Past Events
All the World’s a Stage: A Global Approach to Catholic Drama (Spring 2026 Global Catholic Literature Seminar)
Join us for the 2026 Lenten season of our virtual Global Catholic Literature seminar.
Mysteries of Faith: On Catholic Detective Fiction and the Search for Justice
Join us for the Fall 2025 edition of our Global Catholic Literature virtual seminar.
Poetry & Mysticism in Maritain, Mistral, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
Join us for the Summer 2025 Global Catholic Literature online seminar.
The American Ghosts of James Joyce
Join us for the Spring 2025 Global Catholic Literature online seminar.
Liturgy, Culture, and Consciousness: Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock
Join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things for the Fall 2024 Global Catholic Literature virtual seminar on Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock (1931).
Flannery O'Connor's Why Do the Heathen Rage?
Join Collegium Institute on Mondays in June for our summer Global Catholic Literature series on Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?
The Roots of Knowing: A Dive into Nobel Laureate Jon Fosse's Novellas
Join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things for this Global Catholic Literature series on Mondays in March.
Dying Well to Live Well: Explorations from Tolstoy to Tolkien, á Kempis to Bellarmine
Join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things magazine for our online Global Catholic Literature Seminar, Dying Well to Live Well. In this seminar, we’ll pair acclaimed modern novellas—Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych” and J.R.R. Tolkien’s purgatorial fantasy “Leaf by Niggle”—with the most famous medieval and renaissance devotional manuals by Thomas à Kempis and St. Robert Bellarmine on making ready for life’s ending. Through these diverse depictions and reflections, we’ll investigate questions of how we can live full lives in the awareness of suffering, mortality, and human limitation.
Confessing My Childhood: Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana
Join Collegium Institute for this online Global Catholic Literature series on Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana.
The Ways of Holiness: Caryll Houselander’s The Dry Wood
Join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things for our online Global Catholic Literature Seminar on Cayll Houselander’s The Dry Wood. In this seminar, we will consider diverse expressions of the universal call to holiness and the literary challenge of representing the saints amidst us. In considering the novel we will ask about the role of literature in depicting and fostering holiness. Can literary works be a form of spiritual writing? Can novels successfully portray the holy? What is the role of suffering in a life of holiness?
Anscombe on Action & Ethics: Virtual Seminar
This reading series considers the pioneering work on action and ethics of Elizabeth Anscombe, one of the seminal philosophers of the 20th century, and perhaps the greatest female philosopher of all time.
Love & Justice: Spring 2023 Catholic Humanism Fellowship on Catholic Social Teaching
The Collegium Institute invites you to apply for the Spring 2023 Catholic Humanism Fellowship. The program welcomes a small cohort of student fellows each semester to participate in a six-session luncheon discussion series held in the Newman Center. The series culminates with a seventh session practicum based on our seminar discussions.
The Ethos of Finance: Spring 2023 Philosophy of Finance Fellowship
Collegium Institute invites you to apply for the Spring 2023 Philosophy of Finance Fellowship. This semester, we will explore various ways in which finance has supported or threatened the common good. We will take a look at the 2008 financial crisis and assess the extent to which epistemic vices (incompetence, financial illiteracy) were responsible, as opposed to greed, appetite, or risk.
Spring 2023 Medical Humanities Fellowship
The Collegium Institute invites you to apply for the Spring 2023 Fellowship program in Medical Humanities. The program welcomes a small cohort of student fellows each semester to participate in a six-session luncheon discussion series held at the University of Pennsylvania.
Law and the Human Person: Spring 2023 Legal Humanities Fellowship
The Collegium Institute invites you to apply for the Spring 2023 Fellowship program in the Legal Humanities. The program welcomes a small group of student fellows to participate in six seminar-style discussion sessions. The discussions will be facilitated by academics and professionals in law, history, and philosophy. The seminars seek to cultivate reflection on the relationship between law and the good life, exploring questions like: How can law—its substance and practice—help us to become more fully human?
Between Heaven and Hell: Dante’s Indiana by Randy Boyagoda
Join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things for our next online Global Catholic Literature Seminar on Dante’s Indiana by Randy Boyagoda. We’ll discuss the book as satire and spiritual guide in the ruins of the late modern world, and our own journey through the novel will end with the author, Randy Boyagoda, leading our final seminar himself.
On Natural Law & Modern Legal Practice (Fall 2022 Legal Humanities Fellowship)
The Collegium Institute invites you to apply for the Fall 2022 Fellowship program in the Legal Humanities. In this series, we will consider natural law as a philosophical approach to law. We will examine this in the context of classical thought and legal history. We will then examine how this approach can shape legal practices in areas related to civil rights, human rights, and constitutional law.
Medical Humanities Fellowship: Fall 2022
The Collegium Institute invites you to apply for the Fall 2022 Fellowship program in Medical Humanities. The program welcomes a small cohort of student fellows each semester to participate in a six-session luncheon discussion series held at the University of Pennsylvania.
Aquinas on Happiness: An Introduction to the Summa Theologiae
With the support of visiting Dominican friars, students will have the opportunity both to grapple with the basic analytical structure of Aquinas’s method and to focus on how he deploys that method to address one of the central question of human life ~~ happiness.
Majoring in Life: The Complete Guide to Adulting — A Summer Seminar for Students
For this June’s student reading group, we’ll read the manuscript of a forthcoming book to explore stories of young people trying to figure out this life in order to ask ourselves what our deepest desires are. Reading Majoring in Life: The Complete Guide to Adulting, by Anna Moreland and Tom Smith, also offers us a chance to give concrete feedback to the writers, which will be included in the published version of the book.
All is Grace: Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest
Join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things for our online Global Catholic Literature Seminar on Georges Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest. Bernanos’s classic novel is a powerful reflection on the trials, boredom, and grace of a priest in rural France. In this seminar, we will explore the text’s depictions of the difficulties of religious life in the modern world but also how hard it is to live out a transcendent orientation in the midst of the mundane.
The Springs of Comedy (Food for Thought Module V)
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.
Sacred Stuff: Objects & Sacrality of the Everyday (Food for Thought Module IV)
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.
O Sons and Daughters: A Virtual Campus Seminar on Chimamanda Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus
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.
Winged Ox Forum (Spring 2022)
The Winged Ox Forum will explore the relationship between the medical vocation and the Christian theological tradition. The Forum welcomes a small cohort of graduate students and resident physicians each semester to participate in six sessions over the course of the semester.
Catholic Humanism Fellowship: The True (Part II)
In the Spring ’22 semester of the Catholic Humanities Fellowship, we will explore the True. How does one come to be truthful? We will not only seek to understand how we come to know what is true, but also how we live out fidelity to the truth and service of the truth. Appreciating the fruitful relationship of faith and reason will be a major theme as a pathway to truth and to the right relationship with the source of all that is true.
Into the Afterlife: Dante at 700 (Food for Thought Module II)
Join Collegium Institute for a soulful dive into the afterlife guided by the epic poet Dante Alighieri.
Between Two Laws: A Virtual Campus Seminar on Sigrid Undset’s Olav Audunssøn: Vows
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.
Winged Ox Forum (Fall 2021)
The Winged Ox Forum will explore the relationship between the medical vocation and the Christian theological tradition. The Forum welcomes a small cohort of graduate students and resident physicians each semester to participate in six sessions over the course of the semester.
An Exploration of Catholic Humanism: The Good (Part I)
Join Collegium Institute for the first semester in a new four-semester program exploring the Catholic intellectual tradition as a reality lived out in the pilgrimage of our lives. The Fall 2021 module will be an exploration of the Good.