Catholic Social Doctrine, Emmett McGroarty, as moderator.

On 8 December 2020, the Holy Father announced the “Year of Saint Joseph” to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Church’s declaration of Saint Joseph as Patron of the Universal Church.

Throughout 2021, the IHE will be hosting a series of events to honor Saint Joseph, who is also our patron in particular. Join IHE Fellow Michael Pakaluk and Fr. Dwight Longenecker on the Feast of Saint Joseph (March 19) for a discussion on Saint Joseph, fatherhood, and the relationship between holy families and the renewal of society.

This event is cosponsored by the Center for Carmelite Studies at The Catholic University of America.

Michael Pakaluk is an IHE Fellow and professor of business at The Catholic University of America. Pakaluk’s main work as a researcher has been in ancient philosophy, as he has authored many papers and three books concerned with Aristotelian ethics. His groundbreaking work in accounting ethics, which is also highly technically informed, approaches the subject through the viewpoint of virtue ethics. Most recently, he published a new translation of the Gospel of John, entitled Mary’s Voice in the Gospel of John. Dr. Pakaluk holds Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University.

Fr. Dwight Longnecker is pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary Parish in Greenville, South Carolina and a Catholic apologist. After graduating from Bob Jones University with a degree in Speech and English, he went to study theology at Oxford University. He was eventually ordained as an Anglican priest and served as a curate, a school chaplain in Cambridge and a country parson on the Isle of Wight. In 1995, Fr. Longnecker and his family were received into the Catholic Church. He spent the next ten years working as a freelance Catholic writer, contributing to over twenty-five magazines, papers, and journals in Britain, Ireland, and the U.S. At St. Mary’s Church in Greenville in December 2006, he was ordained as a Catholic priest under the special pastoral provision for married former Anglican clergy. Fr. Longnecker is the author of many books, including Listen, My Son: Saint Benedict for Fathers.

Egalitarian values and generous social welfare states had been credited with protecting the Nordic countries in particular from very low fertility rates. Yet since 2008, birth rates in those countries have nonetheless plummeted.

Join IHE Fellows Bradford Wilcox (professor of sociology at the University of Virginia), Laurie DeRose (professor of sociology at The Catholic University of America), and American Enterprise Institute Fellow Lyman Stone (sociology graduate student at McGill University) for a conversation about a key factor impacting fertility rates — attitudes towards work. Our speakers will tackle the elevation of work and career advancement to a very high place in individual’s values and provide evidence that the concept of workism helps explain reduced fertility worldwide.

This event is cosponsored with the Institute for Family Studies and Plough Quarterly. The latest issue of Plough, entitled “What Are Families For?,” features IHE Fellow Bradford Wilcox.

W. Bradford Wilcox is a professor of Sociology at the University of Virginia, a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the director of the National Marriage Project. In his latest work, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage Among African Americans and Latinos, Dr. Wilcox highlights the underappreciated role that faith plays in the lives of strong and happy minority couples. He is now studying the class divide in American family life.

Laurie DeRose is an assistant professor of sociology at The Catholic University of America. She also serves as a senior fellow at the Institute for Family Studies and as the Director of Research for their World Family Map project that investigates both the determinants of family strength and the outcomes stemming from family strength across the globe. She is currently studying the effects of family structure on education in the Global South, including the possibility that where single motherhood is prevalent, the gender gap in education may be smaller.

Lyman Stone is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, and the chief information officer of the population-forecasting firm Demographic Intelligence. He and his wife serve as missionaries in the Lutheran Church-Hong Kong Synod. He also writes about migration issues on his blog “In a State of Migration.” He was formerly an agricultural economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service. He has an MA in international trade policy from the George Washington University and is completing his doctorate in sociology at McGill University.

Bipartisan agreement exists in affirming that our republican political system has decayed over the last two generations. But why has this decay happened and what can we do to stop it? Can we save our institutions or is saving them an impossible project?

Join IHE Media Fellow Ross Douthat (The New York Times) for a conversation about the causes of decline in our American republic and how our republican system of government might be rebuilt. Douthat asks Yuval Levin (Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and senior editor of The New Atlantis) and Christopher Caldwell (Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute) for their reflections on and diagnoses of the causes of our republican government’s decline as well as what we need to do to save it.

Ross Douthat is a Media Fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology. He joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed Columnist in 2009. Previously, he was a Senior Editor at the Atlantic and Blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism (Simon and Schuster, 2018), Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics (Simon and Schuster, 2012), and Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class (Hyperion, 2005). He is the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream (Doubleday, 2008). Mr. Douthat is also the Film Critic for National Review. He holds a B.A. from Harvard University.

Yuval Levin is the founding and current editor of National Affairs. He is also the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. He is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a contributing editor to National Review. Dr. Levin was formerly the Hertog Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He has been a member of the White House domestic policy staff (under President George W. Bush) and the executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently A Time to Build: From Family and Community to Congress and the Campus, How Recommitting to Our Institutions Can Revive the American Dream (Basic Books). He holds a B.A. from American University and a M.A. and Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Christopher Caldwell is a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. He was previously a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for the Financial Times. His writing also frequently appears in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times (where he is a contributing editor to the paper’s magazine), and The Washington Post. Mr. Caldwell is the author of The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties and Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West. He holds a B.A. from Harvard University.

What do people mean when they say liberalism has failed? Or that “classical liberalism” is good? Liberalism (whatever it is) seems to be receiving more critical attention than ever. Does it deserve it? And what should Christians make of this?

Join David Corey for a conversation with William T. Cavanaugh, Kristen Deede Johnson, and Samuel Goldman for a conversation about the current state of liberalism in America.

The IHE is pleased to cosponsor this event with Baylor in Washington as a program of the Joint Initiative on Faith and the American Commonwealth.

William T. Cavanaugh is the director of the Center for World Catholicism and Intercultural Theology (CWCIT) and a professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. He received a B.A. in theology from Notre Dame in 1984, and an M.A. from Cambridge University in 1987. After working as a lay associate with the Holy Cross order in a poor area of Santiago, Chile, he worked at the Center for Civil and Human Rights at the Notre Dame Law School. He then studied at Duke University, where he received a Ph.D. in religion in 1996. He has taught at the University of St. Thomas since 1995 and at DePaul University starting in 2010.

Kristen Deede Johnson is Associate Professor of Theology and Christian Formation at Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. She and Bethany Hanke Hoang wrote the award-winning The Justice Calling: Where Passion Meets Perseverance (Brazos Press, 2016). Her other publications include Theology, Political Theory, and Pluralism: Beyond Tolerance and Difference (Cambridge University Press, 2007) and an array of articles and books chapters related to theology, culture, and political theory.

Samuel Goldman is executive director of the John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and director of the Politics & Values Program. His first book God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2018. His second book, After Nationalism, is forthcoming from the University of Pennsylvania Press in early 2021. In addition to his academic research, Goldman is literary editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Quarterly and a contributing editor at The American Conservative. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.

David Corey is the Director of Baylor in Washington and  a professor of Political Science focusing on political philosophy in the Honors Program at Baylor University.  He is also an affiliated member of the departments of Philosophy and Political Science. He is the author of two books, The Just War Tradition (with J. Daryl Charles) (2012) and The Sophists in Plato’s Dialogues (2015).

Saint John Henry Newman wrote in The Idea of a University that “education implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connection with religion and virtue.”

But what is the university in light of the challenges posed by COVID-19? Can the university still fulfill her mission? What is the university’s goal — creating saints, forming citizens, educating the intellect, or fostering friendships — and have there been deviations from or improvements in light of this goal during the pandemic?

Continuing the dynamic discussion from our recent panel on the university in the time of COVID, join IHE Fellows Thomas Hibbs, Angela Knobel, and Brandon Vaidyanathan for a conversation delving more deeply into the goal of university education moderated by IHE Executive Director Joseph Capizzi.

Thomas Hibbs is a professor of philosophy and the ninth president of the University of Dallas. Previously, Dr. Hibbs was dean of the Honors College and distinguished professor of ethics and culture at Baylor University since 2003. He has spent most of his career writing, teaching and designing academic programs; he has 30 published academic articles, and two are forthcoming. He has written, edited or provided introductions for 12 books, including three on the thought of Thomas Aquinas. He has also written more than 200 movie reviews and dozens of essays and book reviews for publications such as National Review, Catholic World Report, First Things, The Weekly Standard and others. Hibbs received a B.A. in English and an M.A. in philosophy from UD and both a master’s and a doctorate in medieval studies from the University of Notre Dame. He was a tutor at Thomas Aquinas College for three years before moving to Boston College, where he taught for 13 years as full professor and chair of the philosophy department.

Joseph Capizzi is an ordinary professor of moral theology at The Catholic University of America. He teaches in the areas of social and political theology, with special interests in issues in peace and war, citizenship, political authority, and Augustinian theology. He has written, lectured, and published widely on just war theory, bioethics, the history of moral theology, and political liberalism, including his book entitled, Politics, Justice, and War: Christian Governance and the Ethics of Warfare. Dr. Capizzi is the Executive Director of the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, a Masters in Theological Studies from Emory University, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. He lives in Maryland with his wife and six children.

Angela Knobel is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Dallas. She has published extensively on medieval and contemporary ethics. Her work focuses primarily on Aquinas’ theory of infused virtue, virtue ethics and applied ethics. She has published widely in such journals as The Thomist, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Nova et Vetera, International Philosophical Quarterly and The Journal of Moral Theology. Her book Aquinas and the Infused Moral Virtues is forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press. Dr. Knobel received her B.A. from The Catholic University of America, her M.A. in mathematics from the University of Maryland, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame.

Brandon Vaidyanathan is an associate professor of sociology and chair of the sociology department at The Catholic University of America. His research examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial, medical, and scientific institutions. He has been published in journals such as Business and Society, Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Social Forces, Social Problems, Sociology of Religion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, and Work, Employment, and Society. He is the author of Mercenaries and Missionaries: Capitalism and Catholicism in the Global South (Cornell University Press, 2019) and co-author of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019). He received his B.A. and M.A. in Business Administration from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia and HEC Montreal respectively, and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame.

Because of the Covid pandemic, many jurisdictions have placed limits on religious worship. Protests that such limits infringe on the religious liberty guarantees of the First Amendment have reached the Supreme Court. What are the permissible limits on religious worship? How can we expect the Supreme Court to rule before its terms ends in June?

William Saunders, J.D., director of the IHE M.A. Program in Human Rights, and Mark Rienzi, president of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, discuss the pandemic, religious liberty, and the courts for a Faith & Law Friday Forum.

Mark Rienzi is Professor at The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law, and President of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. He teaches constitutional law, religious liberty, torts, and evidence. He has been voted Teacher of the Year three years in a row, and he is widely published, including in the Harvard Law Review. Mr. Rienzi is Director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Columbus School of Law. He has broad experience litigating First Amendment cases and represented the winning parties in a variety of Supreme Court First Amendment cases, including Hobby Lobby, Wheaton College, and Holt. Mr. Rienzi and his colleagues at Becket won several important religious liberty cases at the Supreme Court in the past year, including Our Lady of Guadalupe, Little Sisters of the Poor, and Agudath v. Cuomo.

William Saunders, J.D., is the director of the IHE’s M.A. in Human Rights Program at the Catholic University of America. He is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, who has been involved in issues of public policy, law and ethics for thirty years. A regular columnist for the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly, Mr. Saunders has written and spoken widely on these topics. Mr. Saunders works closely with Chinese dissident and CUA Distinguished Fellow, Chen Guangcheng, on human rights issues, and he is co-director of the Center for Religious Liberty at the Columbus School of Law. His new book, Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases Under Scrutiny, was published in 2019.

Saint John Henry Newman wrote in The Idea of a University that “education implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent, and is commonly spoken of in connection with religion and virtue.”

But what is the university in light of the challenges posed by COVID-19? Can the university still fulfill her mission? Has the essence of the university emerged more clearly, and what can we learn from past eras of education — ancient, medieval, modern, present day — about what the university is or should be?

The Catholic University of America’s President John Garvey, IHE Executive Director Joseph Capizzi, IHE Fellow Jennifer Frey, and IHE Fellow Mark J. Clark engage in a panel discussion on the idea of the university in the time of COVID-19.

John Garvey became the 15th president of The Catholic University of America July 1, 2010. He is a nationally recognized expert in constitutional law, religious liberty, and the First Amendment. He has won distinguished fellowships and teaching awards and served as the 2008 president of the Association of American Law Schools. President Garvey is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including What are Freedoms For? (1996); Religion and the Constitution (2011), which won the Alpha Sigma Nu Jesuit book award; and Sexuality and the U.S. Catholic Church (2007), which won the Catholic Press Association Award. He received his A.B. summa cum laude from Notre Dame in 1970 and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1974. President Garvey and his wife Jeanne Walter Garvey have five children, 23 grandchildren, and a rescue dog named Gus.

Joseph E. Capizzi is an ordinary professor of moral theology at The Catholic University of America. He teaches in the areas of social and political theology, with special interests in issues in peace and war, citizenship, political authority, and Augustinian theology. He has written, lectured, and published widely on just war theory, bioethics, the history of moral theology, and political liberalism. Dr. Capizzi is the Executive Director of the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, a Masters in Theological Studies from Emory University, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. He lives in Maryland with his wife and six children.

Jennifer Frey is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina. She earned her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, where she worked under Michael Thompson and John McDowell. She earned her B.A. in philosophy and medieval studies with a classics minor at Indiana University-Bloomington. Her research interest lies at the intersection of philosophy of action, ethics, and meta-ethics. She has co-edited a book entitled Self-Transcendence and Virtue, which was part of the work she did as principal investigator on a major three year research project, “Virtue, Happiness, and Meaning of Life.”  Dr. Frey also writes for The Virtue Blog and hosts a popular philosophy, theology, and literature podcast sponsored by the IHE, “Sacred and Profane Love.”

Mark J. Clark is an ordinary professor of medieval theology and received his Ph.D. in Medieval History at Columbia University in 2002. His specialty is the history of medieval theology and in particular the Bible and theology during the second half of the twelfth century. During the past seven years he has travelled frequently to Europe (to Paris and Troyes in France, and to Bologna, Padua, and Rome in Italy) to lecture on the development of the first university textbooks, which became the basis for the teaching of the Bible in universities across Europe for centuries. He has a contract with the flagship Medieval Law and Theology Series of PIMS Press to publish six books over the next ten years (a monograph followed by texts and translations). Dr. Clark also earned a law degree from Duke University, worked as an attorney with Arnall, Golden, and Gregory in Atlanta, Georgia, specializing in the then-incipient field of intellectual property. He left the practice of law first to sing professionally both in the United States and in Europe, and subsequently embarked on a career as a teacher and professor.

What does it mean to be pro-life and how can we, especially as Catholics, be more effective in our promotion of the sanctity of human life?

Our speakers, Kathryn Jean Lopez (Senior Fellow at the National Review Institute and an editor-at-large of National Review), Erika Bachiochi (Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of the forthcoming The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision), and Sr. Magdalene Teresa, S.V. (Director of the Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life), have exemplified profound commitments to life across diverse vocations: media, law, and direct service of mothers in crisis. Regardless of vocation, age, or profession, Christ’s command to love all people is an urgent, demanding, and rewarding responsibility. Join us for a concrete and challenging reflection on what it means to be pro-life.

This event is cosponsored by the National Review Institute and the Catholic Women’s Forum, a program of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

New York Times columnist and IHE Media Fellow Ross Douthat reprises a conversation he began in his latest book, The Decadent Society, about what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing, how long our era of stagnation and repetition might last, and how, whether in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end. Almost a year after its original publication, we are keen to hear from Ross on what the events of the past year have revealed about our condition and how we might serve as agents of renewal in a divisive and decadent time.

This event is cosponsored with The Trinity Forum, the Harvard Christian Alumni Society, and the Catholic Information Center.

IHE Executive Director Joseph Capizzi moderates a discussion between IHE Fellow Paul Scherz (moral theology professor with a doctorate in genetics at Catholic University), Melissa Moschella (philosophy professor at Catholic University), and IHE Fellow V. Bradley Lewis (philosophy professor at Catholic University) on ethical questions surrounding the COVID vaccine.

A discussion with Kenneth Woodward (Lumen Christi Institute), Peter Wehner (Ethics & Public Policy Center), and William McCready (University of Michigan), moderated by IHE Executive Director Joseph Capizzi (Catholic University of America).

The 2020 presidential race seemed to highlight the central role of religion in the electorate. Democrats spent heavily on campaign ads emphasizing Joe Biden’s Roman Catholicism. President Trump has spent the past four years courting Evangelicals and conservative Catholics. But is there really a religious vote? In this panel, experts examine the relationship between religion, polls, and presidential elections.

This event was cosponsored by America Media and the Institute for Human Ecology.

View this event:

Emmett McGroarty, IHE Director of the Program on the Constitution and Catholic Social Doctrine, leads a panel discussion about unwinding the administrative state, featuring Kara Rollins, litigation counsel for New Civil Liberties Alliance, and Anthony Campau, visiting fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

Panelists will discuss legal and legislative routes available for reining in arbitrary administrative lawmaking power, the discrimination religious Americans face at the hands of the administrative state, and the effects of COVID-19 on administrative power inflation.

Americans have long cared about preserving a tradition of liberal arts education, seeing it as key to a free society of citizens with both the knowledge and virtue to sustain self-governance and to advance social order and prosperity. For a Faith and Law Friday Forum, Professor Mooney analyzes the major philosophical debates about educational policy, such as between pragmatist, Marxist, classical liberal and Christian views of education. She will explain key principles that could shape the goals and practices of American educational policies, curricula, and institutions. Based on the conviction that humans are created in the image of God, a good, practical and just education should focus on learning as an end in and of itself that forms intellectual and moral virtue and allows students to pursue a diversity of vocations, regardless of one’s social origins.

Economic inequality is a major concern for political actors across the ideological spectrum, especially in light of the 2020 election. What are the causes of inequality, and what role might public policy play in alleviating it? Join us for an ideologically diverse panel to consider these issues.

The IHE is pleased to cosponsor this event with Baylor in Washington.

Featuring:

David Madland

David Madland is a senior fellow and the senior adviser to the American Worker Project at American Progress. He has written extensively about the economy and American politics on a range of topics, including the middle class, economic inequality, retirement policy, labor unions, and workplace standards such as the minimum wage. Madland is the author of Hollowed Out: Why the Economy Doesn’t Work without a Strong Middle Class, which was published by the University of California Press in 2015. He has appeared frequently on television shows, including “PBS NewsHour” and CNN’s “Crossfire”; has been cited in such publications as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. Madland has a doctorate in government from Georgetown University and received his bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ramesh Ponnuru

Ramesh Ponnuru is a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies the future of conservatism with a particular focus on health care, economic policy, and constitutionalism. He is also a senior editor for National Review, where he has covered national politics and public policy for 20 years, a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, and a contributor to CBS News. A frequent contributor to television and radio, Mr. Ponnuru has appeared on “Face the Nation,” CBS News; “Meet the Press Daily,” MSNBC; “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” ABC News; the “PBS NewsHour” and “All Things Considered,” National Public Radio. He holds an AB in history from Princeton University.

Moderated By:

David Corey

David Corey is a professor of Political Science focusing on political philosophy in the Honors Program at Baylor University. He is also an affiliated member of the departments of Philosophy and Political Science. He was an undergraduate at Oberlin, where he earned a BA in Classics from the College and a BMus in music from the Conservatory. He studied law and jurisprudence at Old College, Edinburgh before taking up graduate work in political philosophy at Louisiana State University. He is the author of two books, The Just War Tradition (with J. Daryl Charles) (2012) and The Sophists in Plato’s Dialogues (2015). He has written more than two dozen articles and book chapters in such venues as the Review of Politics, History of Political Thought, Modern Age, Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Cambridge Dictionary of Political Thought. His current projects, Rethinking American Politics, and Liberalism & The Modern Quest for Freedom, examine the loss of healthy political association in the United States and offer strategies for reform.

George Weigel and Os Guinness will discuss short-term and long-range outcomes of the 2020 election and its impact on America’s future for a Faith and Law Friday Forum.

Free and open to the public. The event will take place via Zoom webinar.

O. Carter Snead, Professor of Law and Director of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, discusses his new book, What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics, with IHE Executive Director Joseph Capizzi.

Why does the federal government own only .5% of Kansas and 1.8% of Texas, but 79.6% of Nevada and 63.1% of Utah? Why are there two separate federal policies for western lands?

Emmett McGroarty, IHE Director of the Program on the Constitution and Catholic Social Doctrine, speaks with former Utah State Representative Ken Ivory on the implications of the federal western land policy for state sovereignty, wildlife and land management, and a host of other ethical and political issues.

Most Rev. Joseph E. Kurtz, D.D., Archbishop of Louisville, KY, and the Episcopal Moderator for the National Catholic Partnership on Disability, unpacks the Catholic understanding of disability and how it leads us to a closer union with one another and God during challenging times. Following the lecture, JD Flynn (Editor-in-Chief of Catholic News Agency) and Dr. Miguel Romero (Assistant Professor of Religious and Theological Studies at Salve Regina University) will engage in a moderated discussion with audience Q&A.

This event is cosponsored by the Institute for Human Ecology and the National Catholic Partnership on Disability.

John Keown, Rose Kennedy Chair in Christian Ethics at Georgetown and Advisory Board Member for the M.A. in Human Rights, delivers a lecture on the ethics of nuclear deterrence from a natural law perspective, with particular reference to the views of Pope Francis, the first Pope to oppose not only the use but also the possession of nuclear weapons.

This lecture is presented as part of the IHE M.A. in Human Rights program. Program director William Saunders, J.D., will introduce the speaker and lead the discussion.

Dr. Gregory Collins (Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer in the Department of Political Science and Program on Ethics, Politics, and Economics at Yale University) speaks about his new book, “Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy.”

The event is cosposored by the Catholic University Department of Politics, the Catholic University Busch School of Business, and the Institute for Human Ecology.

Choosing a graduate program can be stressful, but we don’t think it should be. That’s why we hosted an online information session with Professor ​William Saunders, Director of the Program in Human Rights and Dr. Jay Richards, Assistant Research Professor at the Busch School of Business.

Our MA in Human Rights is the premier graduate degree for students who want to defend the dignity of the human person in the framework of the Catholic intellectual tradition. You don’t want to miss this opportunity. If you have additional questions, please email William Saunders, Program Director at saunderswl@cua.edu.

IHE Executive Director Joseph Capizzi moderates an Oxford-style debate between Marquette University’s Kate Ward and The Catholic University of America’s Catherine Pakaluk on the motion, RESOLVED: “A universal basic income meets the Catholic demand for a Just Wage.”

One of the great advantages of Catholic social teaching is that it is normally stated in general terms of values, principles and goals, not specific programs. It is the reason that Catholic social teaching doesn’t fit into either political party’s platform and why Catholics of good standing in the Church can exercise prudential judgement and come to different conclusions.

As Catholics we are called to honor the human dignity of each person we encounter and encouraged to approach conversations with civility, clarity, and compassion. In this spirit, we invite you to join us as Dr. Ward and Dr. Pakaluk debate whether a universal basic income (UBI) aligns with Catholic social teaching’s call for a just wage.

The Catholic Information Center and The Institute for Human Ecology cosponsored this event.

Who is my neighbor? Who is my brother and sister?

Drawing on central gospel themes found in the Good Samaritan narrative, Pope Francis applies them to the whole “human family,” proposing that the logic of social friendship and neighborly love move beyond the personal to touch on every major social sphere.

IHE Director Joseph Capizzi, IHE Fellow Jennifer Frey, and Lumen Christi Institute Senior Fellow Russell Hittinger discuss Pope Francis’s latest social encyclical, Fratelli Tutti.

Cosponsored by the Lumen Christi Institute and America Media.

In this event cosponsored with the Beatrice Institute, the Harvard Catholic Forum, the Institute for Faith and Culture, the Nova Forum for Catholic Thought, and the St. Paul Catholic Center, a panel discussion explores the history of the Holy See’s relations with the United Nations, the role of lay Catholics and Church leaders in developing the human rights tradition, and the growing role of Catholic NGOs as they work alongside the UN for justice, peace, religious freedom, and integral human development around the world.

Featured speakers include Archbishop Gabriele Giordano Caccia (Permanent Observer of the Holy See to the United Nations), Joseph Cornelius Donnelly (Permanent Delegate to the United Nations for Caritas Internationalis), Mary Ann Glendon (Former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See), and Paolo Carozza (Notre Dame Law School).

IHE Media Fellow and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat moderates a panel discussion between Samuel Goldman (George Washington University), Dan McCarthy (Modern Age), and Ramesh Ponnuru (National Review) about the upcoming election and the future of conservatism in America.

Join Professors Robert P. George (Princeton) and William Saunders (IHE Director of Program on Human Rights) for this discussion with Faith & Law.

The Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, chaired by Harvard professor Mary Ann Glendon, issued its report on human rights in U.S. foreign policy in July, examining human rights from the perspective of both America’s foundational principles and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Robert George and William Saunders  will discuss the report and examine its relevance for a deep and clear understanding of human rights and responsibilities.

Third Annual Human Rights Lecture

Kenneth Anderson, Paolo Carozza, and Christopher Tollefsen, members of the Unalienable Rights Commission at the U.S. Department of State, join the IHE’s Director of the Program in Human Rights, William Saunders, J.D., for a conversation about the Unalienable Rights Commission Report.

George Weigel is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. In addition to holding the Ethics and Public Policy Center’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies, Mr. Weigel is perhaps best known for his widely translated and internationally acclaimed two-volume biography of Pope St. John Paul II: the New York Times bestseller, Witness to Hope (1999), and its sequel, The End and the Beginning (2010). In 2017, he published a memoir of the experiences that led to his papal biography: Lessons in Hope—My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II. Mr. Weigel received a B.A. from St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore and an M.A. from the University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto.

Joseph E. Capizzi is Ordinary Professor of Moral Theology at The Catholic University of America. He teaches in the areas of social and political theology, with special interests in issues in peace and war, citizenship, political authority, and Augustinian theology. He has written, lectured, and published widely on just war theory, bioethics, the history of moral theology, and political liberalism. Dr. Capizzi is the Executive Director of the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, a Masters in Theological Studies from Emory University, and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. He lives in Maryland with his wife and six children.

SPONSORED BY THE INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN ECOLOGY AND THE THOMISTIC INSTITUTE

The Civitas Dei Summer Fellowship (sponsored by the Thomistic Institute and the Institute for Human Ecology) supports rising scholars seeking to better understand the Catholic intellectual tradition. This summer’s program will examine the search for happiness as a fundamental end of the person and the polis. Applications will be accepted from graduate students and advanced undergraduates in all disciplines.

The week-long seminar will introduce students to foundational themes in philosophy, political theory, and theology, dealing with law, personhood, political life, and the search for happiness. The focus will be an introduction to foundations of political and moral theory of Augustine, Aquinas, and modern constitutional jurisprudence. The program will include visits to institutions in Washington, DC, as well as encounters with outstanding Catholic public figures. The seminar is an excellent way to think theoretically about the intersection of political theory, moral principles, and practical engagement, in the heart of the nation’s capital.

View images from last year’s Fellowship here.

Due to COVID-19, Civitas Dei 2020 will be held online in a modified format. 

Speakers

Father Dominic Legge, O.P.
Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology Dominican House of Studies

Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P., is the Director of the Thomistic Institute and Assistant Professor in Systematic Theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.L. from the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2001, after having practiced constitutional law for several years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has also taught at The Catholic University of America Law School and at Providence College. He is the author of The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2016).

V. Bradley Lewis
Associate Professor of Philosophy, The Catholic University of America Faculty Fellow of The Institute for Human Ecology

V. Bradley Lewis is an associate professor of philosophy.Dr. Lewis specializes in political and legal philosophy. He has written articles on the political thought of Plato and Aristotle and on some figures in the neo-Thomist tradition, as well as on the topics of public reason and religious freedom.

Adrian Vermeule
Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional LawHarvard Law School

Adrian Vermeule is the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law. Before coming to the Law School, he was the Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. The author or co-author of nine books, most recently Law’s Abnegation: From Law’s Empire to the Administrative State (2016), The Constitution of Risk (2014) and The System of the Constitution (2012). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. His research focuses on administrative law, the administrative state, the design of institutions, and constitutional theory. Having grown up in Cambridge and attended Harvard College ’90 and Harvard Law School ’93, Vermeule lives in Cambridge still.

For more information, please contact ihe@cua.edu or 202-319-5892.

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON THE AESTHETIC DIMENSIONS OF SCIENCE:
BEAUTY, AWE, AND WONDER IN SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY

SPONSORED BY THE INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN ECOLOGY AND THE SOCIOLOGY DEPARTMENT WITH SUPPORT FROM THE TEMPLETON RELIGION TRUST

How do aesthetic factors such as beauty, awe, and wonder shape the practice of science? Are such experiences help or hindrance to scientific progress? And do they vary across disciplines and national cultures?

Join us for an international symposium that explores these questions, hosted by IHE Fellow Brandon Vaidyanathan.

Speakers include:

• James McAllister (Philosophy, Leiden University)
• Robert Gilbert (Biology, University of Oxford)
• Mario Livio (Astrophysics, University of Nevada, Las Vegas)
• Duilia DeMello (Astrophysics, Catholic University of America/NASA)
• Renny Thomas (Sociology, University of Delhi)
• Stefano Sbalchiero (Sociology, University of Padova)

Join us for a discussion about the lessons offered by Saint Thomas Aquinas, Adam Smith, and Vernon Smith on the ingenuity of human beings in creating social orders that permit human flourishing, cooperation, and a prosperous society. In this webinar, we will consider these ideas and how they can help us consider current trade-offs and approaches to the COVID-19 crisis.

Click here to register for the event.

This event is online; questions may be submitted during Q&A digitally.

For questions or accommodations, please contact ihe@cua.edu.

Choosing a graduate program can be a very stressful process, but we don’t think it should be. That’s why we hosted this online information session so you can get answers to all your questions about our program. Our M.A. in Human Rights is the premier graduate degree for students who want to defend the dignity of the human person in the framework of the Catholic intellectual tradition.

In this information session, William Saunders, Program Director, talks with Professor Chad Pecknold of The Catholic University of America about our M.A. Program in Human Rights. If you have questions about our program, please email William Saunders at saunderswl@cua.edu.

In this lecture, Dr. Robert Enright presents his groundbreaking scientific study of interpersonal forgiveness in the context of the family, school, workplace, house of worship, and world conflict zones. Scientific study has demonstrated how interpersonal forgiveness reduces the emotion of anger, while increasing psychological well-being.

This event is cosponsored by Divine Mercy University.

Robert Enright’s award winning book, Forgiveness Therapy (2015, with Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons, published by the American Psychological Association), describes his intervention approach. He has worked on interventions including women who have suffered discrimination, cardiac patients, and children in schools. He has developed ways to assess group forgiveness, that is, the forgiveness of one group by another. He has worked with sample populations in China and Taiwan, North and South Ireland, and with African-American and European-American groups. His work is just beginning to explore the role of forgiveness in the healing of communities.

The challenge of adjusting to our increasingly secularized world is the central conversation in the modern Church. It must be asked, however, whether the secret of the saeculum as revealed by Jesus is becoming a secret even Christians fail to grasp. Do we still understand the dynamic of the age and the mission of the Church as our fathers in faith did? What do we think is at stake in the present age?

In this lecture, Professor Douglas Farrow employs Christian eschatology to challenge false secularisms operating both inside and outside the Church.

This event was co-sponsored by First Things and the Institute for Human Ecology.

Today the Western world seems to be in crisis. But beneath our social media frenzy and reality-television politics, the deeper reality is one of drift, repetition, and dead ends.

On the release date of his latest book, join New York Times columnist and IHE Media Fellow Ross Douthat for a discussion of our decadence — of what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing, how long our era of stagnation and repetition might last, and how, whether in renaissance or catastrophe, our decadence might ultimately end.

For American Christians, national security debates involve a complex relationship between the faith, America’s role in a state-centered world order, and the dangers of that world. Join us for a discussion about the possibility of reconciling the premises of contemporary American foreign policy with the Christian faith.

Michael C. Desch — Notre Dame, NDISC
Paul D. Miller — Georgetown University, AEI
Moderated by Tim Carney — Washington Examiner

This event was cosponsored by the Center for the Study of Statesmanship and the Institute for Human Ecology.

Since the 1970s, more Americans have embraced the Soulmate Myth, the idea that marriage is about an intense emotional connection between two people that should only last as long as that connection remains happy and fulfilling. Not surprisingly, this myth powered the divorce revolution of the 1970s, as feelings are a fragile foundation for durable marriage. But, as sociology professor Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia will argue, the Soulmate Myth is also counterproductive when it comes to fostering higher quality marriages. That’s because directly pursuing marital happiness and abandoning an ethic of marital permanence actually reduces the odds of husbands and wives forging happy unions. Gallery and video are below:

Andrés Guilarte had to leave his life in Venezuela after an oppressive regime crippled the economy, caused widespread starvation, blanketed the nation in blackouts, and silenced and jailed those who dared to speak out and criticize the government. With an eyewitness perspective, he answers the questions: How did a country with so much wealth and promise completely collapse? Could it happen in the United States? His answers will surprise you.

This event is FREE, open to the public, and will be followed by a reception with refreshments.

Timothy Carney, commentary editor at the Washington Examiner and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, proposes a key insight into the political success of Donald Trump. The “death of the American Dream” narrative that fueled his political rise is the result of the localized erosion of civil society. Timothy Carney and Emmett McGroarty discuss the challenges facing modern America, the relevance of Catholic social doctrine, and a framework for leading us out of the wilderness. Gallery and video below:

Guangcheng Chen, the “barefoot lawyer” who drew worldwide attention to forced abortion in China and who is a tireless advocate of the oppressed in China, reflects upon developments since the Tiananmen Square protest was crushed by the Communist party.  Has the situation deteriorated further?  What can be done to protect human rights in China? After his presentation, he discusses these issues in greater depth with William Saunders, JD, director of the IHE’s Program in Human Rights and director of the Center for Human Rights in the School of Arts and Sciences.

The Intelligence Studies Program, with the Institute for Human Ecology, is pleased to host a panel discussion to explore the additional role that the media plays in keeping U.S. intelligence accountable. Nicholas Dujmovic, Assistant Professor of Politics and the Director of The Catholic University of America’s Program in Intelligence Studies, will moderate the discussion of four journalists with extensive experience reporting on national security: Julian Barnes of The New York Times, Ellen Nakashima and Peter Finn of The Washington Post, and Steve Coll, the dean of Columbia University’s School of Journalism and a former correspondent for The Washington Post.

Issues to be discussed include:

• Is the “public’s right to know” a blanket justification to reveal any secret a journalist might discover, or are there limits?
• On what basis do members of the media judge that information ought to be shared with–or withheld from–the public?

Dr. Samuel Goldman, Assistant Professor of Political Science at The George Washington University, and Ramesh Ponnuru, journalist and visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, engage in a spirited debate about the recent rise of nationalist sentiment in the West. Can loyalty to one’s nation promote human flourishing? How should Catholics understand nationalism in the context of solidarity, subsidiarity, human dignity, and the common good?

George Weigel proposes a dramatic new reading of the past 250 years of Catholic history and charts a path beyond the old liberal/conservative cliches. Attendees learn how they can forge a path toward a more sustainable democracy by focusing on the moral foundations of law and government.

The Institute for Human Ecology and the National Catholic Partnership on Disability sponsored a symposium to provide an introduction to the distinctively Catholic approach to disability. Ideal for clergy, religious, pastoral/catechetical leaders, seminarians, theology students, and academics.

This event was followed by a 4:00 p.m. Mass in the Crypt of the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception.

Civitas Dei Summer Fellowship:
An Introduction to the Natural Law Tradition

SPONSORED BY THE INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN ECOLOGY AND THE THOMISTIC INSTITUTE

The Civitas Dei Summer Fellowship supports rising scholars seeking inspiration from the natural law tradition within the contemporary academic context. The Institute for Human Ecology and the Thomistic Institute are partnering to offer the Civitas Dei Summer Fellowship for students in the sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The focus is an introduction to foundations of political and moral theory of Augustine, Aquinas, and modern constitutional jurisprudence. The program includes visits to institutions in Washington, DC, as well as encounters with outstanding Catholic public figures. The seminar is an excellent way to think theoretically about the intersection of political theory, moral principles, and practical engagement, in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Speakers

Adrian Vermeule
Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law
Harvard Law School

Adrian Vermeule is the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law. Before coming to the Law School, he was the Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. The author or co-author of nine books, most recently Law’s Abnegation: From Law’s Empire to the Administrative State (2016), The Constitution of Risk (2014) and The System of the Constitution (2012). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. His research focuses on administrative law, the administrative state, the design of institutions, and constitutional theory. Having grown up in Cambridge and attended Harvard College ’90 and Harvard Law School ’93, Vermeule lives in Cambridge still.

Rev. Dominic Legge, O.P.Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology
Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception

Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P., is the Director of the Thomistic Institute and Assistant Professor in Systematic Theology at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C. He holds a J.D. from Yale Law School, a Ph.L. from the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America, and a doctorate in Sacred Theology from the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. He entered the Order of Preachers in 2001, after having practiced constitutional law for several years as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice. He has also taught at The Catholic University of America Law School and at Providence College. He is the author of The Trinitarian Christology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Oxford University Press, 2016), and is a weekly co-host of EWTN Radio’s Morning Glory show.

Joseph Capizzi, Ph.D.
Professor of Moral Theology, The Catholic University of America
Executive Director of The Institute for Human Ecology

Joseph Capizzi is the executive director of The Institute for Human Ecology and an ordinary professor of moral theology. He has published widely on just war theory, bioethics, the history of moral theology, and political liberalism. Recently, Dr. Capizzi worked as a research fellow at the VADM James B. Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the U.S. Naval Academy from 2013 to 2014.

For more information, please contact ihe@cua.edu or 202-319-5892.

CIVITAS DEI SUMMER FELLOWSHIP:
THE PERSON, THE POLIS, AND THE SEARCH FOR HAPPINESS

SPONSORED BY THE INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN ECOLOGY AND THE THOMISTIC INSTITUTE

The Civitas Dei Summer Fellowship (sponsored by the Thomistic Institute and the Institute for Human Ecology) supports rising scholars seeking to better understand the Catholic intellectual tradition.

The week-long seminar introduces students to foundational themes in philosophy, political theory, and theology, dealing with law, personhood, political life, and the search for happiness. The focus will be an introduction to foundations of political and moral theory of Augustine, Aquinas, and modern constitutional jurisprudence. The program will include visits to institutions in Washington, DC, as well as encounters with outstanding Catholic public figures. The seminar is an excellent way to think theoretically about the intersection of political theory, moral principles, and practical engagement, in the heart of the nation’s capital.

View images from last year’s Fellowship here.

View participants from last year’s Fellowship here.

SPEAKERS

Adrian Vermeule
Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law
Harvard Law School

Adrian Vermeule is the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. Professor of Constitutional Law. Before coming to the Law School, he was the Bernard D. Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Chicago. The author or co-author of nine books, most recently Law’s Abnegation: From Law’s Empire to the Administrative State (2016), The Constitution of Risk (2014) and The System of the Constitution (2012). He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2012. His research focuses on administrative law, the administrative state, the design of institutions, and constitutional theory. Having grown up in Cambridge and attended Harvard College ’90 and Harvard Law School ’93, Vermeule lives in Cambridge still.

Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P.Professor of Moral Theology, Dominican House of Studies
Prior of the Dominican House of Studies

Fr. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P., is the prior of the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC, where he also teaches moral theology. He obtained his doctorate from the university of Fribourg (Switzerland), defending a dissertation on St. Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the common good. Fr. Guilbeau has also worked for various Catholic media, including The Catholic Channel on Sirius XM Radio, EWTN Radio, and Aleteia.org.

Chad C. Pecknold, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, The Catholic University of America
Faculty Fellow of The Institute for Human Ecology

Chad C. Pecknold is an associate professor of systematic theology. He teaches in the areas of fundamental theology, Christian anthropology, and political theology, with a particular interest in Saint Augustine’s City of God. As a commentator on the Church and contemporary politics, Dr. Pecknold has appeared on a wide variety of other news programs from NPR and PBS, to FOX, CNBC, Voice of America, and the BBC. c policy to natural science, technology, and the environment.

For more information, please contact ihe@cua.edu or 202-319-5892.

How did we become consumers trapped in an ever-spinning circle of production and consumption, not only of goods but even of events, experiences, and emotions? How is it that even non-economic spheres and aspects of life — love, friendship, education, health, emotion, play — have become increasingly captured by the logic of consumer capitalism? How did we become the historically-specific character who satisfies desires through consumer goods, defining and molding his ever-changing, fluid identity through acts of consumption?

These questions motivated research by Professor Cesare Silla on the genesis of consumer capitalism in America between 1880 and 1930. Please join us for a talk about his work on this topic.

Professor Silla is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Urbino “Carlo Bo.” He also teaches Principles of Sociology at Catholic University of Milan. His publications include The Rise of Consumer Capitalism in America, 1880 – 1930 (Routledge, London-New York, 2018). He is currently a Visiting Researcher at the Catholic University of America in the Department of Sociology, working on collaborative projects with IHE Fellow Brandon Vaidyanathan.

Focusing on the rise of urban consumption and the role played by a few marketing tools like store window display and print advertising, the aim is to show how historically-oriented sociology is capable of shedding light upon a few neglected distant causes of contemporary consumerism and materialism.

Recent essays by Sohrab Ahmari of the New York Post and David French of the National Review Institute provide dueling visions for how cultural conservatives should respond to the post-liberal left. Ahmari contends that social conservatives should assertively use their power to oppose the secular left. French holds onto the classical liberal approach to resisting leftist policy proposals. Join us for this conversation, which will be moderated by IHE Fellow and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.

The M.A. in Human Rights, led by program director William Saunders, gives you the building blocks to help transform society. If you’re ready to make a difference, but have questions about the program, we invite you to visit campus for an information session. Mr. Saunders shares about various aspects of the program, including:

• Curriculum
• Program requirements
• What careers this program prepares students for
• Who would benefit from this program
• Scholarships
• And your questions!

WHAT’S REALLY GOING ON? THE ROOT CAUSES OF THE CURRENT CRISIS

The sessions for this day are devoted to a deeper analysis, presenting competing views of the role of sexuality and of clericalism. These sessions are complemented by a panel of experts in organizational behavior, who help analyze the present crisis in these terms. Finally, a discussion roundtable of Catholic journalists from across the spectrum explore how these deeper analyses might be better reflected in the media narratives about what is really going on.

Participants:

Susan Timoney, Associate Dean, The Catholic University of America
Richard Gaillardetz, Boston College
Chad Pecknold, The Catholic University of America
Gary Weaver, University of Delaware
Michael Edward Brown, Penn State University
Brandon Vaidyanathan, The Catholic University of America
Fr. Paul Sullins, The Catholic University of America
Julie Hanlon Rubio, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
Matt Malone, SJ, America
Greg Erlandson, Catholic News Service
Jeanette DeMelo, National Catholic Register

Since the collapse of communism in Europe in 1989, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe have undergone massive social changes. One can draw many lessons from the collapse of communism, but perhaps the most significant are anthropological in nature. Dr. Stephen Bartulica, former advisor to the President of Croatia on Catholic affairs, addresses Marxism’s failure to create a new kind of human being – innocent and disinterested in property and material wealth – and how it deprived people the opportunity to assume responsibility for their own lives.

This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Human Ecology and the Busch School of Business.

Patrick Deneen is Professor of Political Science and holds the David A. Potenziani Memorial College Chair of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame. His previous books include Why Liberalism Failed, The Odyssey of Political Theory, Democratic Faith, and a number of edited volumes. He lives in South Bend, IN.

In a liberal democratic age, two words are widely used to contrast what liberal democracy is not: aristocracy and populism. Yet, we have both political factions emerging today in new and caustic forms that pit an increasingly corrupt elite against an increasingly coarse and angry populace. Both are morally adrift and engaged in politics as an assertion of power, albeit for different reasons.

While the current trajectory of the West would appear to be an ongoing and inconclusive battle between these two factions, classical political theory understood that only an appropriately mixed regime could correct and even elevate the shortcomings of an opposing faction. In an age in which monarchy and inherited titles are rightly suspect, is there nevertheless a prospect for a mixed regime in the modern age that goes beyond pitting elite against populace and vice-versa, and which might instead give rise to a fruitful combination?

In this lecture, Patrick Deneen envisions the prospects for an ennobled aristoi and a more refined populace. He will at once acknowledge the persistence of class and inequality even in a democratic age (denying a path forward lies in a growing sympathy for socialism), but will propose that only a well-formed elite can support a humane condition of the populace, and only a well-formed populace can fruitfully restrain the hubris of a liberal elite and even orient them toward virtue. Through such a mixed regime, practices supporting a common good might emerge, correcting the core weakness of a liberal order designed to forestall such a possibility.

The Intelligence Studies Program of The Catholic University of America and the Institute for Human Ecology cosponsored a symposium entitled “The Humanity of Espionage.”

Espionage is the collection of national security intelligence through human means. One person, the spy–typically a foreign national with access to information–passes it to another person, called a handler or case officer. At the heart of this activity is the relationship between the spy and his handler. This panel of former CIA case officers explore the nature of that relationship through exploration of a variety of questions:

• What does it mean to persuade another human being to break the trust he has with his own country and work for the benefit of the United States?
• What obligations does the U.S. government have in such situations?
• What is the personal connection between spy and case officer–is it totally cynical, or is there an authentic relationship?
• How do we mitigate the risk to human dignity in the conduct of this intelligence activity?

Join moderator Nicholas Dujmovic (assistant professor and director of the University’s Intelligence Studies and 26-year veteran of CIA, having served as an analyst, manager, editor of the President’s Daily Brief, and CIA staff historian) and the following panelists for a great discussion:

John Bennett is a former Director of the National Clandestine Service at the Central Intelligence Agency. He retired from CIA in 2013 after 33 years as an operations officer and manager. Mr. Bennett served 18 years overseas, mostly in Africa, including four tours as a Chief of Station. He engaged in Cold War programs directed against the Soviets in Africa and managed counter-terrorism operations in East Africa and Southwest Asia. Mr. Bennett has a Bachelors Degree from Harvard and a Masters Degree from Georgetown University. Prior to joining CIA he served for five years as an infantry officer in the United States Marine Corps.

Juan Cruz is a former career CIA operations and case officer. He served as chief of station in four different overseas locations and later was in charge of the Agency’s Latin America division. He has experience in counterinsurgency, counterproliferation, covert action, and covert influence operations. Mr. Cruz graduated from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and has a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins. He has done graduate work at the Pontificia Universidade Catolica of Rio de Janeiro. Most recently he served on the National Security Council as Special Adviser to the President and Senior Director for the Western Hemisphere. He is originally from Puerto Rico and speaks Spanish and Portuguese.

Gil Kindelan is a retired case officer with 34 years of government service in the US Army and the CIA. He served overseas for 17 years of his career in Asia, Eastern Europe during the Cold War, Western Europe and the Middle East as a case officer, deputy chief of station and chief of station. At CIA Headquarters, he served at various levels of management including chef of staff in the Counterterrorism Center. Since retiring he works part-time as a consultant. He has a masters degree in journalism and has worked as broadcast newsman and director of an educational TV news program.

Scotty Skotzko served 40 years as a CIA operations officer with eight overseas postings in the Balkans, South Asia and Africa, senior management positions in several Headquarters components, and deployments in support of U.S. military operations in Somalia, Kosovo, Iraq, Qatar and Afghanistan. His experience includes interagency intelligence collaboration, cooperation with foreign governments, and researching lessons-learned case studies of security issues. He is a graduate of Franklin and Marshall College and the Columbia University School of International Affairs.

THE ROLE OF THE LAITY IN RESPONDING TO THE CRISIS: THEOLOGICAL AND HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS

Participants:
Cardinal Daniel DiNardo – Archbishop of Galveston-Houston
President John Garvey – Catholic University
Christopher Ruddy – Catholic University
Carlos Eire – Yale University
Sr. Nancy Bauer, O.S.B. – Catholic University
Bronwen McShea – Princeton University
Michael Root – Catholic University

Lunch and refreshments will be provided.

Can’t make it in person? Livestream it here.

This first session focuses on the role of the media in investigating, reporting, and framing our understanding of the crisis.

Participants:
Elizabeth Bruenig – The Washington Post
Ross Douthat –The New York Times
J.D. Flynn – Catholic News Agency
Chris White – Crux/The Tablet

Kevin Davis, Baltimore’s 39th Police Commissioner, recounts a big city police culture and its relationship with its residents in his presentation of the historic riots in 2015: the riots, the criminal charges against The Baltimore 6, the ensuing spike in murders, a Department of Justice civil rights investigation that led to a consent decree, and the politics that accompany urban policing from an insider’s perspective. If you think you know what happened in Baltimore, think twice and check out this presentation.

Join us for a conversation with Yoram Hazony, a leading conservative thinker who argues that a nationalist order is the only realistic safeguard of liberty in the world today. He is also the author of The Virtue of Nationalism, from which much of his talk will be formed.

In The Virtue of Nationalism, Yoram Hazony contends that a world of sovereign nations is the only option for those who care about personal and collective freedom. He recounts how, beginning in the sixteenth century, English, Dutch, and American Protestants revived the Old Testament’s love of national independence, and shows how their vision eventually brought freedom to peoples from Poland to India, Israel to Ethiopia. It is this tradition we must restore, Hazony argues, if we want to limit conflict and hate–and allow human difference and innovation to flourish.

Yoram Hazony is President of the Herzl Institute. In addition to The Virtue of Nationalism, his other books include The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture, and The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul. Hazony is Director of the John Templeton Foundation’s project in Jewish Philosophical Theology. His writings on philosophy, Bible, and political theory appear frequently in the Wall Street Journal, American Affairs, National Review and other publications. He holds a B.A. in East Asian Studies from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Political Theory from Rutgers University.

Congressman Lipinski draws on his experiences in Congress to describe what it means to be a faithful Catholic in contemporary American politics, especially from the too-rare perspective of a pro-life Democrat. IHE Executive Director Joe Capizzi is the moderator.

On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the anti-Jewish laws in Italy, Prof. Lucia Ceci’s talk examines how the Holy See developed a doctrinal statement and assumed an institutional position towards the first racist laws which the Fascist Government introduced in the colonies after the conquest of Ethiopia, when Mussolini planned to build an Italian Empire that was homogeneous from the biological and cultural point of view. The analysis of one of the most thorny questions for historiography on the Catholic Church in the contemporary age (the hiatus between the affirmation of truth and the search for modus vivendi) links the specificities of the Italian case and some transnational processes. Analyzing public and private documents, Prof. Ceci shows the complexity of the reason that convinced the Pope Pius XI to reach a compromise with Mussolini on the matter.

Inaugural Event of the Program in Human Rights

December 10, 2018 marks the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  The Declaration signaled the world’s determination to avoid a third world war by recognizing and protecting universal human rights.  Among these rights, it recognized religious freedom as a vital human right.

Join Princeton’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Robert George, who served as Chair of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, and William Saunders, Director of the Program in Human Rights, Institute for Human Ecology, and of the Center for Human Rights, School of Arts & Sciences, as they reflect upon human rights and threats thereto in today’s turbulent times.

As part of Constitution Day, Daniel Burns, associate professor of Politics at the University of Dallas, visiting research associate in Politics and Fellow at the Institute for Human Ecology at the Catholic University of America speak about what makes Freedom of Religion different from Freedom of Speech.

Cosponsored by the Department of Politics and the Columbus School of Law.

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Human Ecology and the Intelligence Studies Program.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 convulsed our country, and the effects reverberate to this day. Americans learned that day that in their own country they were not safe from external attack. The U.S. response to the attacks raised enduring questions about ends and means. How can a people flourish under the continual threat of attack by extremists bent on violence? How far do we go with security measures to ensure public safety?

These continuing questions manifest how the 9/11 attacks brought into vivid relief the relationship between security and liberty. Americans have had to grapple with the idea that, while too little security leaves us vulnerable to attack, too much security can undermine the liberty by which we define ourselves as Americans. As a people, we’ve been debating the proper balance ever since

Even so, this traumatic event is marching into the past and, for all its importance, out of our memories: our University’s seniors graduating this year barely remember 9/11—most of them were five years old.

To help us remember and put in context the 9/11 attacks and what followed, former acting director of CIA Michael Morell agreed to offer his memories and insights to the Catholic University community. Mr. Morell served at that time as President George W. Bush’s CIA briefer and was with the President in Florida on that morning. He later served in several crucial leadership roles in CIA as the Agency sought and eventually found Osama Bin Ladin. He was CIA’s deputy director during the raid on Bin Ladin’s compound by US special forces.

In an interview setting with Nicholas Dujmovic, director of the University’s Intelligence Studies Program, Michael Morell relates the challenges, frustrations, and accomplishments of the men and women of US intelligence as they worked to make sure another 9/11 would not occur.

IHE Fellow Ryan Anderson, Ph.D., author of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment, leads a discussion about transgenderism and how to respond to friends or family undergoing this gender-identity conflict. Dr. Anderson is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a prolific author, and the founder of Public Discourse. Professor John Grabowski and Fr. Jude DeAngelo add their insight to the discussion, with IHE Fellow Jay Richards, host of A Force for Good on EWTN, acting as the moderator.

Has liberalism failed because it has succeeded?

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 tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

The Institute for Human Ecology invites you to a discussion with media experts on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of the election of Pope Francis.

Panelists:

John L. Allen Jr. — Crux
Elizabeth Bruenig — Washington Post
E.J. Dionne — Washington Post
Ross Douthat — New York Times

Moderator:

Dr. Joseph Capizzi — IHE Executive Director

A Conversation with Ambassador Sam Brownback, United States Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom

Sponsored by the Columbus School of Law, Catholic University of America.

The Intelligence Studies Program of the Catholic University of America and the Institute for Human Ecology are cosponsoring a symposium entitled “The Ethics of Technical Intelligence Collection.” During this event, a variety of questions will be addressed:

• Where is the line between security and privacy?
• When it comes to national security, is it possible to collect too much information, or is it better to collect everything possible as a hedge against a potential attack?
• Is U.S. technical collection on an individual an unacceptable violation of that person’s dignity?
• What rules for intelligence collection are necessary and appropriate to allow our democracy to flourish without either the undue fear of attack or the concern that the government knows too much about us?

Join moderator Nicholas Dujmovic (Visiting Assistant Professor of Politics and the Director of The Catholic University of America’s New Program in Intelligence Studies) and panelists Michael Hayden (retired U.S. Air Force four-star general and former Director of both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency), Scott Shane (journalist for The New York Times), Michael O’Hanlon (Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution), and Allison Stevens (Deputy General Counsel for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) for answers to these question and many more.

Can’t make it in person? Livestream it here: https://livestream.com/CatholicUniversity/events/8143087.

What is Christian responsibility in a world in which the innocent are increasingly under lethal assault? Grappling with a range of issues including Christian pacifism, the just war tradition, and protestant and Catholic theological teaching on military ethics, the nature of sovereignty, and the use of American power, “Force & Christian Responsibility” brings together leading Christian thinkers and practitioners to address enduring questions of timely importance. The Institute for Human Ecology and Providence are partnering to offer this day-long private symposium for scholars.

Participants:

H. David Baer, Professor of Theology and Philosophy, Texas Lutheran University.

Edward T. Barrett, Ph.D., Colonel USAFR (ret.) is Director of Strategy and Research at the Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership at the US Naval Academy.

Nigel Biggar is the Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Theology at the University of Oxford, where he also directs the McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics, and Public Life. Among his publications are In Defence of War (Oxford, 2013), Behaving in Public: How to Do Christian Ethics (Eerdmans, 2011); Religious Voices in Public Places (Oxford, 2009); Aiming to Kill: The Ethics of Suicide and Euthanasia (DLT, 2004); Burying the Past: Making Peace and Doing Justice after Civil Conflict (Georgetown UP, 2003), and Cities of Gods: Faith, Politics, & Pluralism in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Greenwood, 1986). His most recent book, Between Kin and Cosmopolis: An Ethic of the Nation, was published by James Clarke/Wipf & Stock in 2014.

J. Daryl Charles is the author, co-author or editor of 14 books, including (with Mark David Hall) America’s Wars: A Just War Perspective(University of Notre Dame Press, forthcoming), (with David D. Corey)The Just War Tradition: An Introduction, (with Timothy J. Demy) War, Peace, and Christianity, and Between Pacifism and Jihad.

G. Scott Davis works at the intersection of philosophy, religion, and politics. His most recent book is Believing and Acting (Oxford, 2012).  Among recent articles are “Justice, Intention, and Double Effect,”(2014) “Islam Observed: Another Neglected Classic of Comparative Religious Ethics,” (2015) and the forthcoming “Understanding the Warrior Spirit: William James on Nature, Virtue, and the Will to Empire,” in Jacob Goodson, ed. William James, Moral Philosophy, and the Ethical Life.  Since 1994, Davis has been the Lewis T. Booker Professor of Religion and Ethics at the University of Richmond.

Debra Erickson holds a Ph.D. in Religious Ethics from the University of Chicago. She is co-editor of the forthcoming volume: In Search of the Ethical Polity: Critical Essays on the Work of Jean Bethke Elshtain.

John Kelsay serves on the faculty of the Department of Religion at Florida State University, where he holds the title of Distinguished Research Professor.  His publications include Arguing the Just War in Islam (Harvard 2007), Islam and War:  A Study in Comparative Ethics (Westminster/John Knox, 1993) and other works focused on the ethics of war in Muslim and Christian traditions.  Professor Kelsay holds degrees from the University of Virginia (Ph.D. in Religious Ethics, 1985), Columbia Theological Seminary (D.Min., 1980), and Old Dominion University (B.A. in History, 1976).  A recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation (2002-03), the Princeton University Center for Human Values (2002-03), and the Institute for International Integration Studies at Trinity College, Dublin (2006-07), Kelsay’s current research interests include the import of the just war tradition for U.S. foreign policy, particularly with respect to the jihadist challenge, as well as studies of the life and career of the abolitionist John Brown.

Dr. Peter Kilner is a retired Army officer who believes in the moral standing of the profession of arms, yet recognizes its shortcomings. He served in the Army from 1984-2017, in the infantry and on the faculty at West Point. As a researcher of combat leadership and ethics, Dr. Kilner interviewed hundreds of Army leaders in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2003-2011.

Chaplain Mallard is a Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church and holds the following degrees: B.A. (Stetson University); M.Div. (the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary); Th.M. (Columbia Theological Seminary); M.S.St. (U.S. Army War College); and the Ph.D. in Christian Ethics (the University of Wales Trinity Saint David). A member of the International Society of Military Ethics and the International Dietrich Bonhoeffer Society, he is a graduate and Grierson Prize recipient as Distinguished Army Master Strategist (U.S. Army Command and General Staff College) and is a graduate and former Eisenhower Fellow (U.S. Army War College). Since 1988, Chaplain Mallard has deployed to combat as a Battalion, Brigade, and Division Chaplain, including with the 101st Airborne and 1st Infantry Divisions and holds the Bronze Star Medal (two awards) and the Combat Action Badge. He currently serves as the Director of Recruiting and Endorser Relations in the Office of the Chief of Chaplains, the Pentagon, VA.

Captain Joseph J. McInerney, USN, Ph.D. is the Chair, Department of Leadership, Ethics, and Law United States Naval Academy.

Keith Pavlischek Keith Pavlischek is a Senior Editor at Providence and holds the following degrees: B.A. Waynesburg College; M Phil, Institute for Christian Studies; Th.M. Westminster Theological Seminary and the Ph.D. in Religion, Ethics and Society (University of Pittsburgh). He is a retired U.S. Marine Colonel having deployed to Desert Storm, Bosnia, and Iraq and has served at the NSA, U.S. Central Command and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He also has served three separate tours in Afghanistan as a civilian military advisor. He was the Executive Director of Civitas, a program for Christian Ph.D. students focusing on Faith and Public Policy, and a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy. He plays bluegrass banjo, enjoys hunting and spending time with his six grandchildren.

Daniel Strand is a postdoctoral fellow in the Center for Political Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. His scholarly interests are in history of political thought, religion and politics, and the thought of St Augustine of Hippo.

James Turner Johnson (PhD, Princeton), was the Distinguished Professor of Religion and Associate of the Graduate Program in Political Science at Rutgers – The State University of New Jersey, where he was on faculty for more than forty years. His research and teaching have focused principally on the historical development and application of the Western and Islamic moral tradition related to war, peace, and the practice of statecraft. He is the author of numerous books on Christian ethics and war, including Can Modern War be Just?, Ethics and the Use of Force, The Quest for Peace, and Morality and Contemporary Warfare.

This December marked the 70th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which originated largely in response to what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” manifested above all in the holocaust, the perpetrators of which were tried and found guilty because they failed to follow their conscience or a higher law rather than the law of the land. Conscience is mentioned in the very first article of the UNHR and freedom of conscience is asserted in article 18.

This panel explored the origins of the UNHR, its articles relating to freedom of conscience and their connection with freedom of religion. It will then compare and examine how freedom of conscience has played out in the American and Canadian contexts with a focus on current issues and debates.

Our keynote speaker was William L. Saunders Jr., Director of the Program in Human Rights for the Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America. Our panel of respondents included Rev. Dr. Andrew P.W. Bennett, Programme Director of Cardus Law, Senior Fellow at Washington’s Religious Freedom Institute, and former Canadian Ambassador for Religious Freedom; Dr. Victor Muñiz-Fraticelli, Associate Professor of Law and Political Science at McGill University; Dr. Christina Lamb, Bioethicist and Assistant Professor of Nursing, University of Alberta; and Brian Bird, Doctoral Candidate in Law at McGill University, whose work focuses on freedom of conscience. The Panel was chaired by Anne Leahy, former Canadian Ambassador to Russia and The Holy See, and Affiliate Member of the School of Religious Studies, McGill University.

This event was hosted by the Newman Centre (3484 Peel Street) in partnership with McGill University’s Faculty of Law, Centre for Research on Religion, and Office for Religious and Spiritual Life, as well as the Thomas More Society of Montreal, Cardus, and the Pillars Trust Fund.

This lecture was led by Dr. Michael Scott Doran, an expert on American foreign policy, who served in the Bush administration as a Senior Director in the National Security Council and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon, where he coordinated American foreign relation strategies. Prior to this, Doran held teaching positions at NYU, Princeton, and the University of Central Florida. Currently, he is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute in D.C. and author of many books including Ike’s Gamble: America’s Rise to Dominance in the Middle East. The Institute for Human Ecology and First Things are pleased to feature Dr. Michael Doran in this year’s D.C. Lecture.

Join the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University for a lecture by Antoni Macierewicz, Former Polish Defense Minister.

Join us for an evening with celebrated author George Weigel as he discusses his new book, Lessons in Hope: My Unexpected Life with St. John Paul II.

George Weigel, Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, is a Catholic theologian and one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He holds EPPC’s William E. Simon Chair in Catholic Studies.

From 1989 through June 1996, Mr. Weigel was president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, where he led a wide-ranging, ecumenical and inter-religious program of research and publication on foreign and domestic policy issues. From June 1996, as a Senior Fellow, Mr. Weigel prepared a major study of the life, thought, and action of Pope John Paul II. Witness to Hope: The Biography of Pope John Paul II was published to international acclaim in the fall of 1999, and has since been translated into twelve languages, with a Chinese edition currently in progress.

Mr. Weigel is the author or editor of some twenty other books, including The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II—The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy (Doubleday, 2010); Practicing Catholic: Essays Historical, Literary, Sporting, and Elegiac (Crossroad, 2012); Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church (Basic, 2013) and Roman Pilgrimage: The Station Churches (Basic, 2013). His essays, op-ed columns, and reviews appear regularly in major opinion journals and newspapers across the United States. A frequent guest on television and radio, he is also Senior Vatican Analyst for NBC News. His weekly column, “The Catholic Difference,” is syndicated to sixty newspapers.

Mr. Weigel received a B.A. from St. Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore and an M.A. from the University of St. Michael’s College, Toronto. He is the recipient of eighteen honorary doctorates in fields including divinity, philosophy, law, and social science.

“On the Margins: At the Intersection of Catholic Thought and Migration,” will take place January 11, at 3 p.m. in the Law School auditorium at The Catholic University of America.

Co-sponsored by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), this is a panel discussion featuring a number of experts in the fields of Catholic thought and immigration.

Panel 1: “Let the Children Come to Me”: Stories of Migrant Children, U.S. Migration Policy, and the Catholic Church

This panel will look at the experience of child migration in its various manifestations, including that of unaccompanied migrant and refugee children, and that of DREAMERs and DACA recipients. To do so, it will provide an opportunity to hear their stories, including the reasons why they left their homeland, their experience in transit, and their reception here in the United States following their arrival.

Panelists include:

• Sister Norma Pimentel, Executive Director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley
• Ashley Feasley, Director of Migration Policy and Public Affairs for the USCCB

Panel 2: The Globalization of Indifference: Pope Francis and the Catholic Response to Migration

The issue of migration has proven a central topic of concern throughout the pontificate of Pope Francis. He has repeatedly called on us all to open our hearts to migrant populations who often experience great suffering throughout their migration process. This panel will examine his teaching on migration in the context of the larger Catholic social teaching tradition, and look at some of the ways in which this tradition has influenced the bishops’ development of migration-related policy here in the United States. 

Panelists:

• V. Bradley Lewis, Faculty Fellow at The Institute for Human Ecology
• Father Richard Ryscavage, S.J., Institute for the Study of International Migration, Georgetown University

To RSVP, click here.

Paul Kengor is author of A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century. During the event, he will speak as well as give and sign copies of his book.

Reception to follow.

Location: Saint John Paul II Auditorium of the John Paul II National Shrine.

For more details and to register, click here.

(WASHINGTON, D.C.) While there are many emerging questions in America’s current political landscape, one consistently rises to the top: Who is better positioned to make decisions about how particular communities thrive — the federal government or the communities themselves?

U.S. Rep. Francis Rooney of Florida addresses how subsidiarity can serve as a guiding principle for communities at “Subsidiarity in Politics, Culture, and Economy,” a symposium hosted by the new Institute for Human Ecology at The Catholic University of America.

Joseph Capizzi, executive director of the Institute for Human Ecology, remarked, “A longstanding principle of Catholic social teaching is the idea that society should be organized around different levels of communities in order for people to thrive.”

Rooney, who formerly served as the Ambassador to the Holy See from 2005 to 2008, is joined by the following panelists:

• Jonathan Reyes, executive director, Department of Justice, Peace and Human Development, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, will speak on the role of well-functioning religious communities.
• David Cloutier, associate professor of moral theology and ethics, The Catholic University of America, is author of The Vice of Luxury: Economic Excess in a Consumer Age.
• Bradley Lewis, associate professor of philosophy, The Catholic University of America, writes and comments on politics and the common good.
• Andreas Widmer, director, Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship, The Catholic University of America.

Watch it the livestream here.

Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy hosted a groundbreaking two-day conference on essential historic Christian teaching about God’s purpose for government, starting with its vocation for security and public order.

The conference included leading scholars and practitioners of political theology and national security, including IHE Executive Director, Joseph Capizzi. They addressed issues such as Just War teaching, nuclear weapons, Reinhold Niebuhr, Christian Realism, nationalism, international human rights, American Exceptionalism, torture, and terrorism.

The event was open to all but was especially aimed at Christian young people who are graduate students or early career.

Can ethics and intelligence coexist? The Institute for Human Ecology held a symposium on ethical issues faced by U.S. intelligence as it confronts myriad global challenges. The symposium featured CIA veterans and renowned intelligence experts from various perspectives.

This event was available via livestream, by clicking here.

Michael V. Hayden

Michael V. Hayden is a retired United States Air Force four-star general and former Director of the National Security Agency, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, and Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Hayden currently co-chairs the Bipartisan Policy Center’s Electric Grid Cyber Security Initiative. In 2017, Hayden became a national security analyst for CNN.

David E. Hoffman

David E. Hoffman is a contributing editor at The Washington Post. He covered the White House during the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Busch, and was subsequently diplomatic correspondent and Jerusalem correspondent. From 1995 to 2001, he served as Moscow Bureau Chief, and later as Foreign Editor and Assistant Managing Editor for Foreign News. Hoffman is the author of the acclaimed book, The Billion Dollar Spy, about how the CIA handled a major espionage case that proved very valuable for US national security.

V. Sue Bromley

Sue Bromley is a former Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, serving as the Agency’s number three official from 2011 to 2014.  She had previously served as the Deputy Director for Intelligence, the position in charge of all the Agency’s analysts.

Ms. Bromley joined CIA in 1983 as a cartographer and then became an analyst in the Crime and Narcotics Center.  She built an extraordinary record of achievement in many senior positions across the Agency.  In the operations directorate, she headed the resources staff that worked with Congress and the White House to manage the Agency’s increase funding after the 9/11 attacks to support CIA’s global counterterrorism operations.  She served as deputy director of the Counterterrorism Center, helping to direct crucial analysis and operations.  In 2009, she became CIA’s Chief Financial Officer, overseeing all financial management and procurement for CIA operations and programs.

Ms. Bromley is the creator of and Senior Facilitator for The Director’s Seminar, an intensive, six-month CIA program designed for senior officers who have the potential for the senior-most level of the Agency.  It is the Agency’s most advanced leadership development program and incorporates government and private sector best practices.  Since her retirement from the agency in 2014, she has continued to facilitate the Seminar and do volunteer work.

Jamil Jaffer

Jamil N. Jaffer is the Founder of National Security Institute and currently serves as an Adjunct Professor of Law and Director of the National Security Law & Policy Program at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, where he teaches classes on counterterrorism, intelligence, surveillance, cybersecurity, and other national security matters. Jamil is also a Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution and is affiliated with Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).

Nicholas Dujmovic

Nicholas Dujmovic is the director of the Intelligence Studies Program at The Catholic University of America.  After service in the US Coast Guard, he joined CIA in 1990 as an analyst on the USSR and East Europe, and later was a speechwriter for the Director of Central Intelligence, editor of the President’s Daily Brief, and a manager of analysts.  He received his Ph.D. in 1996 from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.  Dr. Dujmovic was CIA staff historian for 11 years before his retirement from federal service in 2016.  He worked on classified studies of clandestine operations, including the hunt for Bin Ladin.  His unclassified work on Agency operations and culture has appeared in several intelligence journals and anthologies, and Yale University published his collection of quotations on intelligence and espionage, The Literary Spy.  Dr. Dujmovic has taught at the US Coast Guard Academy and at American University’s School of International Service.  He is a deacon of the Orthodox Church in America.

This past January, the question of pro-life participation in the Women’s March on Washington generated significant interest on our campus.  With the full support of the University, large numbers of our students annually participate in the March for Life.  This year, many of our students participated in both the Women’s March on Washington and the March for Life.  A lot of people, pro-life and pro-choice alike, see no contradiction in the notion that one can be both pro-life and a feminist, but others on both sides of the debate do see a contradiction.

The Institute for Human Ecology is hosting a panel discussion with women representing a different perspective on this issue, in the hopes of shedding light on some emerging questions.

Panelists include:

• Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, New Wave Feminists
• Megan Klein-Hattori, University of Massachusetts
• Robin Marty, co-authored Crow After Roe: How Women’s Health Is the New “Separate But Equal” and How to Change That
• Pamela Merritt, Reproaction
• Aimee Murphy, Life Matters Journal
• Cessilye Smith, Doulas for Life
• Angela Knobel, Moderator, The Catholic University of America

REGISTER HERE.
Join the conversation
#ProLifeFeminism
#HumanEcologyInst

For questions, please email ihe@cua.edu or call 202-319-5892.

Modern political thought tends to ignore the place of spiritedness in the psychology of political life, although it was explicitly thematic in For 2000 years–prior to the birth of the modern state–thumos, or spiritedness, was a core theme in the psychology of political life. Between the intellect and the emotions, this third component of man pertained to the realm of desire.

Yet, modern political thought largely ignores the role of thumos in politics. Even Francis Fukuyama, the modern champion of its importance, underexamines the place of thumos in the soul and its impact on political society by reducing it to the soul’s craving for recognition, dignity, and esteem.

Is thumos best understood as the fire animating tribal identity, self-assertion, and an increasingly divisive and belligerent polity? Can this power be confined to the level of consciousness, or is its place in the psyche of man more complex?

Through the lens of a Platonic-scholastic psychology, our panelists (Joe Capizzi, Matthew Crawford, Mark Shiffman, and Adrian Walker) will delve deeper into the role of thumos in the modern soul. Particular attention will be given to questions regarding the relationship between thumos and work, economic competition, violence, and political legitimacy.

Please RSVP here.

A recording is available here.

 

 

Adrian Walker, PhD has taught theology and philosophy at The Catholic University of America’s School of Theology and Religious Studies, The Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America, and the Pontificio and Istituto Giovanni Paolo II per Studi su Matrimonio e Famiglia.

In addition to his own publications, Dr. Walker translated and edited numerous philosophical and theological texts into English, German, Spanish, and Italian. He is an editor of Communio: International Catholic Review.

He is fluent in English, Italian, German, Spanish, and French.

 

 

Joseph E. Capizzi, PhD is Ordinary Professor of Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America. He teaches in the areas of social and political theology, with special interests in issues in peace and war, citizenship, political authority, and Augustinian theology. He has written, lectured, and published widely on just war theory, bioethics, the history of moral theology, and political liberalism.

Dr. Capizzi is the Executive Director of the Institute for Human Ecology at Catholic University. He received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, his Masters in Theological Studies from Emory University, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Theology from the University of Notre Dame. He lives in Maryland with his wife and six children.

 

 

Matthew Crawford, PhD studied physics at UC Santa Barbara and then turned to political philosophy, earning a PhD from the University of Chicago. He has published articles on ancient Greek philosophy, neuroscience, and the philosophy of science. He is the author of Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road (HarperCollins, 2020); The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015); and Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Penguin, 2009), a New York Times best seller that has been translated into seven languages.

 

 

 

Mark Shiffman, PhD is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Classical Studies and Social and Political Theory in the Department of Humanities. A professor at Villanova since 2003, he teaches interdisciplinary courses in the humanities, including classical studies, social and political theory, and philosophy.  His researches focus on the transformations of the disciplines of knowledge in the west from the Greeks to the present, in both the practical (moral, economic and political) and theoretical (metaphysical, natural scientific and mathematical) fields of inquiry.  He is the translator of Aristotle’s De Anima (Focus Books) and Descartes’ Rules for the Direction of the Mind (Saint Augustine’s Press, forthcoming), and has published on Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Augustine, William of Ockham, John Locke, Simone Weil, Ralph Ellison, Wendell Berry and Rémi Brague.

LIVESTREAM: https://livestream.com/catholicuniversity/events/9667327

Religious freedom is a foundational human right without which subsequent human rights cannot be upheld. This widely recognized fact is maintained, not only in the luminous tradition of the Catholic Church, but in the contemporary human rights discourse, including secular documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the U.S. Constitution. Saint John Paul II called it the “first freedom.” Others describe religious freedom as an “architectural” right, on which others are built.

Thus, the work of promoting and protecting religious freedom, as well as refining our understanding of it, is a critical task for our generation.

Ambassador Sam Brownback has dedicated his life to promoting religious liberty. As former U.S. Ambassador for international religious freedom, Brownback developed networks to combat human rights abuses on a global scale.

In the Fourth Annual Human Rights Lecture, Ambassador Brownback will discuss the challenges and opportunities for religious freedom with the IHE’s William Saunders, Director of the Program on Human Rights.

The event will take place at Heritage Hall on Catholic University’s campus. A livestream will also be available.

Sam Brownback served as Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom from February 2018 to January 2021. He served as Governor of Kansas from 2011 to 2018. Prior to that he represented his home state in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. While a member of the Senate, he worked actively on the issue of religious freedom in multiple countries and was a key sponsor of the International Religious Freedom Act of 1998. Ambassador Brownback currently serves as co-chair for the International Religious Freedom Summit. He and his wife Mary have five children and six grandchildren.

LIVESTREAM: https://livestream.com/catholicuniversity/events/9667327

Please join us for a symposium on Vision, Law, and Human Rights: Celebrating the Work of Father Ladislas Orsy.

Professor Joseph Capizzi presents on International Human Rights: From Vitoria to the present.

Professor Capizzi is an Ordinary Professor of Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America and the Executive Director of the Institute for Human Ecology. He is the author of Politics, Justice, and War: Christian Governance and the Ethics of Warfare and the co-editor of A Catechism for Business: Tough Ethical Questions and Insights from Catholic Teaching.

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing a global mental health crisis, with significant increases in anxiety, depression, hopelessness, and suicidal ideation. Religious communities are a vital source of social and emotional support for many Americans, and considerable research attests to the positive relationship between religiosity and mental health. But pandemic-related lockdowns have severely restricted religious participation and community gatherings. It is therefore crucial to understand the mental health impact of the pandemic on faith communities. Between October and December 2020, IHE Fellow Brandon Vaidyanathan and colleagues surveyed more than 1,600 members in diverse faith communities to assess the effect of the pandemic on their religiosity and well-being. In this webinar, we will present key highlights of their findings, and discuss the implications for faith leaders and for scholarship on religion and mental health.

Presentation: Dr. Brandon Vaidyanathan

Responses:
Dr. Scott Thumma, Hartford Seminary
Elisa Gilmore, First Baptist Church of Glenarden
Lisa Ziv, Blue Dove Foundation
Dr. Mark McMinn, George Fox University

Cosponsored with the Catholic University of America Department of Sociology. This project is supported by a grant from The John Templeton Foundation.

Brandon Vaidyanathan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at The Catholic University of America. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. His research examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial, medical, and scientific institutions and has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of Mercenaries and Missionaries: Capitalism and Catholicism in the Global South (Cornell University Press, 2019) and co-author of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019). His ongoing research examines aesthetics and well-being among scientists, as well as mental health issues in religious communities.

Scott L. Thumma is Professor of Sociology of Religion and director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research at Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut. He has published numerous research reports, website documents, articles, and chapters on religious life in the United States in addition to co-authoring three books, The Other 80 Percent, Beyond Megachurch Myths and Gay Religion. He has researched and written on megachurches, evangelicalism, gay religious life, congregational studies, the rise of nondenominational churches, and the changing religious landscape. Scott is the PI for a Lilly Endowment Thriving in Ministry grant and a grant to study the impact of the pandemic on churches. He co-leads the Faith Communities Today national research project which in 2020 surveyed over 15,000 congregations. He has conducted 7 national studies of megachurches as well as a 50,000 person survey of megachurch attenders and 3 national studies of nondenominational churches.

Elisa Gilmore is a life-changing mental health awareness educator, speaker and transformation life coach whose mission is to communicate the importance of mental health to bring healing and wholeness to all. She is committed to sharing hope, healing and wholeness through transformative work and is an active ministry leader at First Baptist Church of Glenarden, where she serves as the Director of the Mental Health Support Ministry. Her unique approach equips and empowers individuals through training, coaching, workshops and seminars. Mrs. Gilmore has more than 20 years of experience in mental health education and is a sought after speaker who presented to audiences on national platforms, including television appearances on WBGR TV.  As founder of Divine Exchanges, LLC, Gilmore specializes in mental health awareness to support and educate individuals, organizations and churches through life challenges, distresses and crises, including mental health, recovery and restoration coaching.   Elisa received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Business Administration from the Southern University in Louisiana.

Lisa Ziv is the chief strategy officer and interim executive director at the Blue Dove Foundation, a nonprofit organization that addresses mental illness and addiction in the Jewish community. Ziv is an innovator, author, and thought leader on the intersection of faith, family and Judaism’s connection to mental health. Her lived experience as a parent of children with mental health challenges forms the basis for her advocacy and educational work to build more supportive schools and communities. Ziv advises the National Alliance on Mental Illness FaithNet National Committee and manages an online support group of 21,000 parents of children with anxiety and depression. Her reflections on Jewish holidays and mental health were published by eJewish Philanthropy, Prizmah, and the Times of Israel. She has an MBA and advises organizations on healthcare financial management, operations and strategic planning.

Mark McMinn is Professor Emeritus and Scholar-in-Residence in the George Fox University Graduate School of Clinical Psychology. His enduring interest throughout his career has been finding creative ways for the church and psychology to partner together in meaningful and helpful ways. Dr. McMinn is a fellow and former president of APA’s Division 36 and is board certified in clinical psychology through the American Board of Professional Psychology. He has authored a number of books, the latest of which (with his daughter, Megan Anna Neff) is, Embodying Integration: A Fresh Look at Christianity in the Therapy Room.

Bhaskar Sunkara of Jacobin and Jay Richards, IHE Fellow and professor at The Catholic University of America, debate the merits of socialism.

About the speakers:

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin. He attended George Washington University, where he got the idea for the publication. Sunkara writes for Vice magazine, The New York Times, Washington Post and The Nation, among other outlets. He has appeared on the PBS Tavis Smiley program, MSNBC’s “Up with Chris Hayes,” The Michael Brooks Show and the FX show “Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell.”

Jay W. Richards is an assistant research professor at the School of Business and Economics, an IHE fellow, executive editor of The Stream and a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute. Dr. Richards’ articles and essays range from culture, economics, and public policy to natural science, technology, and the environment.

National conversation about racial bias in law enforcement has become increasingly polarized over the last year. Some deny the existence of any widespread discrimination, while others see systemic racism as an inextricable part of American criminal justice, and call for defunding or even abolishing police forces.

Professor Brandon Vaidyanathan says that racial bias in the criminal justice system is more complicated. A number of factors, including personal prejudice, laws and policies with racist origins, and broader cultural disparities that reflect the history of American racial discrimination, all contribute to a system that is neither irredeemably racist nor free from racial bias. Recognizing this complex interplay of problems, says Vaidyanathan, can help us move toward solutions.

Join IHE Fellow Brandon Vaidyanathan, Herschella Conyers, and Darren Davis for a conversation moderated by Cook County Judge Tom Donnelly, as they discuss race in contemporary American criminal justice and a path to equality in a fractured nation.

This event is organized and cosponsored by the Lumen Christi Institute.

Herschella G. Conyers is a clinical professor of law and the Director of the Criminal and Juvenile Justice Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School.  The clinic affords law students a supervised opportunity to provide direct client representation while working on juvenile justice issues including policy initiatives, legislation, and systemic litigation.  The clinic works with other institutional players to advance reforms in the criminal and juvenile justice arena. In recent years CJP has collaborated with the Illinois Judicial Council in presenting symposia on understanding juveniles involved in the system. In addition to her clinic, Professor Conyers also co-teaches the Intensive Trial Practice Workshop and a seminar called Life (and Death) in the Law. Before joining the law school faculty, Professor Conyers served as an assistant public defender in the First Municipal, Felony Trial and Multiple Defendants divisions of the Cook County Public Defender’s Office. During her time in MDD, she handled mostly capital cases. Before leaving the Public Defender’s Office, Professor Conyers also served as a Supervisor in the First Municipal Division and Deputy Chief of the Sixth District in Bridgeview. Professor Conyers is a graduate of both the University of Chicago’s College and Law School.

Darren W. Davis is Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame. His research interests cover most areas of public opinion and political behavior. He is the author of Negative Liberty: Public Opinion and the Terrorist Attacks on America, which examines the role of threat perceptions on the tradeoffs between civil liberties and security, political tolerance, and ideas of citizenship, and Perseverance in the Parish? Religious Attitudes from a Black Catholic Perspective, based on the first national survey of African American Catholics, the book explores the perceptions of racism and racial experiences in the Catholic Church.

The Honorable Thomas More Donnelly serves as an Associate Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County. He is assigned to the Law Division. Sworn in as a judge in 2000, he currently serves in the Law Division, Trial Section.  He has tried over 300 jury trials.  He currently sits on the Illinois Judicial College Board of Trustees with a term expiring 2023 and serves as liaison to the Committee on Judicial Education. From 2016 to 2019, he served as the inaugural chair of the Illinois Judicial College Board. Additionally, he serves on the faculty of the National Judicial College and teaches judges around the country. He served on the Illinois Supreme Court Commission on Pretrial Practices from its inception until its final report 2018-2020. The Illinois Supreme Court appointed him as one of two judicial representatives on the Statutory Court Fee Task Force and he served on the task force from its inception until its final report 2016-2019.  He has taught at Loyola Law School for the past thirty years.  While he has taught five different courses, he currently teaches Illinois Civil Procedure. He has taught or lectured at many other law schools:  Marquette, University of Chicago, Washington & Lee, DePaul.  He teaches widely with bar associations and other groups.

Brandon Vaidyanathan is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology at The Catholic University of America. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Notre Dame. His research examines the cultural dimensions of religious, commercial, medical, and scientific institutions and has been widely published in peer-reviewed journals. He is the author of Mercenaries and Missionaries: Capitalism and Catholicism in the Global South (Cornell University Press, 2019) and co-author of Secularity and Science: What Scientists Around the World Really Think About Religion (Oxford University Press, 2019). His ongoing research examines the mental health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on faith communities and among scientists.