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June 9, 2025

Literature, Social Friendship, and the Culture of Encounter

Welcome and Keynote Conversation

Event Series: Rome, June 2025

The relationship between literature, spirituality, and society is a rich one in Catholicism and across the world's great religious/wisdom traditions. How can we sustain and deepen that relationship in our own tumultuous era? How do Pope Francis' call to a "culture of encounter" in Fratelli Tutti and his recurring emphasis on literature as a means of encounter point to/open up ways forward in a divided world?

Participants

Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça

Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça

Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça serves as prefect of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education, a position he has held since 2022. A native of Portugal, a scholar, and a poet, Cardinal Tolentino taught on the Faculty of the Catholic University of Portugal, where he also served as vice-rector and dean of the Faculty of Theology. In 2018 Pope Francis elevated him to the post of archivist and librarian of the Holy Roman Church and named him an archbishop. In 2019 he was made a cardinal.

Paul Elie

Paul Elie

Paul Elie is a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and a regular contributor to the New Yorker. He is the author of two books, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (2003) and Reinventing Bach: Music, Technology, and the Search for Transcendence (2012), both National Book Critics Circle Award finalists, as well as dozens of essays, articles, reviews, and prefaces for the New York Times and its Book Review and Sunday magazine, The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, and Commonweal. His third book, The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex, and Controversy in the 1980s, will be published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in May 2025.

Accessibility

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