New York City Event Talks Catholic Views on Art and Beauty

The Catholic Artists Society is hosting the lectures between September and February in the heart of the Big Apple.

A stained-glass window
A stained-glass window (photo: The Catholic Artists Society)

NEW YORK — A series of talks on art and beauty aims to bring a Catholic understanding of the arts into the heart of New York’s Greenwich Village.

The Catholic Center at New York University, 238 Thompson St. in Lower Manhattan, is hosting the Saturday lecture series “The Art of the Beautiful,” with the aim of exploring the “nature and purpose” of art and beauty and “their place in the social order.”

All lectures are free and open to the public.

The series aims to reach professional artists in all disciplines, students and patrons of the arts, and all those interested in culture and art, according to the Catholic Artists Society’s website.

The series’ sponsors include both the Catholic Artists Society and the Washington-based Thomistic Institute at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, a Dominican institution.

The lecture series begins Sept. 14 and runs through February. Lectures begin at 7:30pm, followed by a reception and sung compline prayer. The speakers include both academics and artists.

Gregory Wolfe, the editor of Image Journal, plans to deliver the first September lecture on the topic “Art: For Whose Sake?”

The editor of Magnificat magazine, Dominican Father Peter John Cameron will speak Oct. 12 on “The Responsibility of the Artist.”

David Clayton, an artist in residence at New Hampshire’s Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, will speak Nov. 16 on the topic “Forming the Artist,” and Alice Ramos, philosophy professor at St. John’s University, will deliver a Dec. 14 lecture on “Beauty and the Real.”

Anthony Esolen, an English professor at Providence College in Rhode Island, will speak Jan. 25 on “Love and Artistic Genesis,” and Fordham University philosophy professor and Jesuit Father Joseph Koterski will speak Feb. 15 on “Virtue and the Artistic Imagination.”


More information can be found here.

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