The public is invited to attend the Wheatley Roundtable on the Family topic lectures. Esteemed scholars will discuss the vital importance of family in our society.
9:00 AM | Mairrage - Catherine Pakaluk
10:00 AM | Sexuality - R.J. Snell
11:00 AM | Children - Jenet Erickson
R. J. Snell is Director of the Center on the University and Intellectual Life at the Witherspoon Institute at Princeton University. Prior to his appointment at the Witherspoon Institute, he was for many years Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University and the Templeton Honors College, where he founded and directed the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good. He earned his M.A. in philosophy at Boston College, and his Ph.D. in philosophy at Marquette University. Research interests include the liberal arts, ethics, natural law theory, Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the work of Bernard Lonergan, SJ. He is the author of Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Lonergan and Richard Rorty on Knowing without a God’s-eye View (Marquette, 2006), Authentic Cosmopolitanism (with Steve Cone, Pickwick, 2013), The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode (Pickwick, 2014), Acedia and Its Discontents (Angelico, 2015), and co-editor of Subjectivity: Ancient and Modern (Lexington, 2016) and Nature: Ancient and Modern (Lexington), as well as articles, chapters, and essays in a variety of scholarly and popular venues. He and his family reside in the Princeton area.
Catherine Pakaluk is a visiting fellow at the Wheatley Institution and is currently a faculty member of Ave Maria University as of Fall 2010. Immediately upon her arrival at Ave Maria she founded the Stein Center for Social Research, a non-partisan, interdisciplinary center for advanced studies in social sciences. Her research is concerned broadly with the analytical study of gender, family, and reproductive dynamics. She also studies education, especially the value of private religious schools, and the role of parental effort in generating observed peer effects and variation in school quality. Her publications include Nontraditional Families and Progress Through School: A comment on Rosenfeld and Epidemiology of brain lymphoma among people with or without acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.
Prior to earning her doctorate from Harvard University in 2010, Catherine received a master's degree in economics from Harvard (2002), and a bachelor's degree from the University of Pennsylvania in mathematics and economics (1998). She has studied the history of Catholic thought with Michael Novak, Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, George Weigel, and Dr. Russell Hittinger.
Jenet Jacob Erickson is a Fellow at the Wheatley Institution and former assistant professor in the School of Family Life at BYU. Her research specializing in maternal and child wellbeing has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, Slate Magazine, and the Today Show. She has authored more than 20 scientific articles and book chapters and presented at national and international conferences. In 2004, she was selected as a Social Science Research Fellow for the Heritage Foundation where she completed research analyses on non-maternal care for policymakers. Erickson received B.S. and M.A. degrees from Brigham Young University, and a Ph.D. in Family Social Science from the University of Minnesota. She is currently a columnist on family issues for the Deseret News National Edition, while she and her husband enjoy their family life journey with two young children.