Video Library

Join the IHE for a webinar titled Hemingway’s Faith with William Saunders (director of the IHE’s M.A. in Human Rights) and author Mary Claire Kendall.

Ernest Hemingway is hailed as one of the greatest writers from America’s golden age of literature. In her new book, Hemingway’s Faith, Mary Claire Kendall reveals something more. She makes the case for a deep spirituality underlying his life and writing, a spirituality that grew with his wounding in Italy during World War I, when he converted to Catholicism, prompting Charles Scribner III to call it “the most revealing portrait of the inner Hemingway since ‘A Moveable Feast.’”

Eschewing the popular stereotype of Hemingway as an irredeemable sinner, Kendall portrays the legendary writer as a quietly devout Catholic – who, though flawed, struggled to live his faith and imbedded it in his writing, iceberg-like, revealing his love of Mary, and understanding that “saintliness” is life’s lodestar.

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Join the IHE for the Eighth Annual Human Rights Lecture for the M.A. in Human Rights Program: “Saving Human Rights in the New World Order” featuring Mary Ann Glendon. Professor Glendon is the Learned Hand Professor of Law, Emerita, at Harvard University and former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See.

Professor Glendon serves as an Advisory Board Member for the M.A. in Human Rights Program. To learn more about the program, click here.

The carnage of the Second World War brought in its wake a universal commitment to the protection of fundamental human rights. However, that grand project is now floundering. Can it – and should it – survive in the New World Order?

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition.

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Join the IHE for a webinar titled “Can the Family Be Saved? A Royal Perspective on Renewal and Resilience” with IHE Scholar Jan Bentz and Eduard Habsburg, Archduke of Austria and Ambassador of Hungary to the Holy See and the Sovereign Order of Malta.

What can a descendant of one of Europe’s most storied dynasties teach us about family life today? In this IHE conversation, Eduard Habsburg discusses his new book, Building a Wholesome Family in a Broken World: Habsburg Lessons from the Centuries, blending personal insight, Catholic tradition, and historical perspective. Drawing on centuries of family experience — both glorious and tragic — Habsburg offers practical wisdom and hopeful encouragement for families trying to live faithfully and joyfully amidst modern cultural pressures.

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Join the IHE and The Lamp for a webinar titled “The Once and Future Parish” featuring IHE Media Fellow Matthew Walther, Father James Bradley, J.C.D., and Father Maximilian Nightingale.

During this conversation, our panelists will discuss the history of American parish life, the challenges posed by closures and mergers, and the tensions between canon law and the habits of the laity. Are Costco-style suburban oratories inevitable, or has the geographically defined parish church got a future?

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Visit mahumanrights.com to apply or email Program Director, William Saunders, at saunderswl@cua.edu with any questions.

The Master of Arts in Human Rights
Study Human Rights from a Uniquely Catholic Perspective
The Master of Arts in Human Rights, developed by the IHE, is designed for students who wish to study human rights from a distinctly Catholic perspective. It draws upon existing courses from several schools at The Catholic University of America. This interdisciplinary degree is awarded by the School of Arts and Sciences. The program’s director is William Saunders, J.D.

“[William Saunders] is genuinely a human rights hero, a person who has literally put his body, put his life on the line upholding human rights in very dangerous places…to stand in solidarity and to support people who were victims of terrible human rights abuses.”

– Robert George, Princeton University’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Advisor to our M.A. in Human Rights

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Join the IHE for a special bioethics lecture of the M.A. in Human Rights program with John Di Camillo, President of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, titled “Navigating the AI Revolution in Bioethics: Human Rights and Being Human.”

Depersonalization is the deepest threat to human rights. It entails de-classifying some human beings and denying their inalienable dignity, which is the foundation of human rights, or treating human beings as just so much useful biological material — so long as a sufficiently good outcome can be accomplished. The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution takes this depersonalization to new levels, raising profound questions about what it means to be human and how we understand intelligence and free will. How do we defend and promote human rights in the churning anthropological and cultural waves intensified by AI?

Sound bioethics defends the rights and dignity of human beings only through a clearsighted grasp of who the human person is. AI can be a powerful aid for health, knowledge, and even life, but it comes with grave risks of deceiving, eliminating, reducing, or replacing human persons, their uniqueness, and the relationships and communities they need to flourish.

In the 21st-century AI revolution, respecting human rights demands reclaiming what it means to be human. As a field, bioethics must unite truth-seeking, sound reasoning, and solid anthropology with personal encounter, respect for human dignity, and respect for conscience. Wisdom, charity, human relationships, and the pursuit of the common good in all its fullness are indispensable features of being and acting human, beyond the reach of AI. Will grappling with this AI revolution help us to understand and live out our humanity more fully than before?

Cosponsored by: Center for Law and the Human Person

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Join the IHE and the Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition for our Fourth Annual Lecture on Catholic Political Thought.

Daniel Philpott, Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, will deliver this year’s lecture: “Resurrecting Justice: How Christianity Gives Justice More Than Its Due.”

For centuries, the dominant concept of justice in the West has been the constant will to render another his due. The Bible, though, contains a different way of thinking about justice: comprehensive right relationship. This justice affirms what is due, or rights, but also proffers duties that exceed due such as mercy, hospitality, care, forgiveness and reconciliation. Retrieving this justice, which the classical concept has overswept, holds out promise for politics today in matters ranging from the protection of life, to immigration, to healing the wounds of racial injustice.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Politics at Catholic University.

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Upon taking the name Leo XIV earlier this year, the first American pope referred back to his 19th-century predecessor, Leo XIII, who forged a distinctive Catholic response to the challenge of industrialization. A similar religious response might be needed, the new Pope Leo suggested, to the new challenges posed by the “revolution” in Artificial Intelligence, which poses “new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

These are strong words, but are they strong enough? Is the age of Artificial Intelligence primarily a novel moral and political challenge for Christians, promising socioeconomic turbulence and requiring a new application of Christian ethics to a shifting social order, a new economic vision to protect workers who might lose their jobs to chatbots and robots, a new political vision for an age of concentrated technological power? Or is its challenge more existential and metaphysical? How should Christians think about the potential replacement of human creativity by algorithmic processes, the rise of digital relationships with artificial persons (therapists, tutors, “romantic partners”), the transhumanist aspirations of some A.I. oligarchs? Is it possible, given biblical premises, for robots to become conscious? Does the advent of artificial intelligence pose a fundamental materialist challenge to Christian beliefs about the soul? Can this technology ultimately be mastered and used for good? Or does this revolution require some kind of Christian-humanist resistance?

Moderator: Ross Douthat

Panelists:
Father Michael Baggot, L.C.
Will Wilson
Brian J. A. Boyd

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Join the IHE for a webinar featuring Father Michael Baggot, L.C., IHE Scholar Jan Bentz, and Wael Taji Miller.

The modern transhumanist movement presents itself as the next stage in human evolution — an inevitable leap toward superintelligence, immortality, and the transcendence of biological limitations. Yet beneath the veneer of technological optimism lies a deeply anti-human ideology: an attempt to reject nature, morality, and the created order in favor of a self-deifying utopia.

Panelists will argue that transhumanism is not merely a technological project but a modernist, Gnostic heresy — one that seeks to replace the human person with a machine-enhanced, artificially engineered being. By drawing from the works of C.S. Lewis, Thomas Molnar, and classical philosophy, they will consider how transhumanism resembles the pagan temptation of self-apotheosis and the Enlightenment dream of complete autonomy, both of which culminate in dehumanization rather than liberation.

As our society enters the brave new era of “artificial intelligence,” bioengineering, and post-human aspirations, it is crucial to confront the deeper implications of this movement. Is transhumanism the “final rebellion” against our nature, or can we still reclaim a vision of human dignity rooted in the reality of our creaturehood?

Key questions to be explored include:

Is transhumanism a natural extension of technological progress or a fundamental break from human nature?
How do the transhumanist promises of “perfection” and “immortality” parallel ancient Gnostic and utopian heresies?
What are the social, ethical, and spiritual consequences of embracing this vision of humanity’s future?
Can transhumanism truly deliver on its promises or is it doomed to failure by its own contradictions?

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