As the academic year begins, The Catholic University of America resumes its great work, offering a space for thought leaders from diverse fields.
Here’s a sneak peek into some of the upcoming important conversations happening on campus this fall.
Humanity and the Digital Age
As technological advances with artificial intelligence accelerate, will we fall behind our own creation? Can humanity survive the rise of the machines?
Existential questions about our digital age will be explored in a Sept. 17 panel discussion in Heritage Hall at 6:30 p.m. featuring prominent voices with expertises in national security, Silicon Valley, and the media. The event is sponsored by the Institute for Human Ecology.
The New York Times’ Ross Douthat, an IHE fellow, will lead a conversation with University faculty Jonathan Askonas, an expert on technology and national security, and The Busch School of Business’ Luke Burgis, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and Ari Schulman, editor of The New Atlantis, a journal that explores the impact of science and technology on society.
“From phone-based childhoods to the rise of more powerful forms of AI, the questions and anxieties that our digital age provokes cannot be adequately addressed apart from an integral human ecology,” said Burgis.
“This is the kind of conversation I crave, and one of the few places where I know I can have it,” he said.
Citizenship and Civility
What does the right to religious freedom really mean? How can citizens live out their faith in a free society?
Phillip Muñoz, University of Notre Dame political science professor, will address these questions in a lecture organized as part of the University’s annual Sept. 17 celebration of Constitution Day. It’s one of many opportunities to engage with the national political conversation that capitalizes on the University’s location in the nation’s capital.
The event marks the launch of the Carroll Forum on Citizenship and Public Life, an initiative spearheaded by Politics Assistant Professor Justin Litke to cultivate a culture of civil conversation on campus to live out in a new way Pope Leo XIII’s call for the University to “give to the Republic her best citizens.”
“Professor Muñoz is a respected scholar who will help set the tone for how we as a group engage with these important questions,” said Litke, who named the project after Charles Carroll, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence.
Throughout the year, 12 undergraduate Forum scholars will converse on challenging topics, read classic texts that remain relevant today, and learn from the nation’s top experts to help prepare them for public life.
“We want to be a leader in thinking very seriously about civil discourse,” said Litke of the University. “We have not just the ability but also the responsibility to take ideas seriously and allow those ideas to collide.”
In addition to the Carroll Forum, the other co-sponsors for the Sept. 17 lecture are the Columbus School of Law’s Center for the Constitution and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the educational non-profit organization the Jack Miller Center.
The Light of Faith and Reason
The University is marking the triple anniversary of the deaths of Boethius, Aquinas, and Bonaventure, through a yearlong series of events with noted scholars from around the world.
On Fridays at 2:00 pm at Aquinas Hall Auditorium, prominent professors including the University of Chicago’s Stephen Brock, Jean Porter of the University of Notre Dame, and Institut Catholique’s Laure Solignac will present their research and reflections in events open to the public.
Boethius, Aquinas, and Bonaventure are role models for the unity of faith and reason in the pursuit of knowledge. In this spirit, the lecture series is sponsored by the School of Philosophy and the School of Theology and Religious Studies. Graduate student associations from each respective school and the Institute of Human Ecology are also cosponsors.
“These are really key players in the Catholic intellectual tradition,” said Philosophy Professor Michael Gorman, who is playing a key role in organizing the series.
Gorman, who holds doctorates in both philosophy and theology, said his hope is that lecture attendees will gain “a sense of the interplay between philosophy and theology.”
At many other academic environments, there can be tension or even hostility between the two disciplines over the relationship between reason and belief. Because at Catholic University it’s given that revealed truth and human truth are complementary, such a conflict is foreign to the campus culture.
“We don’t have that problem,” said Gorman.