With profound joy, we invite you to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture. This milestone reflects the commitment of our students and faculty, staff and trustees, supporters and friends, as well as the University of Pennsylvania’s own Perry-Collegium Initiative (PCI) within its Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society. On this occasion we also will honor Molly Perry and James N. Perry, Jr., the first trailblazing donors to both CI and PCI. We envision a bold future for Collegium as a vital center of humanistic learning and faith-informed scholarship for our own university community and for higher education generally. Thank you for supporting us in this mission.
You are cordially invited to attend our Gala Dinner on Saturday, October, 21 at 6pm honoring Molly Perry and James N. Perry, Jr. and featuring remarks by Ross Douthat, Columnist for the New York Times and author of Privilege and Bad Religion, on "The Future of the Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the (Secular)University". The gala is a ticketed event and requires business attire.
We also invite you to attend several free events on Friday, October 20 and Saturday, October 21 before the gala. These events are free of charge but advance registration is required through this event page.
We also encourage you or an organization with which you are affiliated to consider becoming a Gala Sponsor! Sponsors will be recognized from the podium and listed in the Collegium Institute Honor Roll in our gala program. Sponsors also receive a certain number of tickets to the gala if desired. An outline of sponsorship levels is provided below. To learn more about supporting Collegium Institute in this special way, please contact Maura Mimnagh Thibault, C’94, at mauramimnagh@collegiuminstitute.org
Gala Sponsors
$15,000 ~ Benefactor Sponsor. Includes up to 10 tickets to the gala.
$10,000 ~ Patron Sponsor. Includes up to 8 tickets to the gala.
$7,500 ~ Visionary Sponsor. Includes up to 6 tickets to the gala.
$5,000 ~ Ambassador Sponsor. Includes up to 4 tickets to the gala.
$2,500 ~ Builder Sponsor. Includes up to 2 tickets to the gala.
For the full schedule of events (also copied below), to purchase your single ticket(s) for the gala, and to register for the free events, please click the button below. Discounted, Early Bird, and Student pricing is available.
Symposium Order of Events:
All events occur in University City, Philadelphia. We will confirm the exact locations to all registered participants.
Friday October 20, 2023:
Opening events. These events are free of charge but registration is required.
- 4pm: Perry-Collegium Initiative (PCI) panel
Penn and the Future of Religion in the University featuring Douglas Jacobsen (Professor of Religion Emeritus, Messiah University, and coauthor of two recent Oxford UP volumes: No Longer Invisible: Religion in University Education and The American University in a Postsecular Age) and three PRRUCS senior affiliates: Professors Michele Margolis (Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania), Beth Wenger (Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, School of Arts & Sciences, University of Pennsylvania) and John J. DiIulio, Jr. (Faculty Director, PRRUCS-PCI, and Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania).
- 5:30pm: Reception
- 7:00pm: Keynote Lecture by Zena Hitz (Tutor at St. John’s College and author of The Hidden Pleasures of the Intellectual Life and now A Philosopher’s Reflections on the Religious Life)
Saturday, October 21, 2023:
Day conference is free of charge but registration is required. Gala dinner is a ticketed event.
This day conference will consider the role that Christian thought and newer centers of humanistic inquiry might play in assisting the modern university to address fundamental aspects of its mission in education.
- 9:30-10:30am: Breakfast
- 10:30-12:00pm: Cura Personalis: Forming Moral Persons in the Age of ChatGPT
Questions: This panel is meant to help us think about the distinctive opportunity and perhaps comparative advantage of Centers for Christian thought and humanistic inquiry in the moral formation of college students during our new ChatGPT era. That is, does the Christian intellectual tradition offer us an understanding of the human person and our flourishing that enables us to continue thinking clearly about the ends of education when our digital servers seem to be able to do more and more thinking (and writing) for us? How so? What *should* an education be focused on now and must any adjustments be made? Are we missing anything significant by making “creativity” the preeminent marker of academic excellence and outsourcing other more “robotic” aspects of learning to machines? How does the most recent digital revolution perhaps only reinforce longer-term developments in higher education, and which this current moment might offer us a chance to reconsider and address in some way?
Speakers: Dr. Vivek Mathew (Executive Director, Chesterton House at Cornell University); Dr. Peter Wicks (Scholar-in-Residence of Elm Institute at Yale University, Faculty Advisory Committee for Collegium Institute Anscombe Archive at Penn); Dr. Lia Howard (Student Advising and Wellness Director, SNF Paideia Program, University of Pennsylvania and PRRUCS-PCI Senior Affiliate )
Moderator: Dr. Daniel Cheely (Executive Director, PRRUCS Perry-Collegium Initiative, University of Pennsylvania; Executive Director, Collegium Institute)
- 12:00-1:00pm: Lunch
- 1:00-2:30pm: Engaging Classical Traditions Creatively
Questions: To what extent can the tradition of humane studies, and the classical tradition in particular, become an aid to human flourishing and to what extent can it become an idol? Is it possible to cultivate a posture of respect or even reverence toward it without leading to dominance or exclusivism? How might classical traditions be studied creatively alongside other traditions without fading away? What might be the role of new centers in blazing new trails?
Speakers: Dr. Dena Fehrenbacher (Executive Director, Berkeley Institute, and Co-Director, African-American Intellectual Traditions Initiative, University of California-Berkeley); Dr. Daniel Wasserman-Soler (Executive Director, Lumen Christi Institute at the University of Chicago); Dr. Dhananjay Jagannathan (Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University)
Moderator: Dr. Terence Sweeney (Assistant Teaching Professor at the Villanova Honors Program, former Barry Fellow, PRRUCS, University of Pennsylvania, and former Scholar-in-Residence, Collegium Institute)
- 2:30-3:00pm: Coffee Break
- 3:00-4:30pm: Cultivating Civic Vocations
Questions: This panel draws together leaders and educators in different professional disciplines (medicine, law, business) to think about integral human formation within them. That is, how might “Christian thinking” be a resource for secular universities in their professional formation and perhaps inform their approaches to cultivating a sense of calling/vocation/ and civic responsibility among professional students and faculty? How to promote civic engagement without reducing education to that?
Speakers: The Honorable Stephanos Bibas (Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit and Senior Fellow, University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School; Faculty Fellow, Collegium Institute); Dr. Bryan Bademan (Executive Director, Anselm House at the University of Minnesota), Dr. Sarah-Vaughan Brakman (Director of Collegium Medical Humanities Program, PRRUCS Senior Affiliate, and Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University)
Moderator: Dr. JP DiIulio, (Perry Scholar of the Program for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society (PRRUCS); Director of Operations, PICCLO, University of Pennsylvania)
- 4:30-6:00pm: Break
- 6:00-9:30 pm: Gala Dinner honoring Jim and Molly Perry and featuring Remarks by Ross Douthat, Columnist of New York Times. Tickets required. Business attire.
6:00-7:00pm: Cocktail reception
7:00-9:30pm: Dinner and remarks
Click the button below to purchase gala tickets and/or register for our free Friday and Saturday events.