Join Collegium Institute for this Food for Thought Module of the Spring 2023 Semester on ambition.

Join Collegium Institute for this first Food for Thought Module of the Spring 2023 Semester on monsters.

Join Collegium Institute for this first Food for Thought Module of the Spring 2023 Semester on madness.

Join Collegium Institute for this final Food for Thought Module of the Fall 2023 Semester on the apocalypse.

Join Collegium Institute for this first Food for Thought Module of the Fall 2023 Semester on comparative myth.

Join Collegium Institute for this first Food for Thought Module of the Fall 2023 Semester on education and A.I.

Join Collegium Institute for Musings on Music, our final Food for Thought module of the year, beginning Wednesday, April 5.

In this Food for Thought module, we will consider food and eating. Is eating well simply about physical nourishment? What does our approach to eating express about our understanding of our bodies and our relationship to the natural world? About our sense of personal identity or communal belonging? What are the ethical implications of our food choices? What can we learn from cultural and religious practices surrounding food?

In this series, we will consider the meaning and importance of home. Beyond just the very real importance of shelter, home offers us our origin and end, the place from which we come and the place to which we seek to return. We will consider the nature of home, journey and return while asking four essential questions: What is home for us? Why do we leave home? How do we make a home for others? And why do we long to return home?

What does it mean to know something? How do the ways in which we are taught or the ways in which academic research is done influence and shape our knowledge? In this Food for Thought module, we will explore knowledge across disciplines-including what it means for something to be true in both the sciences and the humanities—and how the rituals of learning influence our understanding.

Join us for this first Food For Thought module of the year wherein we will explore the merits of the intellectual life and its relation to the active life. By discussing past and present texts and evaluating contemporary scenarios, we also will consider how to develop judgment for discerning between virtues and vices that so often mirror each other.

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.

The concept of wellness is increasingly ubiquitous in contemporary culture and discourse, but what does it actually mean to be well? Collegium Institute’s first Food for Thought module of 2022, cosponsored by Penn's SNF Paideia program invites students to take up this very question and explore the meaning of wellness and its relationship to the good life. 

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

Join Collegium for the first Food for Thought module of the Fall 2021 semester, exploring the significance of in-person learning both in principle and in relation to pressing social issues that command our attention today. By chewing together on provocative texts of the past and present, we ultimately will consider the values and practices of becoming non-virtual human students again.

“What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not.” In this Food for Thought seminar series—the final module of Spring 2021—we will take a look at this most elusive of philosophical subjects: time. While time seems so obvious and we so clearly dwell in time, it remains hard to pin down just what exactly time is and where time resides. This series is open to current undergraduate and graduate students only.

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.

Join Collegium Institute and special guest facilitator Dr. Peter Wicks for the first Food for Thought module of 2021: a series of discussions about how to read the news critically and how to think critically about how much attention we should be paying to the news in the first place. Open to students only.

Is free will a figment of our imagination? A neuroscientific mistake? Or a decision we make? Join us as we look at a few accounts of free will to see how free it is and why it matters. We will be looking at some contemporary scientific research on the question as well as some classic texts from philosophy. We'll report, but you will have to decide!

Death has been alive and well in the world since the Fall of Man. Since that time, Death, the concept, the actual event, the figure, has permeated and haunted the human imagination. From the cave paintings of Lascaux depicting hunting scenes to Death as narrator in Markus Zusak’s 2005 bestselling novel, The Book Thief, death has shown his face from prehistory to the current day. How do we then live with the knowledge of death? How are death, health and mortality entwined? Can we overcome death or must we instead make space for it within our daily living? To what extent is it the one answer to every deep question about life?

As we begin the new year and (re)assess our resolutions, we may confront the question: who do I want to become in 2020?  That may seem like a bigger existential question than we may have bargained for on New Year’s Eve. But to what extent does it depend on other questions, no less profoundly existential, that we may be more likely to take for granted.Join Collegium and Harrison College House for dinner  as we reflect together on these questions with the help of brief, provocative texts from the past and present. Click here for more details

What does it mean to be an animal, and what does it mean to be a person? What is life? How ought we think about and relate to God’s Creation in light of these things? These weighty questions will be central to the third Food for Thought Module of the Fall semester.

Dr. Janice Chik, Barry Foundation Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania and Director of Collegium Institute’s Magi Project, will facilitate this module, drawing from diverse thinkers and texts to help students explore these ideas both philosophically and scientifically. Click here for more details

Food for Thought continues with the second module of Fall 2019! Talk about justice abounds. We are deeply concerned with what others—or perhaps we?—are due. Yet, for all this, we have deep disagreement about the nature of justice and its import for the world. What does it mean to be just, and how can we develop that virtue as individuals and a society?

During our first module, we’ll explore questions of knowledge, self, and trust. We will explore thinkers like Descartes and Augustine, but also W.H Auden, A.A Milne, C.S. Lewisand Simone Weil, along with this year’s Penn Reading Project book Weapons of Math Destruction.