Annual Ethics & Culture Lecture
The Honors College, with gratitude to Dr. Donald and Judy Schmeltekopf for sponsorship, hosts the Annual Ethics & Culture Lecture. This lecture series addresses publicly relevant topics uniting academic expertise in ethics with a generous-spirited engagement of culture as expressed in film, law, literature, music, politics, religion, and other forms of shared cultural life. Simultaneously, the series highlights the interdependent relation between ethics and culture, regarded from a decidedly Christian perspective, and undergirds renewal of ethically grounded and culturally sound American life.
About the Speakers
Anna Bonta Moreland, Ph.D. is the Anne Quinn Welsh Endowed Chair and Director of the University Honors Program at Villanova University. A full professor in the Department of Humanities, her academic expertise and research include medieval theology, interfaith dialogue, and comparative theology, especially between Christianity and Islam. She is the author of Muhammad Reconsidered: A Christian Perspective on Islamic Prophecy (University of Notre Dame Press, 2020), Known by Nature: Thomas Aquinas on Natural Knowledge of God (Crossroad/Herder, 2010), and edited New Voices in Catholic Theology (Herder & Herder, 2012). Her latest book, co-authored with Dr. Thomas W. Smith, The Young Adult Playbook: Living Like it Matters (CUA Press, 2024) reflects decades of listening closely to the challenges her undergraduates face. She has also written numerous articles in both academic journals and more popular venues. Dr. Moreland is recipient of a “Hope in Higher Education” Templeton Foundation three-year grant and the “Augustinian Leadership and Character Education Beyond the First-Year Experience” Lilly funded ECI grant. She is married with four children.
Thomas W. Smith, Ph.D. is Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at the Catholic University of America where he also serves as Professor in the Politics Department. He is a non-resident fellow in the American Enterprise Institute’s Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies Department. Dr. Smith was founding chair of the Department of Humanities at Villanova University, where he also served as Associate Dean and Director of the University Honors
Program. An award-winning teacher, Dr. Smith is the author of Revaluing Ethics: Aristotle’s Dialectical Pedagogy and The Young Adult Playbook (with Anna Moreland). He has published in some of the top ranked Political Science journals in the nation. His areas of specialty are classical and Christian political thought, as well as liberal political theory. He and his wife have three grown children.