Sr. Blandine Lagrut — The Anscombean Daemon

On Saturday, November 15, 2025, Collegium Institute hosted a Gold Mass for Catholic Scientists at St. Agatha-St. James Church. Gold Masses are celebrated for Catholics who are or have been involved with the sciences. The patron of this mass is St. Albert the Great, a 13th century Dominican friar and teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas—and the patron saint of scientists.The celebrant for the Gold Mass was Fr. Christopher Daniel, O.P., who serves as the Parochial Vicar at St. Patrick's Church in Philadelphia. Please listen to his homily here.

At our 2025 Alumni Brunch, co-presented by Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture and the Penn Newman Center, we heard remarks from distinguished Penn alum Bernardo Aparicio Garcia C’05, the co-founder and publisher of Dappled Things, the premier Catholic literary magazine in America. Bernardo reflected on his experience co-founding with other Penn alumni and considered how the intellectual ferment in the Penn Newman community 20 years ago relates to the new challenges and opportunities in the present moment. Listen to Bernardo's thoughtful remarks here!

Collegium Institute student fellows Rachel Fischer and Sophia Silva talk with Katy Carl, the former editor of Dappled Things Magazine (a Collegium imprint). She is now spearheading Luminor, a new literary series with Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire project. Join us as we discuss Katy’s career, evolution, and vision for contemporary Catholic media and discourse.Check out Word on Fire's new publishing imprint, Luminor, here.

Collegium Institute student fellow talks with Blandine Lagrut, a consecrated sister of the Chemin Neuf Community, who teaches philosophy at the Facultés Loyola Paris and is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Lorraine. Join us as we discuss Sr. Lagrut's research on the ethical thought of G.E.M Anscombe and how it connects with her scholarly and religious vocation.

In 2009 the landmark monograph of William Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict, was published by Oxford University Press. In that work, Cavanaugh showed how the term “religious violence” is not just an uncomplicated description of tragic phenomena witnessed all too frequently around the world. On the contrary, he argued, it is a foundational myth of western societies that denigrate religious actors as irrational and their conflicts as intractable while at the same time concealing and legitimating state violence against those same actors. Now in 2024, fifteen years later, it seems that many of the global conflicts – certainly in Ukraine and the Middle East as well as elsewhere in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the US itself – which have embroiled college campuses and played a role in toppling their presidents, have involved unmistakable religious elements. So how then are we to understand them if not by religious violence? Is “religious extremism” any better or do alternatives like those mobilize new threats against religious liberty? And how might it become possible not only to understand religious communities and their traditions as not primarily responsible for global violence but also to activate them as vital sources of healing and reconciliation?For Collegium Institute’s annual reception at the Penn Club of New York this April, we are pleased to host a conversation with Professor William Cavanaugh (DePaul University), author of The Myth of Religious Violence, together with two distinguished discussants: (1) Archbishop Borys Gudziak, Ph.D., Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Catholic Archeparchy of the United States; (2) Professor Timothy Shah, Distinguished Research Scholar in Politics at the University of Dallas (UD), and Director of UD’s Jacques and Raïssa Maritain Program on Catholicism, Public Life, and World Affairs. This event will be introduced by Dr. Daniel Cheely, Executive Director of the Perry-Collegium Initiative of Penn’s PRRUCS Program and Director of Collegium Institute, who is teaching a Penn History course this fall on Histories of Religious Violence.

Student fellow talks with Dr. Lydia Dugdale about her new book, The Lost Art of Dying: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom. Dr. Dugdale, M.D., speaking from her own experience caring for dying patients, invites us to recover our sense of our own finitude and reconsider what it means to die well.

Collegium Institute student fellow talks with Dr. Ryan J. (Bud) Marr, Associate Provost of Mercy College in Iowa and director of the National Institute for Newman Studies and associate editor of the Newman Studies Journal, about his new book, Seeking God with St. John Henry Newman.

Collegium Institute student fellow talks with Kate Soper, philosopher, author, and professor emerita at London Metropolitan university, about her 2022 book, Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism, which proposes a new understanding of the good life that delinks prosperity from endless growth.

Collegium Institute undergraduate fellow talks with Dr. Joshua Stuchlik, Professor of Philosophy at University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, and assistant editor of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, about his new book, Intention and Wrongdoing: In Defense of Double Effect.

Collegium Institute student fellow talks with Dr. David Deavel, associate professor of Theology at University of St. Thomas, and Dr. Jessica Hooten Wilson, inaugural Seaver College Scholar of Liberal Arts at Pepperdine university. Join us as we discuss Dr. Deavel and Dr. Wilson’s collection, Solzhenitsyn and the American Culture: The Russian Soul in the West.