Join us for a combined sacred music performance by the Harvard Catholic Schola and the COLLIS/Cornell Chant Choir student singers, with an introductory talk by Dr. Hall on spiritual listening as a form of prayer and religious expression. Reception to follow.

Michelangelo Caravaggio (1571 – 1610), perhaps the boldest and most groundbreaking painter in an exceptionally creative age, produced a series of masterpieces that explore deep tensions - light and dark, nature and mystery, good and evil. Today, in a culture of increasing moral ambiguity, his work speaks to us with distilled power and directness. Professor Lev dives into the art of this enigmatic painter and explores his work in relation to his dramatic life and times. Reception to follow.

Pre-register for this event on the origins and flowering of polyphony in the liturgical life of the cathedral c. 1200. More details to follow!

Pre-register for our annual scripture lecture. More details will be shared soon.

Is any history of “impossible” miracles essentially irrational? How do Christians reconcile their understanding of history, which includes the ‘irrational’ and revelation, with the strictly ‘rational’ accounts of secular historians? To what extent does this Christian version of history pose a challenge to today’s prevalent and dogmatic materialism? Talk followed by a short response from Brian FitzGerald, Harvard University and Q&A. Reception to follow.

Fauré’s beloved Requiem, usually heard in the concert hall, here provides the musical setting of the annual Memorial Mass for the St. Paul’s community in Harvard Square. Before the Mass, Professor Kuriyama delves into the theological, liturgical, and musical dimensions of Fauré’s unique engagement with the great tradition of the requiem Mass. 

The city of Rome underwent a stunning and lasting transformation in the sixteenth and seventeen centuries, and not only in its historic centers at the Vatican and on the Capitoline. Throughout the old city, patrons and architects refashioned the major basilicas and the icons into islands of sacred order, compelling beauty, and instruments of the Catholic Reform. 

Religion is usually assumed to require belief in the supernatural. But Professor Harrison demonstrates that the central conceptions in this understanding of religion—’belief’ and ‘the supernatural’—are the product of a very specific, recent Western history. Elsewhere in the human past, and in many societies around the world today, people could not and did not understand their religious commitments in this way. This understanding invites us to reappraise the history of modernity and of religious thinking in the present.