Ars Vivendi Arts Initiative

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this evening conversation, we will encounter the debut novel by Katy Carl, As Earth without Water. Christopher Beha, editor of Harper’s Magazine describes the novel as a “sharp and moving meditation on freedom, choice, and the creative life. Katy will read from her novel and participate in a discussion about the text with Joshua Hren, editor-in-chief of Wiseblood Books.

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.

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.

Join Collegium Institute for a conversation about faith and fiction in the modern world, featuring prominent contemporary writers Christopher Beha, Kirstin Valdez Quade, and Randy Boyagoda.

This talk is the final installment in the Faith in Art Series presented by the Lumen Christi Institute and Harvard Catholic Forum and cosponsored by Collegium Institute. It will explore how artists of every background and walk of life transformed imported European images of the Virgin to make her a truly Latin American saint.

To return the gaze of the faithful to mystery, to assist congregations to see beyond the material, the Catholic Church in the 17th Century called upon the talent of Caravaggio, the Carracci School and other great artists, who produced works that still delight, teach and move people today. This talk, presented by Lumen Christi Institute and the Harvard Catholic Forum and cosponsored by Collegium Institute, will look at old masterpieces with new eyes, revealing how artists used their gifts to render the invisible, visible.

On April 8th, join the Collegium Institute for an evening conversation with recent Templeton Prize-Winning Physicist Marcelo Gleiser moderated by renowned chemist and spiritual writer Michelle Francl, as they discuss science and discovery, beauty and the unknown, and their immersive journeys into the mysteries of the universe.

St. Joseph was an unassuming latecomer to the history of art, but once discovered, his images evolved rapidly to serve the Catholic Church during challenging times. From model for the papacy, to symbol of marriage and fatherhood, to guide for a good death and advocate for the worker, St Joseph's many guises have made him one of the Church's greatest spiritual treasures. Following Pope Francis' dedication of 2021 to St. Joseph, this talk will look at Giotto, Raphael, Murillo and others as we uncover the many faces of this quiet saint.

Through seminar discussions, students will explore thinkers like Pope John Paul II, Thomas Merton, Madeleine L'Engle, C.S. Lewis, and others; in addition, they will have the opportunity to participate in hands-on creative workshops with guest artists and writers, engaging the mind, the heart, and the hand.

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.