Speakers

Colloquium: The Regensburg Moment

The Regensburg Moment
Benedict XVI and the Rediscovery of Reason 

Date:
September 21-22, 2007

Location:
Maison Française
Assumption College
500 Salisbury St.
Worcester, Massachusetts 01609
Click here for directions to the Assumption Campus

Click here to print your own copy of the Regensburg Colloquium flyer

“Faith, Reason, and the University”—the speech by Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg on September 12, 2006—became widely known quickly because of the outrage among radical Muslims that it sparked.  Less noticed, but more likely to be its lasting contribution, was the argument of this speech that the conception of God as reasonable is a central Christian and Western tenet.  Benedict identifies three successive stages of de-Hellenization in the past five hundred years, in which the West has steadily distanced itself from this conception, and thereby imperiled the power of public discourse to determine and seek the good. Click here to view a copy of Pope Benedict's speech to the faculty of the University of Regensburg.

Does the history of reason reflect its reduction--even its disappearance?  Can it be recovered?  Regensburg and the Rediscovery of Reason will place ten philosophers, theologians, political philosophers, historians, and literary critics in dialogue on this urgent issue at a time in which the nature of the West, religion, and intercultural relations are under stringent reexamination. 

Pope Benedict ends his speech with a call concerning the breadth of reason that Western discourse has lost:  “To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.”   What does rediscovery entail?  Regensburg and the Rediscovery of Reason is a call to think with Benedict about the breadth of reason: to reexamine his speech not as part of a supposed war of rhetoric, but as a claim about the centrality of reason; to reexamine the nature of reason, and to reassess its need in modern society and the university.

Topics for Consideration:

• The dialogue of reason and faith: the role of reason in steering between the extremes of fideism and the rejection of revelation
• The conception of God—and of the world—as knowable by reason
• The covenant of reason: reason as a reliable index of God’s will concerning human action
• The need for a robust conception of reason in a free society
• The self-critical nature of reason
• The historicist limitation to fact and the relation of history to reason
• Natural science and the history of reason
• The imitation of the exact sciences and the restriction to the measurable
• The division of the modern world between the measurable and the subjective
• The subjectivization of conscience
• The concept of cultural construction as challenge to particular formulations of reason
• The role of reason in the full human experience in Western literature
• The poetic recovery of myth and its dialogue with reason
• The desertion of reason in literary criticism and the criticism of art
• The relation of these topics to the current situation—political, educational, and cultural—and what can be done to address it