The House of Social Thought brings together philosophers, theologians, historians, economists, and political theorists to pursue the deepest questions about human dignity, justice, and the ordering of social life. In the spirit of the University of Chicago’s famed Committee on Social Thought, we believe the most important questions cannot be answered within disciplinary silos — they require the integration of humanistic wisdom across the arts and sciences. But where that committee was defined by its secular humanism, we ground our inquiry in the Catholic intellectual tradition, believing that the most important questions cannot be adequately addressed apart from the question of God and divine revelation.

Fellows in this house study Scripture and the Church Fathers alongside Plato and Aristotle, Peter Lombard and the scholastics alongside Locke and Rousseau, the great papal encyclicals alongside Rawls and Arendt. The scope of inquiry stretches from the Decalogue through the medieval summas to contemporary analytic philosophy — the full inheritance of Western reflection on man and society. The Catholic tradition provides our grounding and our point of departure, but our engagement is with the whole range of thought that bears on the fundamental questions of social and political life.

This breadth is not eclecticism. It reflects a conviction at the heart of the Catholic intellectual tradition itself: that faith and reason illuminate one another, and that the deepest truths about human society are discovered not by narrowing the conversation but by widening it — confident that truth, wherever it is found, belongs to the same God who is its source.