April Lecture: Dr. Tal Howard

SYMPOSIUM 2024 Keynote Lecture

WHEN: April 18, 2024
WHERE: KOSC - Chair's Room and Loggia
TIME: Reception at 10 a.m., Lecture at 10:30 a.m.
Free and open to the public

In this lecture

Wisdom: One or Many? This talk will explore the category of wisdom in the Christian intellectual tradition. Some questions broached in it include: What does wisdom actually mean? How does it speak to God's role and the role of humankind in the divine plan? How has it been treated by past theologians, thinkers, and artists? How might a recovery of a vocabulary about wisdom breathe new life into Christian higher education, which currently finds itself facing many challenges?

About our speaker

Thomas Albert (Tal) Howard (PhD, University of Virginia) is Professor of Humanities and History and holder of the Phyllis and Richard Duesenberg Chair in Christian Ethics at Valparaiso University, where he is affiliated with Christ College, Valparaiso’s humanities-based honors college. He also serves as a Senior Fellow for the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts. Prior to coming to Valparaiso, he taught at Gordon College, where he founded and directed the Jerusalem and Athens Forum honors program and led the Center for Faith and Inquiry. He is the author or editor of several books, including The Faiths of Others: A History of Interreligious Dialogue (Yale University Press, 2021), The Pope and the Professor: Pius IX, Ignaz von Döllinger, and the Quandary of the Modern Age (Oxford University Press, 2017), Remembering the Reformation: An Inquiry into the Meanings of Protestantism (Oxford University Press, 2016), and (edited with Mark A. Noll) Protestantism after 500 Years (Oxford University Press, 2016). His writings have appeared in peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of the History of Ideas and the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, and in more general venues such as Hedgehog Review, Wall Street Journal, Modern Age, Touchstone, Inside Higher Ed, National Interest, Christian Century, First Things, and Commonweal. He is currently working on two book projects: "Broken Altars: Secularist Violence in Modern History” (forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2025) and “Modern Christian Theology: An Intellectual History” (under contract with Princeton University Press).