The Morningside Institute

In her talk, “Remembering America: The High Stakes of Memory and Moral Imagination in Civic Life,” Angel Adams Parham explores how narratives of the American past, especially those concerning slavery…

In his talk, Antón Barba-Kay probes how the logics of the digital world—endless choice, algorithmic optimization, and a veneer of neutrality—quietly erode the habits of judgment and shared reality th…

In his talk, “Demography, Religion, and the Eight-Billion Body Problem," Stephen Bullivant delves into the complex interplay between declining fertility rates, evolving religious landscapes, and shif…

In her talk at Living Well at the End of a World, Sarah Shortall examines the experiences of French Jesuit priests during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a period marked by anti-clericalism a…

In this talk at Living Well at the End of a World, James Hankins draws parallels between our contemporary anxieties about civilizational decline and the late medieval Renaissance period, specifically…

In his talk at Living Well at the End of a World, Bishop Erik Varden discusses the end of our “internal world”—the microcosm of human life—at the deathbed and the monastic venture to confront death a…

In his new book Believe, NY Times correspondent Ross Douthat offers a blueprint for thinking one's way from doubt to belief. Douthat argues that religious belief makes sense of the order of the cosmo…

The Metamorphoses is a work with an insistent modern resonance and relevance. In terms of Roman political commentary, socio-cultural implication, historical awareness, and psychological investigation…

According to ancient philosophers, all human beings want to be happy. But how can we achieve this?  In Books 3 and 4 of his dialogue “On the Greatest Good and Evil” (De finibus bonorum et malorum), C…

Tradition describes courage, moderation, justice, and prudence as the cardinal virtues (a list going back to Plato) and faith, hope, and charity as the theological virtues (a list going back to Saint…

Birth is one of the most fraught and polarized issues of our time, at the center of debates on abortion, gender, work, and medicine. But birth is not only an issue; it is a fundamental part of the hu…

On October 9, 2023 the Morningside Institute and the Galileo Center at Columbia Law School hosted Joshua Katz (AEI) for the last lecture in our series Language Rights and Wrongs. This series explores…

Does language contain truth in itself? And whether or not it does, at what level are the words we use natural, and at what level are they a matter of convention? Plato’s Cratylus provides the earlies…

This fall, the Morningside Institute and the Galileo Center at the Columbia Law School hosted Joshua Katz (AEI) for a three-part lecture series on the relationship between word and world. The series …

In his famous Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki writes, “In the Beginner’s Mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” These words have served as a guide for James…

Thomas Aquinas's ethical system is framed in terms of evaluating an individual's intentional actions, which may be good or bad depending on their conformity with the natural law.  Can such a framewor…

We instinctively think of images as things we create, control, and consume. But in this lecture, Prof. Thomas Pfau (Duke) argued that our encounter with images and the visible world as a whole serves…

Are some books “great” in a way others are not? Can a core curriculum represent all the members of a university community? What should students get out of their classes in the Core? How should we jus…

As American politics descends into a battle of anger and hostility between two groups called "left" and "right," people increasingly ask: What is the essential difference between these two ideologica…

Many scholars have held that Christianity created a new kind of religious belief and devotion, unlike the ritualistic, legal, and cultural religious practice widespread throughout the Roman Empire. B…