Join Collegium Institute and Dappled Things for this Global Catholic Literature series on Mondays in March.

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.

Join Collegium Institute for this online Global Catholic Literature series on Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this reading series, free and open to all students, faculty, and independent scholars, we will consider G.E.M. Anscombe in dialogue with major thinkers from the history of philosophy. With each reading, we will take up Anscombe’s relation with a certain figure and a central question that she was trying to unfold through her conversation with the masters. 

Join us for our July reading group in which we will wrestle with questions revolving around God, technology, culture, and living Christianity in a world of machines and social media. To explore these questions, we will take up Jacques Ellul’s Presence in the Modern World to consider his diagnosis of the technological society as well as his proposals for developing a Christian culture in our times. 

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.

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.

During Lent 2021, Collegium Institute and Dappled Things Magazine continued the Global Catholic Literature series with a seminar on Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, taking readers on a literary pilgrimage through Mexico with Graham Greene’s ‘Whiskey Priest’ to explore themes of suffering, triumph, and of the power of the sacraments.

The Anscombe Reading Group will relaunch this spring, convened by Dr. Nathan Hauthaler (Barry Foundation Fellow, PRRUCS, University of Pennsylvania). The group will meet on a monthly basis to explore the views of G.E.M. Anscombe on some connected concepts and questions in ethics, metaethics, the philosophy of action, and theology.