Past Events
Looking at Life like Art: A Workshop on Seeing with Marina Gross-Hoy
Join Collegium Institute’s Ars Vivendi Initiative for this afternoon workshop on looking at life like art with Marina Gross-Hoy.
The Work of the Hands: The Ordinary and Divine in Contemporary Art
The Collegium Institute and Dappled Things invite you to join us for this online panel featuring four artists, working across four different mediums: Kara Patrowicz, fiber artist, Daniel Mitsui, illustrator, Matilde Olivera, sculptor, and Caleb Kortokrax, painter. In this Ars Vivendi Arts Initiative conversation, we will explore the relationship, particularly in these traditional mediums, and historically religious forms, of the tactile, ordinariness of these materials, but the ways in which in the hands of an artist they are transformed into things of beauty and may even help us commune with the divine.
Evensong for the Feast of the Nativity of Mary
Join Collegium Institute and the Durandus Institute on September 8 at 7pm for an evening choral experience celebrating the Feast of the Nativity of Mary.
The Lost Women: Recovering the Other English Catholic Literary Revival
Collegium Institute invites you to this special online Ars Vivendi Initiative event on Jan. 12 at noon: The Lost Women: Recovering the Other English Catholic Literary Revival. We will look to recover these lost Catholic women writers, from Caryll Houselander to Sheila Kaye-Smith and Josephine Ward, and explore how the obscuring of women’s participation in the Catholic Literary Revival has distorted the movement’s intellectual legacy.
The Art We Live With: Seeking, Prioritizing, and Cultivating Beauty in the Everyday
The Collegium Institute and Dappled Things invite you to join us for this online event which will bring together a diversity of voices to explore the need to prioritize, make, and seek beauty in our everyday lives, beyond the walls of museums and concert halls.
Catholic Humanism Fellowship: The Beautiful (Part III)
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.
Vespers for the Feast of the Holy Cross: Choral Evensong in the Ordinariate Rite
Join Collegium Institute and Durandus Institute for Sacred Liturgy and Music for Vespers for the feast of the Holy Cross. This evening choral experience will be held in person at St. Agatha - St. James Parish in West Philadelphia.
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.
“No Unsacred Places”: The Rhythms, Rituals, and Routines of the Creative Life
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.
Faith & Reason: Can Beauty Save the World?
This fall, we investigated the relationship between art, beauty and faith. We will ask questions like: How do these three things inform each other and feed each other? Does beauty aid a life of faith? What effect does beauty have on the human soul? Why do we seek it, does it seek us?
Silence, Suffering and the Way of Beauty: An Evening Conversation with Makoto Fujimura.
"I write this in my red barn studio...The nihonga process, which flows out of a thousand-year refinement, overlaps as a metaphor for the journey of faith that is refining me. Malachite and azurite are strikingly beautiful in the form of rock, but to use them for nihonga one must pulverize them, shatter them into small, prismatic pieces. They are to be layered, sometimes over sixty layers, to create a refractive surface. It is a laborious, slow process -- I like to call nihonga 'slow art.' The layers take time to dry, and in the act of waiting an image is revealed."
Shusaku Endo’s 1966 novel Silence — a narrative of suffering, religious persecution and divine silence set in 17th century Japan — took visual artist Makoto Fujimura on a pilgrimage of grappling with the nature of art, the significance of pain, and his own cultural heritage. His artistic faith journey overlaps with Endo’s as he uncovers deep layers of meaning in Japanese history and literature, expressed in art both past and present. Fujimura, much like Endo, feels caught between two worlds, East and West, conversant with both, though not fully at home in either. Beauty and death, honor and shame, pain and stoicism, ritualism and disbelief -- Fujimura has lived with these ambiguous Japanese pairings and his work seeks to untangle them. Melding the ancient nihonga technique with his preferred medium of abstract expressionism, Fujimura believes that art can heal as well as disturb, and he refuses to abandon the ideal of beauty. Ultimately he seeks to find connections to how faith is lived amid trauma and glimpses of how the gospel is conveyed in Christ-hidden cultures.
This event is co-sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania's Year of Why, the Chaplain's Office, SPARC: The Spiritual and Religious Life Center, Penn Catholic Newman Community Chi Alpha Christian Fellowship, and Christian Union.