Gratitude

In this seminar we will explore gratitude as a fundamental moral disposition without which no one can really be happy.

Our culture today is fraught by questions about gratitude. How do we receive in gratitude the goods of our own traditions despite their evils, of which we are increasingly aware? Can we cultivate gratitude in a social-media world of envy, isolation, and self-assertion? Why should we be grateful in the midst of great suffering?

In this seminar, we will attempt to answer these questions and to offer gratitude as an antidote to other challenges, such as feelings of loneliness, resentment, envy, and the self-hatred that oppresses so many today. We will show how gratitude guards against despair, and resists the nihilist attitude that fails to see the value of anything.

Ultimately, we will propose gratitude as an essential condition of human happiness and human flourishing.  In so doing, we will explore the relations between gratitude and contemplation, stewardship, and material creation; between gratitude and wonder, creativity, and invention; between gratitude and beauty, hope, and joy; and between gratitude, self-love, and the love of God.   The seminar will draw on ideas in from the history of philosophy, medieval philosophy, contemporary virtue theory, phenomenology, and personalism, as well as aesthetics and poetics.   Several keynote addresses will be given by

—Eleonore Stump, Professor, St. Louis University
—John F. Crosby, Professor Emeritus at Franciscan University and author of The Selfhood of the Human Person and The Personalism of John Henry Newman
—Jonathan J. Sanford, President at the University of Dallas, author of Before Virtue: Assessing Contemporary Virtue Ethics
—Mark Spencer, professor at the University of St. Thomas (MN), author of The Irreducibility of the Human Person: A Catholic Synthesis
—James Matthew Wilson, Professor in the MFA program at University of St. Thomas (Houston), author of The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition

A full list of faculty can be found on the event website.  

For more information and to apply, please visit https://hildebrandproject.org/event/gratitude-2023-summer-seminar/