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Benedict XVI Online Event

January 26, 2023 7:30 pm – 8:30 pm EST

Image License: Shutterstock/Marco Iacobucci Epp.

Join the Hildebrand Project on Thursday, January 26, at 7:30 p.m. EST for this special commemorative conversation on the thought of Pope Benedict XVI focusing on faith and reason, joy, and personhood. 

The event will feature short presentations by three scholars followed by a panel discussion and Q&A with the online audience.

Register for this event

Three scholars, each from different intellectual traditions, will reflect on the life of Pope Benedict XVI and share how their tradition was enriched by his writings and witness. 

Fr. James Brent, O.P., will reflect on Joseph Ratzinger’s essay “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology” and bring it into dialogue with the Thomistic tradition.

Rabbi Mark Gottlieb will reflect on Benedict XVI’s critical defense of Western culture and the powerful public witness of a well-reasoned faith for engaging with the modern world.

Dr. John F. Crosby will discuss why Pope Benedict says that it is so difficult to rejoice in my own existence and the profound reasons Benedict offers for Christian joy.

Associated Scholar

Fr. James Dominic Brent, O.P
Senior Scholar

John F. Crosby
Trustee

Rabbi Mark Gottlieb
President & Founder

John Henry Crosby
Associated Scholar

Fr. James Dominic Brent, O.P

Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception
Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Fr. James Dominic 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. He now teaches full-time at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception.

Research Areas:

Epistemology; Aquinas, Knowledge,

More about Fr. James Dominic Brent, O.P

Senior Scholar

John F. Crosby

Franciscan University of Steubenville

Professor Emeritus of Philosophy

Research Areas:

Personalism, John Henry Newman, John Paul II, Dietrich von Hildebrand

Prof. Crosby was himself a student of Dietrich Hildebrand. Besides writing major studies on the thought of John Henry Newman, Max Scheler, and Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II, and making his own contributions to personalist philosophy, Prof. Crosby has devoted his long and distinguished academic career—first at the University of Dallas, then at the International Academy of Philosophy, and currently at Franciscan University of Steubenville—to introducing his students to the intellectual legacy of Hildebrand, and also to making Hildebrand better known in scholarly circles. Prof. Crosby was the translator of the English edition of  Hildebrand’s philosophical masterpiece, The Nature of Love, and he also serves as the General Editor of all our present and future translations of Hildebrand’s works.

Trustee

Rabbi Mark Gottlieb

Rabbi Mark Gottlieb is Senior Director of the Tikvah Fund and founding Dean of the Tikvah Institute for High School Students at Yale University. Prior to joining Tikvah, Rabbi Gottlieb served as Head of School at Yeshiva University High School for Boys and Principal of the Maimonides School in Brookline, MA and has taught at The Frisch School, Ida Crown Jewish Academy, Hebrew Theological College, Loyola University in Chicago, and the University of Chicago. He received his B.A. from Yeshiva College, rabbinical ordination from the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, and an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago, where his doctoral studies focused on the moral and political thought of Alasdair MacIntyre. Rabbi Gottlieb is a member of the Orthodox Forum Steering Committee and serves on the Editorial Committee of Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Jewish Thought. In addition to his contributions to Jewish theology, Rabbi Gottlieb has written on the thought of C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesterton, and John Paul II, and is especially interested in the relationship between Jewish and Christian forms of personalism. He lives in Teaneck, NJ with his wife and five children.

Tikvah Fund

Senior Director

President & Founder

John Henry Crosby

John Henry Crosby is a translator, writer, critic, and cultural entrepreneur. 

Late in 2003, searching for a life’s work that could integrate the quest for truth, the existential need for beauty, and the service of a great good, and beginning to despair of ever finding such a mission, he called Alice von Hildebrand to propose that he spend one year translating her late husband’s Aesthetics. Would she help, he asked.

She did, and her blessing transformed his one-year plan into lifelong mission that soon attracted the collaboration of others. Thus, the life’s work he had sought found him. Established in February 2004, the Hildebrand Project’s mission to renew culture has grown to encompass publications, events, fellowships, and online resources that draw on the continuing vitality of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s thought and witness.

Under his leadership, the Hildebrand Project has become the world’s leading organization dedicated to Dietrich von Hildebrand’s legacy. The Project has been supported by many leading foundations and donors, including the Bradley Foundation, Chiaroscuro Foundation, Earhart Foundation, Fieldstead & Company, Henry Luce Foundation, Luddy Charitable Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Our Sunday Visitor Institute, Papal Foundation, and the Raskob Foundation. 

He was the editor of a new edition of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s The Heart (St. Augustine’s Press, 2007). He joined John F. Crosby as co-translator of Hildebrand’s major philosophical work, The Nature of Love (St. Augustine’s Press, 2009). He edited Selected Papers in the Philosophy of Dietrich von Hildebrand (2012), the first major volume of essays on von Hildebrand in two decades. Most recently he is the primary compiler, editor, and translator of Hildebrand’s anti-Nazi papers, My Battle Against Hitler (Random House, 2014). 

His work has been featured in both popular (e.g., The Daily Beast) and scholarly publications (Logos Journal). His numerous radio appearances have taken him from PRI’s The Takeaway to the Hugh Hewitt Show. He was host of He Dared Speak the Truth, a 14-part television series on the life of Dietrich von Hildebrand, which aired on EWTN (2014).

Son of an Austrian mother and an American father, his mother tongue was German. Both his undergraduate studies in philosophy, history, and literature (2000) as well as his graduate studies in philosophy (2001) were pursued at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio. 

He was for many years a violinist. As a student of Daniel Heifetz, he was formed in the great violinistic traditions of Henryk Szeryng, David Oistrakh, and Ivan Galamian. 

He serves as a trustee of The Personalist Project. 

In 2010 he married Robin-Marie Bobak. Through their marriage—and all the more with the birth of their children Magdalene (2011), Robin (2013), John Henry, Jr. (2015), and Peter—he has found (or, again, been found by) an integration of the good, true, and beautiful far greater than any he has ever known.

The event is open to anyone. Please feel free to invite your friends and colleagues.