Past Events

Filtering by: “Ars Vivendi Initiative”

The Work of the Hands: The Ordinary and Divine in Contemporary Art
Oct
24

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.

View Event →
The Lost Women: Recovering the Other English Catholic Literary Revival
Jan
12

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.

View Event →
Catholic Humanism Fellowship: The Beautiful (Part III)
Sep
16
to Nov 4

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.

View Event →
All is Grace: Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest
Jun
6
to Jun 27

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.

View Event →
Silence, Suffering and the Way of Beauty: An Evening Conversation with Makoto Fujimura.
Apr
11

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.

View Event →

 Want to see even more past Collegium Institute events? Click the button below to visit the events archive.