LUMEN CHRISTI ON 59TH STREET
by Phil Thompson

In the midst of forbidding gargoyles, gothic buildings and students accoutered almost uniformly in black, there is a new light, a lumen cristi at the University of Chicago. In conjunction with the campus Catholic ministry, the Lumen Christi Institute is primarily the vision of a graduate student, Thomas Levergood, and a professor, Paul Griffiths, of the Divinity School. These two converts have developed a bold and creative plan for reinvigorating the Catholic intellectual and spiritual life on campus.

Lumen Christi is an independent Catholic institute which is faithful to the Magisterium and seeks to integrate the spiritual and intellectual life, the heart and the mind. In order to improve the spiritual life, it sponsors special Masses, retreats to the Monastery of the Holy Cross, lectio divina and sacred study workshops.

In only its second year, the institute has already invited a variety of speakers to comment and reflect on the tradition of the faith. Speakers this fall for the Christian Wellspring Lectures include Fr. Benedict Ashley, Agnes Cunningham and Patrick Creedan addressing topics from mysticism to morality. Despite its orthodox orientation, Lumen Christi is not afraid of a vital and broad intellectual engagement with the university. More open and less fearful than the puritanical preachers of endless diversity, it has also sponsored lectures by Jean Luc Marion and David Tracy.

The future plans of Lumen Christi are impressive and extensive. The institute is in the midst of a fund raising initiative to start a number of new programs. It hopes to sponsor visiting post-doctoral fellows and a regular series of seminars and conferences with Catholic scholars from around the world. Moreover, it will offer courses to students to both supplement from a religious perspective the core curriculum of the university and to explore the spiritual, philosophical and theological dimensions of the depositum fidei.

The institute is well aware that such goals will not be easily or rapidly realized. They will encounter resistance. Any whiff of orthodox Catholicism is not welcomed in many quarters. Still, Levergood and Griffiths appear to have the tenacity to persevere. And why shouldn't they succeed? The institute in its own words merely seeks to combine "the intellectual spirit and the love of ideas of the University of Chicago  with "the best of the tradition of Christian wisdom and mysticism." Anyone who passes Harper Hall on campus is reminded of the school's traditional respect for such a dialogue. The architect of the hall placed rooks and bishops on the corners of its towers to represent the secular and the sacred. He then connected the towers.

The Lumen Christi institute is a befitting instrument to aid in reconnecting these antinomies since it can internally anneal the faith while also actively engaging the secular education of the university. Whatever the eventual result of this restoration experiment may be, it appears that Catholics at the University of Chicago have already been the beneficiaries of an enlightening new presence.