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2026: But Where Can She Be Found? Wisdom From Age to Age

2026: But Where Can She Be Found? Wisdom From Age to Age

But Where Can She Be Found?
Wisdom from Age to Age

The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture's 26th Fall Conference
October 1–3, 2026 | University of Notre Dame

The Hebrew Scriptures characterize the nature of wisdom simultaneously as a sublimely personified reality that reflects God’s glory, power, eternality, and goodness, ordering “all things well” (c.f. Wisdom 7:22–8:1), and as something concrete, related to practical expertise, and constitutive of a good and virtuous life, as in the Book of Proverbs. The Catholic tradition likewise speaks of both uncreated Wisdom—identified with the Logos or Son of God incarnate in Jesus Christ—as well as created Wisdom, which renders the cosmos and reality intelligible. And ancient philosophical traditions, which have deeply shaped Christianity and the Western intellectual tradition, similarly preserve understandings of wisdom that include the more contemplative (sophia, theoria) and the more pragmatic or practical (phronesis).

In the current age and culture, however, the hegemony of mastery, technique, and mere information threatens to displace wisdom in both its supernatural and natural senses. This loss is perhaps only exacerbated by a growing incapacity to attend to what poet Gerard Manley Hopkins has called “the dearest freshness deep down things,” or to cultivate a rich interior life that might encourage what St. John Henry Newman praised as the “clear, calm, accurate vision, and comprehension of the whole course, the whole work of God.”

The de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture’s 26th annual Fall Conference will feature presentations on wisdom that draw on traditions across the disciplines—including philosophy, theology, ethics, law, history, and the natural and social sciences, as well as the creative domains of literature, music, film, theater, and the visual arts—and engage a wide range of questions and themes, including:

Phronesis, Prudence, and Judgment
Contemplative Wisdom
Understanding in a Technological Age
Art, Beauty, and Aesthetics
Wisdom in/as the Word of God
Education, Formation, and Communities of Practice
Wisdom in Nature and the Cosmos
Practical Wisdom in Governance, Citizenship, Law, and Polis/Polity

Register to Attend the Conference

Registration is available here.

Questions?

Please contact Brooke Tranten (btranten@nd.edu).

Past Conferences

Find information regarding past conferences and lecture videos at the links below.