2027 Veritas Conference
2027 Providence College Veritas Conference
What is Man, That Thou Art Mindful of Him?
Christian Humanism and Its Rivals
Spring Conference | April 9–10, 2027 | Providence College
The Providence College Humanities Program invites you to its fourth annual Veritas Conference. Keynote speakers include Mary Harrington (Unherd), Bradley J. Birzer (Hillsdale College), Sr. Carino Hodder, OP (Dominican Sisters of St. Joseph), and Jonathan Ciraulo (Catholic Univerity of America).
About the Conference
What does it mean to be human? The question is perennial, but presses with special urgency during periods of crisis. In twentieth-century Europe, for example, the decades leading up to and following immediately upon the Second World War witnessed a remarkable floruit of Christian reflection on this question. What are the bases of moral values and political institutions, and how can they be justified? Are such artifacts of human culture as literature and music really and ultimately worthwhile? What should be handed on in education to the next generation? Christians as varied as Jaques Maritain and Henri de Lubac, Karl Barth and C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden – to name only a few – attempted to respond to such questions with a renewed, Christian sense of the human place in the cosmos.
Perhaps we are well on our way into another such period of crisis. In a world where much of human cultural making appears capable of being automated – where human hands are not needed to manufacture textiles or tools – and where the AI tools themselves can produce music, novels and essays on Shakespeare – what are we humans for? What does it mean to be human now? In Magnifica Humanitas, Pope Leo XVI has raised these questions and offered helpful guidelines for responding to them. He also recently invited Catholic universities to “form pioneers of a new humanism in the context of the digital revolution.” What form should such a Christian humanism take given the crisis of our age? In what ways will it build on earlier approaches, and what new challenges does it face? Ultimately, what questions should we be asking now regarding the human place in the cosmos – and what resources for answering them are supplied by the Christian tradition – especially, by the Catholic and Dominican tradition? These and similar questions are the proposed topic for the Humanities Program’s fifth Annual Veritas Conference (2027).
For questions or inquiries about the conference, email veritas.conference@providence.edu.
Our Keynote Speakers
Mary Harrington
Dr. Bradley J. Birzer
Sr. Carino Hodder, OP
Dr. Jonathan Ciraulo
Dr. Michael Legaspi
Full schedule and additional information coming soon. Please send any questions to veritas.conference@providence.edu.
For information on our previous conferences, click on the links below.
