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 emphasis on literature as a means of encounter point to/open up ways forward in a divided world?
June 9, 2025
Literature, Social Friendship, and the Culture of Encounter
Welcome and Keynote Conversation
Event Series: Rome, June 2025
Showing the Literature, Social Friendship, and the Culture of Encounter: A Keynote Conversation Video
Participants
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.”
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.