The Providence College Humanities Forum FA2024

Human Flourishing at the End of Life

John Y. Rhee, MD MPH

Physician, Center for Neuro-Oncology & Division of Adult Palliative Care, Dana Farber Cancer Institute / Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Instructor of Neurology, Harvard Medical School

Friday, September 13 at 3:30 p.m.

Can we flourish at the end of life? End-of-life often comes with decreasing physical and mental functionality, and many patients fear their final days and what their quality of life may look like. But the period of one’s end-of-life may also present possibilities for a unique realization of human goods — such as the consolidation of a personal narrative, a deepening of close relationships, and a growth in character and virtue. With a contextualized understanding of what human flourishing may look like as death approaches, we find unique aspects of human flourishing particular to the end-of-life context.

Why September 17 Matters and What All Americans Should Know about Our Constitution

Jerome Foss

Endowed Professor of Catholic Thought and Culture at Saint Vincent College

Friday, September 20 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

Everyone knows the date that delegates of the Second Continental Congress signed their names to the Declaration of Independence. Americans commemorate its anniversary every July 4^th with parades, barbeques, and fireworks. Why don’t Americans similarly celebrate the signing of the proposed document crafted at the 1787 Constitutional Convention? This talk will make the case that September 17 should be a day of celebration commensurate with, if not surpassing, July 4. The talk will review the history that led to the Constitutional Convention, the tension that animated its proceedings, the institutions that emerged from its debates, and some common misperceptions about the text that should be the focus of our civic celebrations: the U.S. Constitution.

Integral Ecology: Augustine, Aquinas, and the Recent Popes on Care for Creation

Marie George

Professor of Philosophy, St. John’s University

Friday, September 27 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

Should recent Catholic Church teachings on the environment be regarded as suspect? In the eyes of some, these teachings appear to be without precedent in the Church’s tradition and unduly influenced by a secular movement, some of whose members are fixated on reducing CO2 in the atmosphere by reducing human populations through means such as abortion. But an examination of Pope Benedict’s notion of “integral ecology” allows us to see that the Church’s vision of care for nature is both more expansive than that of the various forms of secular environmentalism and also solidly rooted in traditional Catholic teachings.

Fairies, Angels, and the Human Heart: Nature and Supernature in Conversation

Junius Johnson

Independent scholar and teacher

Friday, October 4 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

Writers like C. S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, and J. R. R. Tolkien drew upon the fairy tradition in folklore to discuss the dynamics of Christian salvation. At first glance, this is quite strange: historically, Christianity worked to suppress fairy folklore, which it considered superstitious at best, and vestigial paganism at worst. And yet any who have drunk at the well of Narnia or The Lord of the Rings knows that these writers were on to something. This talk will explore the nature of fairies and angels, as well as the dynamics of the human heart, and demonstrate that it is just possible that Fairyland is indeed a sort of neighboring kingdom or back door into the Christian vision of blessedness.

Is Consciousness Reducible to Physics?

Stephen Barr

President of the Society of Catholic Scientists and Professor Emeritus of theoretical particle physics at the University of Delaware

Friday, October 18 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

The well-known scientist Carl Sagan once declared, “I am a collection of water, calcium, and organic molecules called Carl Sagan.” This idea — that matter is the only reality and that everything, including human beings, is therefore entirely reducible to physical explanation — is called “materialism” or “physicalism.” It has had enormous influence in the modern world and contributed to the loss of religious belief and respect for human dignity.  In this talk, physicist Stephen Barr will explain why a number of well-known physicists and philosophers have argued that the phenomenon of consciousness is not reducible to physics and thus refutes physicalism. 

Rebel Stances: The Antigones of Sophocles, Virginia Woolf, and Athol Fugard

Nancy Worman

Professor of Classics, Barnard College

Friday, October 25 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

How do we make sense of the character of Antigone? This talk explores how Antigone is positioned – physically, emotionally, and ideologically – in the different settings of Sophocles’ Antigone, Virginia Woolf’s The Years and Three Guineas, and Athol Fugard’s The Island. Always a figure of rebellion, Antigone is embodied by each writer in distinctly meaningful ways. While Sophocles stages her resistance to Creon as physically isolated, Woolf deploys her outsider status to depict female embodiments and attitudes that challenge the status quo. Fugard and his collaborators take up Antigone as a means of highlighting the contrasting perspectives of the incarcerated rebels who stage a very succinct revision of Sophocles’ play. Thus all three writers, including the ancient dramatist, find in Antigone a stance that joins political resistance to unconventional and uncompromising deportments.

What is a “Social” Encyclical? Opportunities and Difficulties in the Magisterial Tradition

F. Russell Hittinger

Research Professor of Philosophy, Catholic University of America

Friday, November 1 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

In George Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest, the older curé instructs the younger priest: “… that famous encyclical of Leo XIII ‘Rerum Novarum,’ you can read that without turning a hair, like any instruction for keeping Lent. But when it was published, sonny, it was like an earthquake.”

Aristotle on the Persuasive Use of the Passions

Jamie Dow

Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds

November 8 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

Is the persuasive use of emotions a form of manipulation? Should our public institutions, assemblies, and committees discourage passionate speech? Or is that politically harmful, silencing the most vulnerable? On what principled basis might persuasive emotional speech be defended? Recent decades have seen a resurgence of interest in Aristotle’s views on the emotions. But most of the new research has neglected his original purpose in analysing them: persuasion. How does emotional persuasion work, according to Aristotle? And how can the arousal of emotion be defended as a beneficial part of public deliberation? This talk offers a picture of Aristotle’s understanding of how persuasion is achieved through emotion-arousal. It identifies two mechanisms that Aristotle seems to have in view. In one the representational contents of emotions provide premises for arguments. In the other, the emotions serve to fix the subject’s attention on their objects. We will consider the prospects for defending each of these against the charge that using emotions in this way is manipulative.

Defending the Human in the Digital Age

Christine Rosen

Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute

November 15 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

Technology has colonized nearly every public and private space, and most of us spend more time staring at screens than at our fellow human beings. How has this changed us? What crucial human experiences have we undermined in our pursuit of lives of greater convenience and efficiency? What important human skills — such as face-to-face communication, working with our hands, practicing patience, and understanding our own and each other’s behavior — have deteriorated as we outsource more of our decision-making to technology? What does it mean to defend the human and what human values should we be cultivating to counteract the powerful pull of our technologies?

“Angel ‘Outside’ the House?: How Lay Convert Women Transformed Catholicism in England

Kathryn Lamontagne

Lecturer in Social Sciences and History, Boston University

Friday, December 6 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

When English women of social privilege converted to Catholicism in late 19th and early 20th century England, they exhibited autonomy very unusual for women of the time — pushing against traditional notions of Englishness and femininity. This is New Womanhood: rejecting all passively suggested ideas of English Victorian Womanhood and setting out on one’s own path. But they joined an English Church that was itself full of new converts, and at times not quite sure what to do with them or their ideas. As this talk will show, this ambiguity surprisingly often resulted in lay women being brought more closely into the fold of the Church and becoming an important foundation of the growing Church. But were their ideas in fact Protestant? Political? Could their membership damage the existing community? This talk will argue that lay female converts helped to remold and rethink old modes of True Catholic Womanhood, but did so in a way that shows their complete dedication to their new faith. They were ‘pious transgressors.’

Troubled: On Family, Foster Care, and Social Class

Rob Henderson

Author and journalist

Friday, December 13 at 3:30 p.m.
Ruane Center for the Humanities 105

A former foster youth with degrees from Yale and Cambridge shares his reflections on upward mobility. More information about Rob Henderson and his work can be found here. 

This presentation is made possible through the support of a grant from Wake Forest University and the Lilly Endowment, Inc. The opinions expressed at this event are those of the speaker and do not necessarily reflect the views of Wake Forest University or the Lilly Endowment, Inc.