The Catholic Information Center

1501 K St NW, Washington, DC 20005

6:00 PM

A lecture by Prof. Nicholas Healy (The Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family)

Free and open to the public. Reception to follow.

Event Description:

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s last and greatest novel, The Brothers Karamazov, explores the question of God’s existence against the backdrop of suffering and betrayal within a troubled family. The genius of Dostoevsky is to have grasped that there can be no love for human beings without a love for God — and conversely, there can be no belief in God without a deep and profound love for mankind. Prof. Healy will present a brief overview of the structure and characters of the novel, focusing on the themes of solidarity and forgiveness.

This lecture is the first of a three-part series titled "Tales That Tell: Moral Devastation and Original Sin in Literature," co-sponsored by the CIC and the Thomistic Institute. 

Speaker Bio:

Nicholas J. Healy, Jr. is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the John Paul II Institute in Washington D.C. He received his doctorate from Oxford University, with a dissertation on the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar. He is an editor of the North American edition of Communio: International Catholic Review and a founding member of the Academy of Catholic Theology. He is the author of The Eschatology of Hans Urs von Balthasar: Being as Communion (Oxford University Press, 2005) and, together with David L. Schindler,Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Declaration on Religious Freedom (Eerdmans, 2015). Recent articles have addressed the nature and sacramentality of marriage, the question of Christian philosophy, and the theological anthropology of Henri de Lubac and Thomas Aquinas.