You are invited to a lecture by

Dr. Christopher Blum

entitled

Old Books Against the New Slavery: Newman's Ideal Today

On Friday, November 13, the Augustine Institute will host a lecture and book signing, followed by a light reception. Please join us!

About the Speaker
Dr. Christopher Blum, Academic Dean of the Augustine Institute, teaches courses in philosophy, the history of Catholic culture and has made a special study of the moral dispositions, practices, and institutional forms that lead to the attainment of Christian wisdom. He has also specialized in administration, curricular development, and college teaching in the traditional liberal arts. His personal interest in biology and the Aristotelian tradition has led to publishing projects exploring how our common experience of the world is a starting point for inquiry into nature. As a student of Catholic culture, Dr. Blum has published six volumes of translations from the French, as well as essays and reviews in the journals Logos, Modern Age, Nova et Vetera, and Pro Ecclesia. Dr. Blum and his wife and two children live in Littleton, Colorado.

About the Lecture, “Old Books Against New Slavery: Newman’s Ideal Today”

In his Homily for the Beatification of John Henry CardinalNewman, Benedict XVI praised Newman’s Idea of a University for defending “an ideal from which all those engaged in academic formation can continue to learn, ”an ideal according to which “intellectual training, moraldiscipline and religious commitment would come together.” Today, our educational systems, both Catholic and public,are finding it difficult to form men and women for lives of practical wisdom and moral virtue. In addition to the legal obstacles to successful education posed by an aggressive secular faction, arguably more serious are the cognitive and moral deficiencies of our common culture. Today’s youth are all too often unable to express themselves accurately, to make or even to follow sustained arguments, or to assess the rival accounts of the human person with which theyare assaulted in the media. These deficiencies threaten the very exercise of moral reasoning and, accordingly, attack the pursuit of the common good at its roots. In the faceof this threat, which constitutes a kind of cultural slavery, Newman’s ideal is arguably more important than ever.

About the Book: Rejoicing in the Truth: Wisdom and the Educator’s Craft

Rejoicing in the Truth offers a series of different looks at the life of a Christian educator. When educators make it their goal to accompany their students along the path to wisdom and to instruct them by showing them how to delight in the truth, then their practice is illuminated and enlivened at every level. Informed by the philosophical and theological visions of John Henry Newman, John Paul II, Alasdair MacIntyre, and, above all, Thomas Aquinas, this volume invites the reader to a joyous pursuit of truth and to a life dedicated to intellectual charity, and offers a vision for the renewal of Christian education through the intentional pursuit of wisdom.

Copies of Rejoicing in the Truth will be available for purchase at the event.