Dominican House of Studies | Washington, D.C.

This retreat is open exclusively to students at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel.

Step away from the daily rush of life to pray, study, and contemplate reason, faith, and the intellectual vocation. Featured speakers are Fr. James Brent, O.P. (Dominican House of Studies) and Prof. Karin Öberg (Harvard University).

At this retreat, you will attend a series of talks within the context of the traditional elements of a retreat, including daily mass, Eucharistic adoration, and chanting the Liturgy of the Hours with Dominican friars and your fellow retreatants. 

Thanks to the generosity of our benefactors, meals and housing will be provided free for accepted applicants. Travel scholarships are available. Please contact Fr. Irenaeus Dunlevy, O.P. (idunlevy@dhs.edu) to inquire.

Schedule:

• Begins with check-in at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, April 26th

• Concludes with check-out at 1:30 p.m. on Sunday, April 28th

Speakers:

Fr. James Brent, O.P. was born and raised in Michigan. He pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies in Philosophy, and completed his doctorate in Philosophy at Saint Louis University on the epistemic status of Christian beliefs according to Saint Thomas Aquinas. He has articles in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Natural Theology, in the Oxford Handbook of Thomas Aquinas on “God’s Knowledge and Will”, and an article forthcoming on “Thomas Aquinas” in the Oxford Handbook of the Epistemology of Theology. He earned his STL from the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception, and was ordained a priest in the same year. He taught in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America from 2010- 2014, and spent the year of 2014-2015 doing full time itinerant preaching on college campuses across the United States.

Karin Öberg is Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University. Her specialty is astrochemistry and her research aims to uncover how chemical processes affect the outcome of planet formation, especially the chemical habitability of nascent planets. Dr. Öberg obtained her B.Sc. in chemistry at Caltech in 2005, and her Ph.D. in astronomy, with a thesis focused on laboratory astrochemistry, from Leiden University in 2009. She did postdoctoral work at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as a NASA Hubble fellow, focusing on millimeter observations of planet-forming disks around young stars. In 2013 she joined the Harvard astronomy faculty as an assistant professor. She was promoted and named the Thomas D. Cabot Associate Professor in Astronomy in 2016, and promoted to full professor with tenure in 2017. Dr. Öberg’s research in astrochemistry has been recognized with a Sloan fellowship, a Packard fellowship, the Newton Lacy Pierce Award from the American Astronomical Society, and a Simons fellowship. Her recent TED talk explaining some of her research can be found here.

Applications to this retreat are due by Friday, March 28th.

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Questions? Contact Fr. Irenaeus Dunlevy, O.P. at idunlevy@dhs.edu.