Monday, June 9, 2025
11:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. CEST
Location: Villa Malta (Rome) La Sala
The liberal ideology that dominates culture and politics across much of the world has conflated individual empowerment with moral and social progress. Has modern literature contributed to this implicit disregard of ethical duties to the "global common good" (Pope Francis)? And is it able to address the deepening ethical vacuum in the public sphere, irreconcilable political narratives, and unmoored and disoriented inner lives that characterize secular modernity?
Participants
Parul Sehgal
Parul Sehgal is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Previously, she was a book critic at The New York Times, where she also worked as a senior editor and columnist. She has won awards for her criticism from the New York Press Club, the National Book Critics Circle, and the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. She teaches in the graduate creative-writing program at New York University.
Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith is the author of essays, short stories, and novels, including the award-winning White Teeth (2000), which has been been translated into over 20 languages, and On Beauty (2005), which was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize and won the Orange Prize. She has received many honors including the City College of New York’s Langston Hughes Medal and the PEN/Audible Literary Service Award. Smith is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. She writes regularly for The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
Rev. Antonio Spadaro, S.J.
Rev. Antonio Spadaro, S.J., is the undersecretary for the Vatican's Dicastery for Culture and Education. Before that he served as the editor in chief of the Jesuits’ biweekly review, La Civiltà Cattolica, a post he assumed in 2011. Since entering the Society of Jesus in 1988, he has worked in a variety of capacities, including joining the review’s community in 1998. Fr. Spadaro considers his work to be part of the new cybertheology–“thinking faith in the Internet age.”
Accessibility
Please email globaldialogues@georgetown.edu by June 2 with any accessibility requests. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made after this date.