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“How should I live my life?” This all important question forms the basis for Luis Tellez’s impressive guide to living an examined and fulfilling life. Believers and non-believers alike will find many prompts for reflection in Tellez’s brief but profound pages. Recommended by professors from Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and UC Berkeley, as well as the Archbishop of Philadelphia, Charles J. Chaput, Tellez’s book nonetheless appeals directly to a non-specialist audience of young students, who will find its conversational tone approachable and compelling. If you have children in college, or if you are currently studying in high school or college, this book is indispensable. Purchase your copy today.

The Franciscan University of Steubenville has named Ryan Anderson the first visiting fellow at the Veritas Center for Ethics and Public Life. For more details, please see this article.

In addition to being the William E. Simon Research Fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author or editor of several books, Ryan Anderson is the founder and editor of The Public Discourse.

The Penn Institute for the Study of Free Markets will host a lecture entitled Milton Friedman and the Development of His Monetary Economics on Tuesday, September 27th at 5:30pm in room 350 of Jon Huntsman Hall. Senior Adviser to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, Edward Nelson, will be giving the lecture.

If you are interested in attending, register here. Please note that registration is appreciated but not needed if you are a Penn student or faculty member.

Parking is easily available in the Parking lot right in front of the building on Walnut Street.

The Institute is pleased to announce its 2017 fall seminar series on Language, Freedom, and Making, sponsored by the Center on the University and Intellectual Life. These seminars form part of the Institute’s efforts to assist the next generation of scholars in reflecting on truly human questions.

Dr. R.J. Snell will teach the two seminars of this series, Living in the Truth and Maritain and Art, on alternating Fridays, lunch provided.

José Pérez-Benzo will also teach two seminars of the this series, Poetry: The Wonder Wounded Word and A Reason Open to God, on alternating Wednesdays, dinner provided.

The Institute is also pleased to announce that the Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution in conjunction with the James Madison Program will co-sponsor a year-long noncredit reading group on The Federalist, meeting on Thursday afternoons beginning September 21, from 1:30pm to 3:00pm in the East Room of Bobst Hall. The Seminar will be led by Professor Matthew J. Franck and Professor John D. Wilsey.

Teacher: R.J. Snell

Time: 12:45pm-2:45pm on Fridays, lunch provided

Dates: 9/22; 10/6; 10/20; 11/10; 12/1

Place: Whelan Hall, 16 Stockton Street

          For the fall semester in keeping with this year’s theme of Language and Freedom, our Living in the Truth seminar will examine the work of Eastern European dissidents, including some thinkers not often studied, on how the manipulation of language by ideology violates the integrity of the human individual, their action, and inquiry, and, further, how the refusal to capitulate to the ideological lie allows the recovery of freedom for even the most powerless of people. For Solzhenitsyn, Havel, Milosz, Patočka, and Wojtyla, being complicit in the ideological lie was to be a “captive mind,” whereas, in the words of Havel, even the most powerless could refuse to allow a deformed language to dominate their understanding.

Teacher: RJ Snell

Time: 12:45pm-2:45pm on Fridays, lunch provided

Dates: 9/29; 10/13; 11/17; 12/8

Place: Whelan Hall, 16 Stockton Street

               For this year’s theme of Freedom and Making, the fall seminar Maritain and Art focuses mainly on the responsibility of the artist, looking closely at the thought of Jacques Maritain. While Maritain is famous for his arguments on the role of practical reason for the artist, and how this responsibility checked ideological uses of art, he’s also interesting for us because 2017–18 is the 70^th anniversary of his arrival to teach at Princeton. By 1947, when the president of Princeton invited him to join the faculty, Maritain was one of the most prominent philosophers and man of letters in the world, and one with high regard for the United States. Among his wide range of interests, including works on epistemology, political theory, metaphysics, and intellectual history, he was well-known in aesthetics, including several influential works written while at Princeton. [Eg: The A. W. Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, later published as Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953) and The Responsibility of the Artist (1960).] For Maritain, the work of the artist, while quite obviously relating to the problems of aesthetics, could not be treated without reference to what might be termed “the ethics of art,” and thus to the responsibilities of a free person striving to exert their agency through their work. The problem of the artist exemplified responsibility with some acuteness, then. In addition to reading Maritain, we will spend time in the Princeton art museum, which includes in its collection works by those (Chagall, Rouault) with whom Maritain was friends and about whom he wrote.