Ars Vivendi Arts Initiative

In the Fall ‘22 semester of the Catholic Humanism Fellowship, we will explore what beauty is and why it matters. In so doing, we hope to deepen our sense of how to make beautifully and to live beautifully. Perceiving, making, and living beauty ultimately means returning to the Divine Beauty that is the source of all existence.

Join the Collegium Institute for an online conversation exploring the rhythms, routines, and rituals of a painter, poet, sculptor, & writer on Thursday June 2nd via Zoom.

Comedy has become a mainstay of contemporary entertainment through movies, tv shows, comedy specials, and more. We engage with comedic entertainment so frequently, but what does comedy have to offer us regarding answers to the big questions about the nature of the world and our place within it? In this fifth installment of Food for Thought, we will engage with comedians, from the Greeks to Godot, in order to gain wisdom through levity.

In this next Food for Thought series, “Sacred Stuff,” or "The Stuff We Live With: Objects and the Sacred in the Everyday,” we will explore our relationship to things, memory, and the sacred.

Join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things: The Quarterly of Ideas, Art, and Faith for our online Global Catholic Literature Seminar on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, Purple Hibiscus.

In this evening conversation, we will encounter the debut novel by Katy Carl, As Earth without Water. Christopher Beha, editor of Harper’s Magazine describes the novel as a “sharp and moving meditation on freedom, choice, and the creative life. Katy will read from her novel and participate in a discussion about the text with Joshua Hren, editor-in-chief of Wiseblood Books.

Join Collegium Institute for a soulful dive into the afterlife guided by the epic poet Dante Alighieri.

Join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things for our next Virtual Campus Seminar on Global Catholic Literature, in which we will explore Olav Audunssøn: Vows by the Nobel Laureate, Sigrid Undset.

Led by Dr. Chiyuma Elliott and several special guest facilitators, this seminar on Claude McKay’s Romance in Marseille gathered during summer of 2021. Written by one of the most important writers of the Harlem Renaissance more than a decade before he converted to Catholicism, Romance in Marseille offers readers the opportunity to consider the ways McKay’s early work about diasporic suffering and injustice relates to his later faith-inspired writing on those same topics, and to think about how both might fit into the broader corpus of Catholic literature.

Join Collegium Institute for a conversation about faith and fiction in the modern world, featuring prominent contemporary writers Christopher Beha, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Randy Boyagoda.

This talk is the final installment in the Faith in Art Series presented by the Lumen Christi Institute and Harvard Catholic Forum and cosponsored by Collegium Institute. It will explore how artists of every background and walk of life transformed imported European images of the Virgin to make her a truly Latin American saint.

To return the gaze of the faithful to mystery, to assist congregations to see beyond the material, the Catholic Church in the 17th Century called upon the talent of Caravaggio, the Carracci School and other great artists, who produced works that still delight, teach and move people today. This talk, presented by Lumen Christi Institute and the Harvard Catholic Forum and cosponsored by Collegium Institute, will look at old masterpieces with new eyes, revealing how artists used their gifts to render the invisible, visible.

On April 8th, join the Collegium Institute for an evening conversation with recent Templeton Prize-Winning Physicist Marcelo Gleiser moderated by renowned chemist and spiritual writer Michelle Francl, as they discuss science and discovery, beauty and the unknown, and their immersive journeys into the mysteries of the universe.

St. Joseph was an unassuming latecomer to the history of art, but once discovered, his images evolved rapidly to serve the Catholic Church during challenging times. From model for the papacy, to symbol of marriage and fatherhood, to guide for a good death and advocate for the worker, St Joseph's many guises have made him one of the Church's greatest spiritual treasures. Following Pope Francis' dedication of 2021 to St. Joseph, this talk will look at Giotto, Raphael, Murillo and others as we uncover the many faces of this quiet saint.

Through seminar discussions, students will explore thinkers like Pope John Paul II, Thomas Merton, Madeleine L'Engle, C.S. Lewis, and others; in addition, they will have the opportunity to participate in hands-on creative workshops with guest artists and writers, engaging the mind, the heart, and the hand.

This Food for Thought module will explore questions like: What does it mean to think imaginatively and live poetically? Can poetry help us access the truth in a way that is distinct from prose and other media? How ought we as readers—or hearers—encounter a poem? How familiar should we be with the “poetry of the page” to be able to appreciate the hidden verse of everyday life? Open to students only.

How do we develop a culture marked by an ethic of ecological awareness? In Laudato Si, Pope Francis called for an ecological conversion to just such a culture. The ecological conversion he envisions entails more than just tinkering with technology or the economy; rather, we must reshape our sense of culture and society.

Join the Collegium Institute and Penn's Program for Research on Religion & Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS) for an online evening panel discussion as we look at how literature can help us understand Catholicism in global contexts by exploring the complexity of living and writing between cultures. Endo, Greene, McKay, and Xuelin wrote from their own experiences of transnational life while also expressing differing relationships to Catholicism. Each of these authors had deep, though complicated, relationships with the Church and found powerful ways to express that in their writing. We hope, in looking to these writers, to see new ways of dealing with contemporary issues, while also dealing with the beauty and meaning of their literary creations.

Collegium Institute is pleased to offer this exciting opportunity to explore Flannery O’Connor’s final novel, The Violent Bear It Away, in a seminar series led by three distinguished O’Connor scholars. Due to the high demand, we are opening up this second seminar, as the first filled up.

For the month of June, our Faith in Fiction seminar will be building off our special event on Wednesday June 3rd to explore the Imaginary of Flannery O'Connor. We will dive into her second and final novel, The Violent Bear it Away, and encounter her strange, sometimes humorous, shocking and glory-filled literature, replete with a motley crew of characters and plot twists.