We would like to invite participants for a conference, “Illuminations from Aquinas and Maimonides and Meanings Today.” The conference is hosted by the Catholic Academy’s Center for Intellectual Diaspora, forum for scholarly exchange on questions of contemporary politics, religion, society, and culture. Participants are drawn primarily from the Catholic and Jewish traditions, and the Center seeks exchange as well with other traditions – Islamic, other Christian denominations, and African, Asian, and other transnational communities. The Center brings together theory and politics and international academics and decision-makers.

The two-day conference will include a public lecture and several panels, each with contributions from scholars with expertise in Maimonides and Aquinas to engender as much cross-illumination as possible. All scholars are free to develop their own topics in a 20-minute presentation with an eye to a subject that would engage participants from both traditions. Topics may draw from philosophy, theology, metaphysics, cosmology, anthropology, ethics, etc. and the scholarly methodologies and debates employed in interpreting these thinkers. 

Some examples include: the nature of God, God’s relationship to world and ordering of the cosmos, God and science, creation/emanation, the nature of nature and of humanity, how humanity knows (or doesn’t know) of God’s existence, via negativa/apophasis, the summum bonum, the ordering of personal and community/political living, theodicy, reward/punishment, providence, the meaning and purpose of revelation, of prayer, ritual, morality, commandments, prophecy, miracles, redemption, salvation, and notions of the messianic era. In addition: past and present debates about any of the above and discussion of the methods appropriate to studying and interpreting Aquinas and Maimonides. But we stress again that scholars are free to develop their own topics.