Collegium Institute’s 2023 annual Newman Lecture, featured Dr. Helena Tomko, at the Penn Newman Center (111 S 38th Street). Dr. Tomko, Associate Professor of Humanities at Villanova University, delivered her lecture, “Reading Newman in the Third Reich: Commemorating the 80th Anniversary of the White Rose Student Resistance” on Newman’s birthday, February 21, at 7:30pm.
On February 22, 1943, three members of the White Rose, a Munich-based student resistance group, were executed on account of their anti-Nazi leafleting campaign.
This year's eightieth anniversary of their deaths offers an occasion to look again at how the White Rose students came to act with the courage for which they are famed—but not always understood.
This lecture will propose that their resistance to the Third Reich grew from a shared commitment to an intellectual life anchored in freedom and defiant of propaganda. Books, friends, and mentors emboldened the White Rose students—and the English Victorian St. John Henry Cardinal Newman figured large as an exemplar of how to think and act freely in good conscience, however dark the times.
Click the button below to watch Dr. Tomko’s lecture.
The Annual Newman Lecture is part of a broader effort by Collegium to rejuvenate the intellectual legacy of John Henry Newman at the University of Pennsylvania, which was the home of the first Newman Club in America. Recent Newman lectures have been delivered by Dermot Moran, Eamon Duffy, Thomas Pfau, Paige Hochschild, David Deavel, Ryan Marr, John Garvey, and the late Don Briel.