About Us

The Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture creates opportunities that provide a Catholic lens to ongoing conversations especially relevant to our local community and our world today.

With the institute as its academic nucleus, the university will examine its Catholic heritage with heightened intentionality and vigor. 

Our Vision

Seattle University’s Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture invites the community to renew the Catholic intellectual tradition of engagement at the crossroads where faith and reason, religion and culture, church and world meet - through academic research, reflection and dialogue. We strive to be a place of multifaith, diverse conversations where people come together to engage in necessary about the meaning of the Gospel in our time.

Through the Catholic Heritage Lectures, course development and research fellowships, team-taught seminars, faculty study groups and campus and community partnerships we hope to:

Ignite students’ curiosity to explore the Catholic intellectual tradition in all its richness and complexity.

Encourage faculty to expand the horizon of Catholic thought through rigorous scholarship.

Engage in a vibrant, community-wide discourse on Catholicism in dialogue with the issues of our day.

Highlight the university’s commitment to Catholicism as a global and diverse tradition concerned with lifting up the most marginalized of our society.