Across two millennia, two wildly disparate texts—one cinematic and one biblical—wrestle with how to live meaningfully. The 2022 film Everything Everywhere All At Once and Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) both propose that meaningful living requires embracing meaninglessness. This counterintuitive notion underlies the film’s reconfiguration of failure as intrinsically meaningful, and its canonization of kindness and vulnerability as cardinal virtues. Qoheleth’s obsession with death leads to a deeper appreciation for how one can enjoy the mundane gifts in our vain and absurd lives. Both the film and the biblical text guide people into how they can fail their way into a meaningful life, and how they can discover meaning, and even love, in the midst of the mundane and the meaningless.  

Meeting from January 1942 to May 1972, the Oxford University Socratic Club was one of the most noteworthy academic societies of the twentieth century. Established as an undergraduate club grounded in religious debate, the Socratic is often identified with its first faculty advisor and president, literary critic, author, and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis. Other accomplished scholars involved in club affairs included a who’s who of eminent figures from the mid-twentieth century: G.E.M. Anscombe, A.J. Ayer, Austin Farrer, Philippa Foot, Richard M. Hare, John Lucas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Donald M. MacKinnon, Basil Mitchell, Iris Murdoch, Gilbert Ryle, and Bernard Williams. Many of the papers first heard at club meetings dealt with the integration of Faith and Reason. My talk will offer several examples of Socratic meetings that took on the topic of Faith and Reason, and how these meetings are representative of the epistemic convictions and deeply held beliefs of contemporary critical inquiry.

Reading the Bible with the Church Lecture Series

Gonzaga Faith & Reason Institute

We are creatures, and when the Son of God took human nature at his Incarnation he sanctified the original creation afresh. He drew forth from his people personal affirmations, and he granted to his people new revelations. The Gospels model for us how to relate to God. Notably, the Virgin Mary was the first to voice her assent to God’s will; Martha of Bethany professed faith in full (“Yes, Lord, I believe…”) face to face with Jesus; and the women of Easter received the revelation of the resurrection and proclaimed it to the Disciples.

A common experience in postmodernity is disconnection from self, God, and others. This sense of alienation only increased during the pandemic and was shared alike among students, faculty, and community members. Although many may pursue modern strategies to alleviate estrangement and achieve deep connection, one should seriously consider the ancient wisdom of full-bodied engagement with the psalms where one allows the psalms to deeply engage oneself, others, and God along multiple dimensions of mind, heart, spirit, relationships, and experience. Unfortunately, few people, even the religiously trained, approach the psalms this way. In this presentation, we will not only cover the historical and theoretical contexts of full-bodied psalm engagement, but we will also approach the task practically so that attendees might begin such a practice on their own.

Learning about Jesuit education to be the best professor and employee at Gonzaga took an interesting route for Dr. Ellen Maccarone, Acting Vice President of Mission Integration. While a practicing Catholic, she attended only secular schools. But her desire to teach in Catholic Higher Ed and landing a teaching job at Gonzaga in 2005 propelled her to learn as much as she could about Ignatian pedagogy and spirituality.  So much so that the mission of Gonzaga animated her life and profession all the way to the Vice President’s Office. Come learn about the many ways the mission might animate your life—intellectual, academic, spiritual, and service-oriented, in this presentation and conversation. Discussion will also include various student, faculty and staff opportunities through the Division of Mission Integration available this academic year as well as other projects of the division.

What can the modern sciences tell us about our nature, the meaning of human existence, and the potential moral value of our being? The talk will endeavor to answer these questions by introducing the audience to the origin, nature, underlying assumptions, and virtues of philosophical naturalism, a position which endeavors to account for the nature of reality through reference to its physical structure alone, a task which it holds is best accomplished in and through the empirical sciences.  While it is commonly assumed that such a position requires the abandonment of any robust sense of human meaning and value, this talk will argue precisely the opposite: namely, that through a speculative extension of philosophical naturalism, a new (albeit counterintuitive and potentially horrifying) sense of human meaning and moral value can be derived. 

1. provide an overview of one development of contemporary hylomorphism, 
2. offer a discussion of how it addresses the problem of other minds, and 
3. identify a surprising implication concerning embodiment and enculturation. 

The distinction between spiritual and temporal authorities, or between religion and politics, is a feature of Christianity that is absent from or minimized within other religions. In the history of Catholicism, the thinker and scholar who most struggled to understand and articulate this distinction was St. Robert Cardinal Bellarmine who, among other things, served as the spiritual director of Gonzaga’s patron, St. Aloysius Gonzaga. Bellarmine's view of the relationship between Church and state came to be known as “the theory of the indirect power.” Bellarmine did not understand himself to be advocating for anything different from what the Church had advocated for since its inception; nevertheless, his views on the matter were extremely controversial in late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In addition to drawing the ire of other Christian leaders, Bellarmine attracted the attention and extended criticism of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Indeed, Hobbes pursued an extended critique of Bellarmine in the longest chapter of his Leviathan (1651). Jean-Jacques Rousseau later extended Hobbes’s thoughts on Church and state in his own writings, such as The Social Contract (1762). The goal of this talk and media presentation by Prof. Kries is to explain succinctly the position developed by Bellarmine as well as the criticism of it developed by Hobbes and Rousseau. The latter, in the end, want to eliminate the distinction by reducing religion and politics to a fundamental unity.  

Dr Mark Alfino (Philosophy, Gonzaga) presents an overview of evolutionary theory and shows how it provides the best explanation of human nature. We now have a compelling and empirically grounded explanatory framework for answering the question, “Where did we come from and how did we become human?” Evolutionary theory explains not only our physical, cognitive, and emotional evolution and structure, but also, with cultural evolutionary theory, how and why we invented religion, law, morality, and most forms of culture through which we express human meaning and purpose. Culture provides both the platform, through the arts, sciences, and politics, for humans to re-imagine themselves, as well as the means, through institutions and cultural norms, for creating selection pressures to realize our continual revisions of human nature. MLS takes evolutionary theory beyond genetic mechanisms to show the open-endedness of human cultural evolutionary processes.

"The Co-Evolution of Humanity and Its Technologies"

Fr Tim Clancy, SJ (Philosophy, Gonzaga) examines how the technologies used by human beings, starting with speech, have shaped human nature and enabled humans to outcompete the other hominid species on the planet and become the dominant life form on earth. Around 10,000 BCE hunter-gatherers began to settle down as herders and farmers. This revolutionized human culture, human identity and what humans held sacred from the wild to fertility. With the rise of writing, humanity was transformed once again, eventually from a communal identity to an increasingly individual identity. Human reasoning also shifted from intersubjective dialogue to a radical objectivity (such as modern science and mathematics) opposed by a radical subjectivity (such as romanticism and existentialism). In the last twenty-five years we have begun moving from industrial literacy and consumer capitalism to virtual or internet-enabled technologies. Once again identity is shifting from a private, ideally autonomous, individual to a new networked identity over social media. Human agency and cognition are also being distributed increasingly across a global network of actors. This history shows how human nature is interlinked with technologies and foreshadows the changes taking place even now.

A pair of presentations by a pair of married philosophers on the subject of how Love serves as a lens for revealing human nature.

"EROS: Activate Your Sexy: The Erotic Condition of Being Human"
Danielle Layne (Philosophy, Gonzaga)

For Plato, as well as many other thinkers in the history of philosophy (both Western and non-Western), the erotic is the principle of connection, of mediating between ambiguity, a dynamic and creative wellspring from which we realize the good of what it means to be and what it means to affirm and even to see the beauty in that which is often regulated to being ‘the problem’ of what it means to be. The erotic condition of what it means to be demands that we acknowledge human lack, the desperation of desire, and do not instead attempt to transcend it, at least if by “transcendence” one means “escapism.” Rather, the erotic is the power that activates our connection to a divine resource we all have within, a resource that allows us to see the Good in our brokenness, the Good in our ambiguity and plurality, the Good in the human condition in both its suffering and alienation as well as its generative, transformative and ecstatic embodied beauty.

"AGAPE: Activate Your Ugly: Agapeic Substitution as the Key to Christology and Human Nature"
Tyler Tritten (Philosophy, Gonzaga)

The Christian concept of sacrificial love (agape) is framed in terms of Christology, i.e., through reflections concerning the union of the divine and the human in Jesus qua Messiah. By contrast to eros, the sacrificial love that imitates the self-emptying love of God in Christ meets human brokenness by substituting for the other, submitting in service to the other, and yielding rights to the other. While agape serves as a pattern for the nature of God as revealed in the Incarnation, it also functions as a pattern for human nature, emphasizing mortification, yielding, release, and foolishness. Attention to traditional positions in patristic and early medieval Christology with classic theories of human nature provides a basis for the argument that traditional christologies and theories of human nature are both homological and analogical, i.e., similar in structure and in content. (Apparently, then, many of our contemporary debates are not as far removed from patristic and medieval philosophy as we sometimes like to imagine!) Only agape, and not eros, is divine, not despite its ugliness and humiliation but precisely because it is ugly and humiliating.

Dualism is the theory of reality most famously associated with early modern French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who argued that the mind and body are different kinds of substances that interact with one another causally to produce a unitary human person. While powerful, popular, and intuitive, however, dualism faces what seem to be insuperable problems: mind-body causal interaction, the apparent dependence of mental life on the brain and nervous system, and assorted logical problems associated with the incompatible properties of mental things and physical things (e.g., spatial location).

In the face of these difficulties, is a broadly dualistic approach to human nature still workable and appealing? The speakers in this panel offer two affirmative answers to that question.

Idealistic Dualism:  Two Perspectives on a Single Being

Wayne P. Pomerleau, Philosophy, Gonzaga University

I believe that a human being is essentially a personal animal.  Both of these concepts are important.  It seems preposterous to try to deny that we are animals—physical organisms living in and biologically dependent on a material environment.  But what sets us apart is that, as far as we know, we are the only animals that typically develop personhood; that is to say, we naturally have the capacities for abstract rational thought, for unselfish social emotions, and for conscientious moral freedom.

Philosophically, I am a Kantian—meaning that I generally follow the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth-century thinker of the German Enlightenment.  Kant is both an idealist and a dualist.  Thus, to understand his position, we must consider both his idealism, which emphasizes the significance of mind without disregarding matter, and his unique form of dualism, which I interpret as a dual-aspect theory—two possible and legitimate perspectives on everything in the world of our experience, including human beings.  So it is the duality of our human nature that makes us both physical and mental beings.

Property Dualism: Conscious Mind as a Non-Reducible Functional Property of Physical Reality

Quanhua Liu, Philosophy, Gonzaga University

Famous formulations of broadly dualistic views of human nature are found in Plato’s Phaedo and Descartes’ Meditations. The affinity argument in Phaedo claims that there are two separate realms of things, sensible things and intelligible things, and argues that since the body is “most like” the sensible and the soul “most like” the intelligible, they must be different kinds of things. Similarly, Descartes argues that the human ability to engage in reflective thought is something qualitatively different from the mechanical physical world, and concludes that mind and body must be separate substances that causally affect one another, a view called dualist interactionism.

When moral orders within us rhyme with the orderliness of the cosmos, the potential arises for sacramental experience. Until modern times, architecture has always served as the material nexus between the subjective "personal" realm and the enormous cosmos. This presentation argues for the incarnational bases for this kind of experience of architecture -- not so much in iconic places like Chartres Cathedral or the Great Wall of China, but in everyday places like cafeterias, or even traffic jams. Without cultivation of incarnational presence, architecture reduces to stage sets. And contemporary urban environments are a cacophony of stage sets. The presentation suggests five ways to retrieve sacramental presence in the architecture of everyday experience:

1. submit to practices which have a history
2. cultivate glow
3. recover procession and arrival
4. retain the old, which is often better
5. replicate the journey to the New Jerusalem

For over 20 years Professor David Wang taught graduate courses in history and theory, interdisciplinary ethics and practice, research methods, and foundation courses in design and construction at Washington State University. Wang is the co-author of Architectural Research Methods (2002, second edition 2013, John Wiley & Sons, with Linda Groat) and has lectured on architectural research nationally as well as in China and Europe. He is also author of A Philosophy of Chinese Architecture Past, Present, Future (Routledge 2017), and the newly published book Architecture and Sacrament: A Critical Theory (Routledge 2020). Professor Wang has published on architectural theory and research methods in numerous journals.

A new book by Duane Armitage (Philosophy, Scranton), Philosophy's Violent Sacred: Heidegger and Nietzsche through Mimetic Theory (Michigan State University Press, 2021), criticizes the failure of Postmodernism to uncover the root cause of violence and victimization. For Postmodernism violence is caused by absolutism, essentialism, and rationality; in short, according to Postmodernism, absolute truth marginalizes. Further, the Postmodern critique of rationality is an offshoot and development of a critique of rationality central to Continental Philosophy. Armitage argues that the Continental / Postmodern diagnosis of violence and victimization is a failure, and thus that its prescription to address the problem fails as well. In contrast, Armitage offers a counter-explanation of violence and victimization drawn from the Mimetic Theory of Rene Girard. Girard argues that it is not truth, but group formation itself that is inherently violent and that such violence is essentially social and religious in nature.  Armitage will conclude with a brief discussion of modern political violence in the US as fitting the schema of mimetic theory.

God created everything, including human beings, and pronounced creation good, as the Book of Genesis attests. For Christians, the best confirmation that creation is good is the Incarnation, in which God joined his divine nature to human nature. Today, fresh affirmation of the goodness of female human nature specifically is found in considering the first moment of the Incarnation in light of genetics and reproductive science. Mary’s natural gift of an egg cell proves to be materially sufficient to become, by supernatural action, the incarnational zygote. All other modern theories about how the Incarnation might have occurred rely on faulty scientific accounts of ovulation and likewise have theological flaws. Thus, this new study also demonstrates afresh the harmony of faith and reason. This is to be expected, for theology is never served by faulty science. Because reality is coherent, true theology is affirmed by accurate science.

The early Christian church described in The Acts of the Apostles was a community in which the participants shared their lives and possessions, deliberately drawing from common resources and meeting the needs of community members. The church was a very special kind of community, reflecting the sacrificial love that Jesus said would be the mark of his followers in a concrete way. Many people across history have found the model of the early church inspiring as a paradigmatic example of communal or communist life.

On the other hand, the Communism theoretically articulated by Marx and instituted as a political system by Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union was noted for its hostility to religion. On this view, religion, as an “opiate” of the people that anesthetized them and distracted them from the project of overcoming class alienation, deserved systematic suppression.

The Cold War fostered in the West a melding of political ideals of representative democracy, civic religion (with overtones of traditional Christianity), and anti-Communism. In this context, even such a strong critic of the shortcomings of Western democracy as Martin Luther King could note that while we might learn from the ideals of communism, Christians could not affirm Communism (see https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/can-christian-be-communist-sermon-delivered-ebenezer-baptist-church ). By contrast, in the 70s and 80s, a series of movements explicitly drawing from Marxist notions of personal and political liberation attracted the support and involvement of priests, religious leaders, and theologians, especially Catholics in Latin America. In the view of these thinkers and activists, Communist values of liberation and solidarity are not merely compatible with Christianity, but resonate deeply. This resurgence of “liberation theology” remained quite controversial at the time, however, prompting sharply critical pastoral instructions from Pope John Paul II and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI).

In recent years, the critique of capitalism offered by Pope Francis has inspired resurgent interest in blending Christianity and Communism. One example is a recent essay in the US Jesuit magazine America, which reversed its 110-year editorial position opposing Communism by publishing “The Catholic Case for Communism” (see https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2019/07/23/catholic-case-communism). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this article prompted ripostes from a number of politically conservative Christians in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and National Review (see for example https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/catholicism-communism-are-not-compatible/).

The doctrine of the imago dei is a very powerful way of articulating and defending the idea of human dignity, one that points to the ways that human beings can share in the divine life.  This sharing or likeness has often been understood in terms of our faculty for reason, and this link has been articulately and fruitfully developed in many contexts, including pointing to the importance of integrating faith and reason.  I have no wish to deny this interpretation and in fact value it highly.  It does not, however, exhaust the possibilities for thinking the human being as the imago dei.

In this talk, I will look to the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, for whom it is our ability to create, to make things, by which we share most intimately in the divine life.  This is not for him bifurcated from rationality.  In fact, Tolkien gives a special place to story-telling, artistic creation by which we make things with words, partly because this form of art remains infused with Logos.  However, the focus on human acts of creation gives a characteristic slant to his thinking that is particularly important in our own time when the act of making tends to be undervalued.  Tolkien shows us compellingly how it is through the act of creation that we come to know and love the materials out of which we create, thus healing some of the problematic aspects of the fact-value distinction that alienates us from our world.

The first part of the talk, therefore, looks at the act of creation as a way of discovering meaning and value in the material world, quite apart from the question of God’s existence.  The second part of the talk, takes up Tolkien’s more theologically motivated distinction between God’s creation, ex nihilo, and our acts of sub-creation in order to think the beauty of our creativity and rootedness in nature in a way that takes seriously both human sinfulness and the goodness of the nature of which we are a principle part.  This allows us to see within the doctrine of the imago dei an invocation of the need to defend the importance of integrating, not only faith and reason, but also faith and culture.

Xavier Tilliette, S.J. was a very influential philosophical and theological thinker in Europe over the last half-century, but is little known in the Anglophone world. In Tritten’s reading, Tilliette offers a powerful account of the relationship between faith and reason, in which faith does not seek the assistance of reason for its justification, but instead provides “theological givens” to reason that expands the borders of philosophy. In an evocative reversal of traditional natural theology, this suggests that reason is the handmaiden of faith. This approach is illustrated by Tilliette’s claim that the incarnation of God in Christ is a fact, and that the fact of the incarnation must be understood in terms of the kenosis, or claim that God in Christ abdicates the “form of God."

Tritten’s discussion will shed light on how Tilliette’s views of faith and reason, which were significant enough for him to be selected as a consultant for the influential papal encyclical Fides et ratio (Faith and Reason, 1998), are relevant for Gonzaga’s reflection on its mission as well.

This event is co-sponsored by the Gonzaga University Faith and Reason Institute

A distinguished professor debunks the assertion that America's Founders were deists who desired the strict separation of church and state and instead shows that their political ideas were profoundly influenced by their Christian convictions.

Mark David Hall is the Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics and Faculty Fellow in the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University. He is also associated faculty at the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University and senior fellow at Baylor University's Institute for Studies of Religion. He has written, edited, or co-edited a dozen books on religion and politics in America and is a nationally recognized expert on the religious freedom.

"Terrence Malick's To the Wonder: Sexist Abomination or Visual Poetry of Transcendence?"

Toward the end of the previous century, Francis Crick and Christof Koch published their seminal article “Toward a Neurobiological Approach to Consciousness” (available here). What followed is the contemporary search for neural correlates of consciousness (for brevity NCC) foundational to the science of consciousness. Simply put, NCC are neural states or processes correlated with consciousness. It is often thought that these brain mechanisms of consciousness at the cellular level provide powerful evidence for a materialist understanding of human nature and more precisely a physicalist view of the mind. Consequently, dualist views that go beyond the ontological straitjacket of physicalism are said to be undermined by contemporary neuroscience. A nonphysical mind or soul is purportedly a relic of our pre-neuroscientific thought.

What does God have to do with how we read the Bible? Recent biblical interpretation has been so dominated by the historical-critical paradigm that such a question is rarely considered; if anything, it has been explicitly rejected by confessional and secular scholars alike. At most, divine agency is historically-situated: the human accounts of Scripture testify to divine action in past history; perhaps those testimonies were true, and perhaps they were not. Either way, God could be no more than a character in the drama of history. But all Christian confessions (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant) affirm divine agency in the writing of Scripture—that is, God is active not only as a character on the stage but in the narration of the drama as well. Such a confession precludes a hermeneutical process devoid of theological content. This lecture offers an account of what that theological content should be, and how, precisely, it should shape our hermeneutical method

"Gregorian Chant: Its Origins, Development, and Future"

The Egyptian Desert Fathers have always occupied a privileged place in the history of Christian spirituality. Following Constantine’s legalization of the faith, an astonishing number of Christians renounced the secular world to pursue God in the desert. Interred in the vast silence, these first Christian ascetics developed the spiritual practices and insights that would ultimately underpin eastern and western monasticism. Although most of the Fathers were uninterested in systematizing their ideas, their followers gathered their stories and teachings (the apophthegmata patrum—the Sayings of the Fathers), and these became foundational for the ascetic branch of the faith.

For centuries, Christians have employed the teachings of the Desert Fathers as a compass to navigate the challenges of their own age. With a spiritual program that centered on the cultivation of discernment—learning to separate truth from deception, the signal from the noise—the Desert Fathers helped Christians ground themselves in God and place themselves in a right relationship with reality.

In the twenty-first century, reality is under siege: humans spend increasing amounts of time in a virtual domain, a world that is deliberately engineered to be more compelling than what exists outside our interface. Faced with the seductive power of the internet, we might wonder if the Desert Fathers still have anything to teach us. In this paper, Richard Goodrich will argue that, if anything, the teachings of the Desert Fathers are more relevant and necessary than they have ever been; the thoughts of fourth century Egyptian monks can serve as a salutary counterbalance to the debilitating influence of technology.

Why are people are willing to give up their selves to Google, Facebook, and all the rest?

Following Walter J. Ong, S.J., and many others, I argue that we are slowly becoming different people, different from those Americans who, just two generations ago, protected their privacy by holding telephone conversations in wooden boxes with folding doors.  I will argue that privacy is historically contingent.  Artifacts from ancient Greece to the 17th century, suggest that the inner life, a self, a soul, a consciousness, inaccessible to any other human being without direct consent, did not begin to form until the early modern period.  The invention of letter press printing and subsequent inventions like tables of contents, indices, and pagination played a causal role.  Norbert Elias has argued that the courtesy books in the late medieval-early modern period chronicle a retreat into the private sphere of things once done in public.  These include detailed advice on nose blowing, spitting, and food service.  The appearance of private diaries in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is especially strong evidence for a growing self.

The self that came into existence under particular historical and technological circumstances is now going out of existence. The evidence is everywhere: informality in speech and writing, the retreat of formal, ritualized dress, the flipped classroom where professors are encouraged to talk less and hear more. In just the past decade, a former senator has appeared in an ad declaring that there is hope for sufferers from erectile dysfunction, a vice-presidential candidate coyly winked at her audience during a foreign policy interview, the once dour New York Times, published a confessional series on the struggles of one woman with her psychiatric meds, and the word “memoirist” has been coined to describe a writer whose profession is to produce serial, confessional biographies.  The self of the early modern period has eroded, under pressure from the electronic media with its relentless informality and person-centeredness. This is not a judgment, only a simple attempt to make sense of puzzling behaviors. Along the way, I’ll read a wonderful passage from Robert Burton’s 17th century extravaganza, The Anatomy of Melancholy.

"Evangelical Christian Reflections on the Significance of Fides et Ratio"

Mulier Fortis:

A series of free public lectures on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, in honor of Rev. Patrick J. Hartin, Professor Emeritus, Gonzaga University, and priest of the Diocese of Spokane.

Sponsored by the Faith and Reason Institute of Gonzaga University, Bishop White Seminary, and the Gonzaga Socratic Club

“St. Macrina the Younger, the Spirit of Holiness, and the ‘God-breathed Scriptures”

Monday, February 19, 7:00 p.m.: Prof. Anna M. Silvas

University of New England, Australia

“A Christian Innovation: Women as Types of Christ”

Tuesday, February 20, 7:00 p.m.: Prof. Catherine Brown Tkacz

Ukrainian Catholic University, Ukraine

“The Importance of Retrieving ‘the Women of Galilee’”

Wednesday, February 21, 7:00 p.m.: Sister Sara Butler, M.S.B.T., Professor Emeritus

Mundelein Seminary, Chicago

"Scientism: What It Is, Where It Came From, and Why It Matters"

We mark this year the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, which, according to most historians, was sparked when Martin Luther posted the 95 Theses on the Wittenberg church door. (According to the story, the date of the posting was October 31, 1517.) The Gonzaga Socratic Club will commemorate the anniversary with a panel discussion of the historical context, meaning, and legacy of the Protestant Reformation. Themes to be addressed include the nature of reformation and reformation initiatives within the church in the 1500s and 1600s, ecclesiastical authority and individualism, the nature of faith, and the role of faith and reason in religious commitment.

During the Reformation, the problem of the criterion became a particularly salient problem as the Reformers claimed that the Church wasn’t applying the proper criterion of truth—the proper set of theological rules—and that Scripture alone was the final court of appeal in theological disagreements.  But making the case for that claim, and disputing it, requires raising the question of the criterion at a meta-level. What is the ultimate criterion of truth in theology, that would allow us to decide questions such as the status and authority of Scripture?

In this paper I attempt to navigate these issues, proposing how contemporary Christians might properly deal with the fact that many theological disagreements are second-order, or “meta” disagreements: disagreements about the fundamental rules of theology.  More specifically, I offer an analysis of how exactly the problem of the criterion applies to the Bible’s role in theology.  I argue that the coherence of sola scriptura depends in part on its ability to adequately deal with the problem of the criterion.  I also argue that if sola scriptura is conceived of as a doctrine about the ultimate or global epistemic authority—the ultimate criterion of truth—it falls prey to the problem of the criterion.  I then argue that sola scriptura is not about global or ultimate epistemic authority but, rather, about a more specific, but related problem, namely, the problem of where to locate God’s word or authority.

What is the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, and why is it important to know about it and to absorb it?  The newly appointed Bernard J. Coughlin, S.J., Professor of Christian Philosophy, Michael W. Tkacz, will address this question.

This event is co-sponsored by the Gonzaga Faith and Reason Institute.

Imagine a conversation between legendary psychoanalyst Dr. Sigmund Freud and the young, rising Oxford don C.S. Lewis one night in London on the eve of World War II.  Mark St. Germain’s play Freud's Last Session is just such an imagined encounter.  The topic of the play was suggested to playwright St. Germain by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, Jr.’s book The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex and the Meaning of Life (Free Press, 2002).  Nicholi’s book was itself based on the course that Nicholi, clinical professor of psychiatry, Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital, taught at Harvard College and the Harvard Medical School for more than 35 years.  The book led to a PBS series as well.

Freud’s Last Session premiered in 2009, and is coming to Gonzaga as a special guest production of Wayland Baptist University, directed by Gonzaga’s Charles M. Pepiton.  The play will be performed on two consecutive evenings, Friday, September 9, 7:30 pm, and Saturday, September 10, 7:30 pm at Gonzaga’s Magnuson Theatre (in College Hall on the Gonzaga campus).  The Friday night performance will be a special co-sponsored event by the Gonzaga Socratic Club and the Gonzaga Faith & Reason Institute, and will feature a post-show discussion panel featuring the director, Charles Pepiton, the guest actors Marti Runnels (Wayland Baptist University) and Cory Norman (Texas Tech University), and Gonzaga philosophers David Calhoun, Brian Clayton, and Fr. Tim Clancy, SJ.  We strongly encourage you to attend the Friday evening performance.  The post-show panel, which will be open to the public, will take place in the Magnuson Theatre starting at about 9 pm.

Tickets for the Gonzaga production  of Freud’s Last Session can be purchased at the Magnuson Theatre Box Office (509.313.6553) or online.  GU students, staff, and faculty tickets are $10, general public tickets are $15.  Group discounts may be available; please call or email Colleen McLean (mcleanc@gonzaga.edu) at the Magnuson Theatre Box Office for further information.

The standard general outlook of educated Christians for the first millennium of the Christian age was a synthesis of Christianity and Platonism.  Many famous Christian thinkers and intellectuals across the years, beginning with Justin Martyr and including St Augustine, Boethius, and St Anselm, were Christian Platonists.  Despite the great synthesis of Christianity and Aristotelian philosophy promoted by Albert the Great and St Thomas Aquinas in the High Middle Ages, Platonism has continued to be an important conceptual point of reference for Christians up to the present.  For example, the first president of the Oxford Socratic Club, the inspiration for the Gonzaga Socratic Club, author, literary scholar, and apologist C.S. Lewis, also had a Christian outlook deeply shaped by Platonic ideas (see The Great Divorce for one particularly striking fictional expression of Lewis’s Christian Platonism).  In particular, the Platonic emphasis on the fundamental metaphysical role of ultimate reality, the radical dependence of perceived reality, and the transcendent and divine status of Good, Beauty, and Truth appealed to Christian thinkers seeking a systematic philosophical expression of Christian ideas.
 
In this talk, Gonzaga philosopher Danielle Layne sketches out a personal account of how Christian commitment and a Socratic-Platonic philosophical outlook complement one another in a rich and powerful way.  Dr Layne will touch on many of the historical and conceptual distinctives of Christian Platonism, but her focus will be more directly on the existential appeal of Christian Platonism, that is, how the fusion of Platonism and Christianity can be a way of life.

Recent scholarly work into the ethical philosophy of Edmund Husserl has brought to light the basic outlines of Husserl’s ethics of vocation. Husserl holds to the position that the ethical life must be grounded upon at least two basic theses: 1) ethical calling is calling of the individual to the realization of their ‘true selves’, i.e. their best self that they are called to be in light of a notion of divine perfection, and 2) that ethical calling, value, and ultimately even objectivity, make no sense in the absence of a notion of God as the entelechy of all intentional life and of all valuation in general.

The sacred ethos of the American Dream has become a central pillar of American civil religion. The belief that meaning is fashioned from some mixture of family, friends, a stable career, and financial security permeates American culture.  In the final Gonzaga Socratic Club meeting for this academic year, Matt Rindge (Religious Studies, Gonzaga) examines three films that assault this venerated American myth. Fight Club (1999), American Beauty (1999), and About Schmidt (2002) indict the American Dream as a meaningless enterprise that is existentially, ethically, and aesthetically bankrupt.  In their blistering critique of the hallowed wisdom of the American Dream, these films function like Jesus' parables. As narratives of disorientation, Jesus' parables upend conventional and cherished worldviews.  Rindge illustrates the religious function of these films as parables of subversion that provoke rather than comfort and disturb rather than stabilize. Ultimately, Rindge considers how these parabolic films operate as sacred texts in their own right.  Rindge's presentation is based on his new book Profane Parables: Film and the American Dream (Baylor U Press, 2016), and will feature clips from the films under analysis.

What is faith?  Is faith, as some contemporary critics of religion complain, "belief without evidence"?  If not, is it, on the other hand, just the result of appropriate and relevant evidence?  What is faith?  How much is will or choice involved in believing?  How do we convert or change beliefs?

A hallmark of Jesuit Catholic identity, and a frequent theme of presentations at the Gonzaga Socratic Club, is the complementarity of faith and reason.  Despite the assertions of critics of religion, religious faith is not "belief without evidence"; it is more aptly understood as a dynamic relationship of evidence and trust, as captured by the Augustinian-Anselmian idea of "faith seeking understanding."  But is the compatibility of faith and reason a complete one?  Are there limits to faith-reason compatibility?  Kierkegaard's explores these questions by developing an account of Christian religious faith as "absurd," and in so doing attempts to articulate the limits of the faith-reason relationship.

In the cover letter that came with his distribution of the “Statement of Affirmation” between Gonzaga and the Oregon Province of the Society of Jesus (January 9, 2013), Gonzaga President Thayne McCulloh wrote that “we are called to engage the question, ‘What does it mean to be a Jesuit university’ on a deeper level...”  He admonished us, “Please,” to “read carefully this Statement of Affirmation, keeping in mind the closely related question, ‘What does it mean to work at a Jesuit university?’ ”  Finally, in bold type, he wrote, “If we are to be a Jesuit university, it will be because each member of our community understands and makes manifest our identity and mission in the daily work that she or he does.”

My purpose in writing is to rise to the occasion of these remarks, specifically with respect to the intellectual component of our work.  The relation between Gonzaga's Jesuit and its Catholic identity is an internal relation.  We can take it for an axiom as analogously there are axioms of logic and mathematics.  We can take it for a first principle and foundation analogous to the "first principle and foundation" of the Spiritual Exercises.  It doesn't seem likely, after the composition of place, that anyone would argue in public to the contrary.  What this means for our university, as the "Statement of Affirmation" ratifies, is that the Catholic Intellectual Tradition, which it spells as a proper name (pp. 4-5), has a privileged place with respect to the intellectual component and its translation into the curriculum.  My purpose in writing is to move from this point of departure to something like a critical theory, concerning the theoretical side of our praxes.

Can Christians use secular culture as a point of departure for Christian apologetics?  Since the very beginning of Christianity, Christian thinkers have puzzled over the right relationship between Christian and non-Christian culture.  Early Church Father Tertullian famously asked “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?,” suggesting that secular philosophy (and perhaps the rational approach to questions about God and religion) was unrelated to genuine Christianity.

Moody Bible Institute Spokane student Peter Elliot, a member of the Ancient Christian Studies Honor Program, will address the question of the relationship between Christian and secular culture by exploring the early church concept of despoiling or plundering the Egyptians, an idea drawn from the story of the Exodus of the Hebrew people.  Just as God’s people were able to take resources from the Egyptians as they departed from Egypt to travel to the Promised Land, so Christians, according to this idea, could and should “plunder” ideas and conceptual resources from pagan philosophy.  Elliot will explain the Early Church concept of plundering the Egyptians as a God-given mandate to make use of secular resources, and will explore ways to apply the idea to modern American Christianity.  Elliot will address the modern practice of creating "Christian" subcultures instead of using the resources of culture (both folk and mass) itself. As a corrective, Elliot proposes (1) a better understanding the Trinitarian nature of God and how he works in the world, particularly in relation with the Church and (2) correcting the dichotomy of secular and sacred.