Thank you for participating in our meeting. Please submit your reimbursement request for our best practice seminar here no later than Oct. 31st. 

Please direct any questions to gzokal@lumenchristi.org

Description:

One of the most influential 20th century Catholic thinkers, René Girard transformed our understanding of culture, religion, and human behavior. His “mimetic theory” builds on the demystifying power of the Old and New Testaments to illuminate the religious history of mankind. Through an intensive reading of his more accessible works, in conjunction with the fiction of the greatest writers, this five-day seminar will explore Girard’s key insights into imitation, conflict, and scapegoating, connecting them to central themes of Christian theology.

Location and Format:
This seminar will be held at University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
There will be two 2.5-hour sessions on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. On Tuesday and Thursday, the morning session will be followed by a post-lunch excursion. Each session will a seminar-style discussion of the text and the issues at hand. Students will be expected to prepare the readings carefully, submit study questions in advance, and participate actively in each session.

Application Information
This seminar is open to all undergraduate students (including 2025 graduates) interested in understanding the thought of one of the great modern Christian apologists.
Applicants will be required to submit an online application form including:
A list of completed coursework.
At least one and as many as two letter(s) of recommendation from a professor at the school in which the student is currently enrolled.
A statement of interest no longer than 750 words, which includes an explanation of how this seminar might bear on the student’s current intellectual interests.
All application materials can be submitted via the online application. Incomplete applications will not be considered. Fifteen applicants will be admitted to this seminar.

Application Deadline is February 2, 2025. 

Grant Kaplan is professor of historical and systematic theology at Saint Louis University (USA). He is the author of three books, including René Girard, Unlikely Apologist: Mimetic Theory and Fundamental Theology (University of Notre Dame Press, 2016), and Faith and Reason through Christian History: A Theological Essay (Catholic University of America Press, 2022).  He is the co-editor of the Oxford History of Modern German Theology. Volume 1: 1781–1848 (Oxford University Press, 2023).
Trevor Merrill teaches French and French literature at Caltech and runs Imitatio, a Girard program at the Thiel Foundation. He has lectured and written widely about René Girard. He contributed translations of Girard to Conversations with René Girard: Prophet of Envy (Bloomsbury, 2020) and to the recent volume All Desire is a Desire for Being (Penguin Classics, 2023), and has edited books by and about Girard, including La Conversion de l'art (Grasset, 2023) and The Palgrave Handbook of Mimetic Theory and Religion (executive editor). He is the author of a novel, Minor Indignities (Wiseblood Books, 2020), and a literary essay, The Book of Imitation and Desire: Reading Milan Kundera with René Girard (Bloomsbury, 2013). His writing has appeared in First Things, Compact, Dappled Things, and many others. He is the producer of the award-winning documentary Things Hidden, the Life and Legacy of René Girard.


 

We are pleased to announce the fifth annual seminar on "Business and Catholic Social Thought: A Primer." During the seminar, graduate students and faculty members in business schools will cover foundational principles in Catholic social thought and apply them to their own field of research and teaching. This seminar aims at widening epistemological preconceptions and showing practical implications of Catholic social thought for business in a way that affirms the goodness of business directed toward the common good. Participants will delve into social encyclicals, secondary sources, and relevant business texts that show the path for principled entrepreneurship in order to gain knowledge, exchange experiences, receive help with their syllabi and consider how best to integrate Catholic social thought into business education.

Location: The seminar will take place at the University of Notre Dame between Tuesday June 11 and Friday June 14.

A limited number of travel grants are available.  To apply for financial assistance, please complete and submit the attached request for funds to murphyinstit@stthomas.edu by May 5, 2025. 

All participants will be provided with accommodations and meals.

Application Information: This seminar will be open to graduate students and faculty of any specialization in business schools.
    Applicants will be required to submit a completed online application, including:
 

• An updated CV/resume.
• A brief statement of research interest related to Catholic social thought no longer than 750 words.
• One academic writing sample.
• All application materials can be submitted via the online application. Incomplete applications will not be considered. Fifteen students will be admitted to this seminar. Application materials are due February, 2 in 2025.

Jim Otteson, University of Notre Dame

Lloyd Sandelands, University of Michigan

Msgr. Martin Schlag, University of St. Thomas

Andreas Widmer, The Catholic University of America

Dionysius the Areopagite: The Corpus and Its Legacy

June 22-27, 2025

Lewis Ayres, Angelicum University/Durham University

Paul Blowers, Milligan University

Fr. Andrew Summerson, Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies

Co-presented with the Sheptytsky Institute of Eastern Christian Studies at the University of St. Michael’s College

Dionysius the Areopagite is a figure who is as elusive as his prose is powerful. The course will involve a close reading of his entire corpus and situating his writings in the intellectual and historical context of the first millennium. We will further outline the indelible marks he leaves on subsequent Christian theology, liturgy, and the broader philosophical tradition.

LOCATION AND FORMAT

The seminar will be held at Sheptytsky House at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto.

Most Meals (some on their own) and lodging will be provided to participants.

· Participants will receive a stipend of up to $350 to offset travel expenses.

· Participants will arrive on Sunday, June 22 and depart on Friday, June 27.

· Participants will be provided with the relevant books.

· Fifteen applicants will be admitted to the seminar.

Working knowledge of relevant ancient languages will be helpful, but not essential. Preference will be given to Ph.D. students in theology, philosophy, classics, and other relevant fields of study, though advanced M.A. students will be considered.

There will be two sessions each day in the morning and in the afternoon. Each session will include lectures and seminar-style discussions. Students will be expected to prepare the readings carefully and participate in the discussions of the material.

The application deadline is February 2, 2025.

Contact us with any questions at seminars@lumenchristi.org.

Economics and Catholic Social Thought: A Primer

Now in its eight year, this seminar is designed as an introduction and immersion into Catholic social thought for graduate students and junior faculty in economics, finance, or related fields. Participants will cover foundational principles in Catholic social thought, starting with the human person, dignity, freedom, subsidiarity, solidarity, and the common good, and moving toward applications of these principles to conceptual understandings and ethical considerations involving economic topics such as utility theory, firm and business ethics, wages, markets, globalization, poverty, and development. Participants will delve into social encyclicals, secondary sources, and relevant economics texts.

This seminar is sponsored by the Lumen Christi Institute; the Catholic Research Economists Discussion Organization; the De Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture; the Kellogg Institute for International Studies; and the the Institute for the Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame.
 

Format: There will be two sessions each day, featuring a different instructor. Each instructor will open with a lecture, and then we will turn to a seminar-style discussion of the texts and issues at hand. In the final sessions, we will discuss how the material can be applied to each student’s particular area of interest.

Location: The seminar will take place at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, between July 28 and August 1. Partial travel reimbursement funds are available on a need basis. All participants will be provided with accommodations and meals.

Application Information: This seminar will be open to PhD students and faculty in economics, finance and related fields.

Applicants will be required to submit a completed online application form, including:

• An updated CV.
• A brief statement of research interest no longer than 750 words.
• One academic writing sample.

All application materials can be submitted via the online application. Incomplete applications will not be considered. Fifteen students will be admitted to this seminar. The application deadline is February 2, 2025.

Please direct any further questions to contact@credo-economists.org or seminars@lumenchristi.org

Truth and Authority in Augustine's City of God
July 27 to August 3, 2025 

Prof. Russell Hittinger & Fr. Michael Sherwin, OP - University of California, Berkeley
This  seminar is an intensive week-long course in how to read, analyze, and  discern the many themes in Augustine’s most ambitious and sprawling  work. The City of God tells the history of two societies, and  their respective origins, progress, and appointed ends. The story is  engaged first from the evidence of profane history (I-XI) and then from  the evidence of revelation (XII-XXII). In this seminar, participants  will discuss how Augustine reckons with the crisis of the ancient and  the human city, and whether it is possible to reconcile truth and  authority across the competing domains of polity, religion, and  philosophical wisdom. These themes will be approached from an  interdisciplinary perspective, addressing questions pertinent to  students in political science, philosophy, law, theology, religious  studies, and history.
Format: There will be  two 2.5-hour sessions each day. Each session will include an opening  lecture and seminar-style discussion of the text and the issues at hand.  Students will be expected to prepare the readings carefully and  participate in the discussions of the material.
Location:  The seminar  will take place at the University of California, Berkeley. Students will  be provided with lodging, meals, and a travel stipend of up to $350.
Application Information: This  seminar will be open to JD, PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and junior faculty in the humanities and relevant  fields (such as philosophy, theology, English, classics, law and  history).
Applicants will be required to submit:
 

• A completed online application form.
• An updated CV.
• At least one and as many as two letter(s) of recommendation from a member of the program in which the student is currently enrolled.
• A statement of research interest no  longer than 750 words, which includes an explanation of how this seminar  might bear on the student’s current or future research plans.
• One academic writing sample (30 pages maximum).

All application materials can be  submitted via the online application. Incomplete applications will not  be considered. Fifteen students will be admitted to this seminar.
The applications is due on February 2, 2025.
Any further questions can be directed to seminars@lumenchristi.org.

This graduate seminar is designed as an advanced introduction to the thought of Bernard Lonergan, SJ. The seminar will examine Lonergan’s approach to self-knowledge and “self-appropriation,” epistemology, and method in metaphysics and theology. The main text for the course will be Lonergan's seminal Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Upon first publication in 1957, Insight was greeted by reviewers as “probably… one of the great philosophical treatises of the century,” “a profound book… evincing an extraordinary sense for the persistent significance of ancient and medieval thought in the light of modern science,” “a Catholic Phenomenology of Mind with a personalist orientation.”

Our principal objectives will be to understand the fundamental ideas animating Lonergan’s project, to facilitate the personal “philosophic experience” Insight was intended to provoke, and to introduce a critique of methods to help participants begin to make sense of the deep sources of disagreement in the humanities, particularly philosophy and theology. Although it would be impossible to communicate the whole of Lonergan’s thought in a week, the seminar will attempt to give a sense of the whole “in” Lonergan’s thought, that is, of the through-line linking the project of Insight to his theological work and to the framework for methodical collaboration he proposed in Method in Theology, his sequel to Insight.

Jeremy D. Wilkins is Associate Professor of Systematic Theology at Boston College, and Director of the Lonergan Institute. He is the author of Before Truth: Lonergan, Aquinas, and the Problem of Wisdom (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America, 2018). In addition to the philosophy and theology of Bernard Lonergan, his research focuses on Thomas Aquinas, Trinitarian theology, Christology, and grace.

Roberto J. De La Noval is Assistant Professor of Theology at Mount St. Mary's University (Emmitsburg, MD). A systematic and historical theologian, his research concerns Russian religious thought, eschatology, and the thought of Bernard Lonergan.

Application Information:

This seminar will be of interest to students in philosophy, theology, and other disciplines that address foundational questions in the humanities and human sciences, including law, economics, politics, and history. Although primarily intended for doctoral students, advanced master’s degree candidates will be considered. Previous familiarity with Lonergan is not required.

Please submit the following:

A completed online application form.
An updated CV.
At least one and no more than two letter(s) of recommendation.
A statement of research interest no longer than 750 words, which includes an explanation of how this seminar might bear on the student’s current or future research plans.
One academic writing sample (30 pages maximum).
All application materials can be submitted via the online application. Incomplete applications will not be considered.

The seminar will take place at Boston College between June 22 and June 27 2025

Admitted students will be provided housing and most meals during the seminar. They can submit for up to $350 travel reimbursement after the conclusion of the seminar.

For full consideration, applications should be submitted by February 2, 2025.