The Challenge One afternoon about twenty-five years ago, I was sitting in an English Department meeting at the Jesuit university where I taught. I was a younger member of the department and was expressing my enthusiasm about a new course I had been invited to create and teach by the
The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame is celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary this academic year. This occasion calls for something of a retrospective mode, a contemplative reflection upon the Center’s very fundaments: “ethics,” “culture,” and—perhaps most importantly—the ampersand or coordinating conjunction between them.
Boeing Airlines is not doing well. From mechanical failures leading to drops in orders to poor designs and ignoring whistleblowers, it is no wonder that they have come under federal oversight and negotiated a plea deal to avoid criminal prosecution. According to The Economist, the problems stem from Phil Condit, the
If contemporary relativism is a Lebensgefühl in which the feeling of the desire for truth and objectivity on fundamental life questions is frustrated by the feeling that such a desire is impossible or childish, then only a philosophical therapy can heal this existential state of self-doubt, can transport a person
St. Bonaventure University is a Catholic liberal arts college in upstate New York. Run by the Franciscans, it is perhaps most famous because Thomas Merton once taught there. They deserve to be famous for another piece of history. For a period, they had a core program of studies that was
The “Catholic Intellectual Tradition” is a concept often invoked to help characterize the warrant for a conversation staged between the sciences and the humanities, where the latter include philosophy and, of course, theology—even if theology is not strictly speaking a discipline of the humanities but a sacred science, a “sacra
This past fall I taught my course on atheism for a second time. It was well received last spring, the first time a course on atheism had been offered at Georgetown University. So, I decided to teach it again. Why offer a course on atheism at a Catholic institution? Many who
Are we, on Earth, the lone intelligent inhabitants of this vast universe? The Catholic tradition teaches us that there are other rational creatures, namely angels, who are purely intellectual, non-physical beings. But do we humans share the cosmos with any other embodied intelligent forms of life? Today, speculation about the