An Evening with Sean McDowell
Date: Friday, January 24, 2025Time: To be Announced1730 Wilshire Blvd, Santa Monica 90403
If 2+2=4, Then God Exists
Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Liebniz, and William Lane Craig provide famous reasons to believe that God exists. Less well known is a way proposed by the African intellectual Augustine. In his fantastic book Five Proofs of the Existence of God, Edward Feser explains this argument at length. Inspired by Augustine, let’s begin with the reality that …
Dostoevsky Speaks to Modernity
Date: Thursday, March 14, 2024 Dostoevsky is often described as “prescient,” even “prophetic.” How did his final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1881, help us to understand our complex social and spiritual condition in 2024? This lecture identified aspects of our contemporary condition — polarization, challenges to our capacity for attention, the desire for …
Thomas Aquinas on Philosophy and Theology
As Christians engaging with philosophy and perhaps becoming philosophers ourselves, the question arises: what is the relation between this study and our faith? Poetically, what does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? Precisely, what does philosophy have to do with theology? When Thomas Aquinas took up this question, he responded with two notions in mind. …
Friedrich Nietzsche and the Decline of Christian Culture
Date: October 20, 2023 It was a great couple of days at Pacifica Christian High School. The faculty and administration of Pacifica’s Center for Philosophy and Theology met to craft vision, toured classes to see students in action, witnessed curricular and pedagogical connections, and prepared for a day-long honors seminar and evening event for the …
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The Decline of Christianity: A Threat to America’s Democratic Fabric?
The decline of American Christianity is no secret. Recent works like Ryan Burge’s The Rise of the Nones and Stephen Bullivant’s Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America have documented, analyzed, and explained quite deftly. The stats are shocking and the implications are quite disturbing—half of all Americans aged 18-29 are not only not religious but …
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The Search for First Principles
Imagine being so important that historians would divide periods of time according to your name. Everything before you were born was just “prehistory”; the really important events don’t get started until your life begins. Our way of talking about history awards this honor to very few people. Off the top of my head I can …
Fireside Chat with Trey Dimsdale: Nietzsche, Modernity, and the Recovery of Conservatism
Date: January 21, 2023Time: 5:00pm
Curing the Crisis of Friendship
Friendship is inherently valuable, indeed one of the most valuable things in life. For this reason, Aristotle said that, “No one would choose to live a friendless existence, even on the condition of having all other good things.” If we better understand what friendship is, then we might better understand how to build new and …
Friendship is More Than a Feeling
Affection seems like a feeling, but friendship seems like an active condition. For affection is no less present for inanimate things, but loving in return involves choice, and choice comes from an active condition. And people wish for good things for those they love for those others’ own sake, not as a result of feeling …
