Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture

This series explores the place of religious and spiritual life in a world that is sometimes at odds with faith, other times in search of it, and always at work reshaping it.

Upcoming Lectures:

Thursday, April 24, 2008 - "Muslim-Christian Encounters in 21 st Century" - John Esposito, University Professor & Founding Director of the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University. 4:30 PM, Rehm Library.

Wednesday, October 29, 2008 - "Who's Afraid of American Religion?" - Alan Wolfe, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. 4:30 PM in Rehm Library.

Past Lectures

2007-2008

This year's lectures focus on four religious movements that are growing or resurgent forces in the world today. Each is important to understand in its own right for any persons who want to understand the contemporary world. All four movements also have an important impact on Catholics world wide.

Tuesday, October 2, 2007 - "Tolerance and Intolerance, Eroticism and Asceticism, in Hinduism" Wendy Doniger, Director of the Martin Marty Center and Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago, where she is also a member of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations, the Committees on the Ancient Mediterranean World and Social Thought, and the faculty of the College. 7:30 PM, Rehm Library.

Monday, October 29, 2007 - "Protestant and Catholic Modernities" - Fr. Anthony Carroll, SJ, Associate Director, The Heythrop Institute for Religion Ethics and Public Life, Heythrop College, University of London. 7:30 PM, Rehm Library.

Thursday, November 1, 2007 - "Of Golden Plates and Global Warming: Translating Mormonism in the Twenty-first Century" - Dan Wotherspoon, PhD, Executive Director, Sunstone Education Foundation and editor, Sunstone Magazine: Mormon Experience, Scholarship, Issues and Art. 7:30 PM, Rehm Library.

2006-2007:

Thursday, October 19, 2006 - Harvard historian of education Julie Reuben on "Authority, Allegiance, and Advocacy: Religion and Politics in American
Higher Education." "Through out its history, American higher education has included some form of religious and political education, linked to colleges' commitment to the moral formation of their students and their service to the larger society. Both religion and politics, therefore, have been seen as a central and enduring part of the mission of higher education. But both have also been
problematic part of American higher education, particularly in the twentieth century, when strong religious or political commitments seemed to conflict with the research ideals of openness and objectivity, and the demands of a pluralistic society. This talk will compare the history of religion and politics in order to better illuminate the possibilities and limits of their respective roles in contemporary American higher education." Reuben is author of The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Univ of Chicago, 1996) about the secularization of higher education at the end of the 19th century. She is currently at work on a book titled Campus Revolts: Politics and the American University in the 1960s. 7:30 PM, Rehm Library.

Monday, November 6, 2006 - "Whatever Happened to 'Holy Dark'?- Electric lights, intimacy, and modernity" Rev. John Staudenmaier, SJ, historian of technology and editor of Technology and Culture, The International Quarterly of the Society for the History of Technology, discusses the impact of one major form of technology on social life and spirituality. 7:30 PM, Rehm Library.

Tuesday, February 13, 2007 - "The Dominance of the Present Over the Past: The Church's forgotten constitutionalist heritage" - Francis Oakley, Edward Dorr Griffin Professor of the History of Ideas and President Emeritus of Williams College, former President of the American Council of Learned Societies. Among his many works are The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages (Cornell, 1985); Community of Learning: The American College and the Liberal Arts Tradition (Oxford, 1992); The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catholic Church 1300-1870 (Oxford, 2004); Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights: Continuity And Discontinuity in the History of Ideas (Continuum, 2005); and Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Routledge, 2006). 4:30 PM, Rehm Library.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007 - "Was Jesus in Auschwitz? Talking of God beyond barbed wire" - Rev. Paolo Gamberini, SJ, Professor of Theology at the Pontifical Theological Faculty "San Luigi" in Naples, Italy. Gamberini is also the Delegate for the Diocese of Naples for Ecumenism and Southern European Assistant for Interreligious Dialogue for the Society of Jesus. 7:30 PM, Rehm Library.

2005-2006 Lectures:

Monday February 27, 2006 - Catholics and Contraception in Twentieth-Century America - Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Professor of History and Director, Center for American Catholic Studies, The Catholic University of America. Tentler's new book on the subject deals with how pastors and lay Catholics have responded to church teachings on contraception over the course of a century. 7:30 PM, Rehm Library.

Tuesday March 14, 2006 - Robert A. Orsi, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America at Harvard University, is a widely admired scholar of twentieth century Catholicism and devotions. Orsi is currently engaged in research on Catholic childhood -- what it meant to grow up Catholic in twentieth century America, and will present a talk on that current research. 7:30 PM, Rehm Library.

2004-2005 Lecture:

Wednesday, Oct 6, 2004 - Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne, KBE, FRS - One of the world's most distinguished writers on religion and science, Sir John Polkinghorne is a mathematical physicist, an Anglican priest, a fellow of the Royal Society, and a winner of the Templeton Prize. He will deliver a lecture entitled "Science and the Soul" and be available two days for informal meetings with students and faculty. 7:30 PM, Rehm Library.

2003-2004 Lectures:

Monday, December 8, 2003 - "Pragmatism and the Modern Self" - Michael J. Lacey, Emeritus Director, Center for American Society and Culture, Woodrow Wilson Center, Smithsonian Institution. 4:00 PM, Rehm Library.

Thursday February 5, 2004 - Rev. Joseph A. Komonchak, Professor, Catholic University: "The Jesuits and Modernity: the Case of John Courtney Murray" 4:00 PM, Rehm Library.Wednesday, March 24, 2004 -Terrence Tilley, Professor of Religous Studies, University of Dayton - "The Falsification Challenge Revisited: Religious Principles and Historical Evidence." 4:00 PM, Rehm Library.

2002-2003 Lectures:

Terrorism and War: Struggles with Apocalyptic Violence"
Robert Jay Lifton
Harvard Medical School
Tuesday, April 8, 2003, 4:00 PM, Rehm Library.

"Hindu Goddesses and Mary the Mother of God"
Francis X. Clooney, S.J.
Professor of Comparative Theology
Boston College
Monday, September 23 2002, 4:30 PM, Rehm Library, Smith Hall.
Co-sponsored by Asian Studies.

"Newman and the Restoration of the Interpersonal in Higher Education"
Michael Buckley, S.J.
Professor of Theology
Boston College
March 12, 2002 - 4:00 PM, Rehm Library.

"Whose History?--Spinoza's Critique of Religion as an Other 'Modernity'"
Idit Dobbs-Weinstein
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Vanderbilt University
March 18, 2002 - 4:00 PM, Rehm Library.

Mary C. Boys
Skinner and McAlpin Professor of Practical Theology
Union Theological Seminary
The New Testament and the Jews: A New Lens on Problematic Texts

Marek Chojnacki
University of Fribourg
Visiting Scholar, Harvard Divinity School
Rethinking the Idea of Transcendence: New Perspectives on Religion in Modernity

Rémi Brague
Professor of Philosophy, University of Paris I, Sorbonne
Worldly Wisdom Jean-Yves Calvez, S.J.
Centre Sevres, Paris
The Christian Critique of Societies: Just or Unjust?

Robert Coles
James Agee Professor of Social Ethics
Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities
Harvard University
Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Moral Life of Young People

John Elder
Steward Professor
Departments of English and Environmental Studies
Director, Environmental Studies Program
Middlebury College
"Stay together/learn the flowers/go light":
Education in a Time of Environmental Crisis

James Carroll
Columnist, Boston Globe
National Book Award Winner
The Passion of the Earth: Politics, Faith, and Sacred Violence

Lee Cormie
Faculty of Theology
St. Michael’s College
The Future of Liberation Theology in a Postmodern Globalizing World

Louis Dupré
Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Religion
Yale University
Religion at the Dawn of the Millennium: The Crisis and the Challenge

Werner Jeanrod
Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Lund, Sweden
Call and Response: The Challenge of Christian Life

Lawrence Langer
Professor Emeritus, Simmons College
National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
The Chosen People and the People Chosen:
Jewish Promise and Jewish Loss in the Paintings of Samuel Bak

Rev. Mark S. Massa, S.J.
Professor of Church History, Fordham University
The New Anti-Catholicism, the Old Anti-Catholicism,and the Analogical Imagination

Colman McCarthy
Nationally Syndicated Columnist, The Washington Post
Founder and Director, Center for Teaching Peace
Radicalize Your Life While There’s Still Time: Non-Violence, Service, and Prayer in Daily Life

Heather McHugh
Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence
University of Washington
Fastenings in Dickinson
(or, How Spirit and Letter Come to Coincide)

Jo Ann Kay McNamara
Professor of History, Hunter College

Sandra M. Schneiders, IHM
Professor of New Testament and Spirituality, Jesuit School of Theology

Vilma Seelaus, OCD, Carmelite Monastery, Barrington RI

Margaret Susan Thompson
Professor of History, Syracuse University
Nuns: A Vanishing Species in the Catholic Church?

David O’Brien
Loyola Professor of Roman Catholic Studies
Department of History
College of the Holy Cross
Catholicism, Modernity…and Holy Cross

Barry Sanders
Professor of English and the History of Ideas
Pitzer College
The Church, Chaucer, and a Joke or Two

William Shea
Saint Louis University
Evangelicals, Catholics and Modernity: Growing Up in the Brave New World

David Tracy
Distinguished Service Professor
Divinity School
The University of Chicago
The Surprising Return of God in Contemporary Thought

Mary Evelyn Tucker
Department of Religion, Bucknell University
Senior Fellow, Center for the Study of World Religions
Harvard University
The Emerging Alliance of Religion and Ecology

James Turner
Department of History
University of Notre Dame
Catholic Intellectual Traditions and Contemporary Scholarship

Cornell West
Professor of Afro-American Studies and Philosophy of Religion
Harvard University
Race Matters

Deitchman Family Lectures on Religion and Modernity