Fall 2026 Lecture Series
Rice Study Center Announces Fall 2026 Lecture Series
Rice Study Center will host four major fall events in 2026, bringing Princeton, Duke, and Oxford voices to campus for conversations that move from jurisprudence and theology to mental health and the renewal of scholarship, leadership, and art. Together, the lectures reflect the Study Center’s commitment to serious Christian intellectual engagement across disciplines and to the life of the university as a place of inquiry, formation, and hope.
The series begins on September 11 with Dr. Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. George is one of the country’s most influential legal philosophers, known for his work on natural law, conscience, civil liberties, marriage, and religious freedom, as well as for public service on the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. His lecture will focus on questions of moral formation, public reason, and the responsibilities of universities and citizens in a pluralistic society.
On September 18, the Study Center will host Dr. Warren Kinghorn for a faculty-student lunch in RMC Grand Hall, followed by an October lecture on faith and anxiety. Kinghorn is the Esther Colliflower Professor of the Practice of Pastoral and Moral Theology at Duke Divinity School, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University Medical Center, and co-director of Duke’s Theology, Medicine, and Culture Initiative. His work centers on the role of religious communities in caring for people with mental health problems, on Christians’ engagement with modern medicine, and on how Thomas Aquinas can inform Christian understandings of mental illness, mental health, and human flourishing. He will help students and faculty think about anxiety not only as a clinical issue, but also as a spiritual and communal concern that calls for accompaniment, wisdom, and hope.
The third event, set for September 23–25, features Dr. Tom Greggs of Princeton’s Center of Theological Inquiry. Greggs is a widely respected theologian whose work focuses on theology outside the conditions of Christendom, especially in contexts marked by secularism and pluralism. CTI describes his leadership as part of its mission to cultivate a theological renaissance through interdisciplinary inquiry, and Greggs himself has written extensively on ecclesiology, Christian faith, and the church’s public witness. His lectures will explore how theology speaks meaningfully into contemporary culture and how Christian thought can remain intellectually and spiritually robust in a changing world.
The final event, on November 3, will be a day of conversations with the Wycliffe Hall New Renaissance Project at Oxford, centered on scholarship, leadership, and art. Wycliffe describes the project as an effort to foster “transformational scholarship, leadership and culture” born out of Christian community, and to offer the truth, goodness, and beauty of the gospel to the world. It also frames the project as a renewed vision for Christian thinking, creativity, and leadership that can revitalize society and equip the church to engage culture with imagination and depth. The event will invite reflection on how the humanities, Christian formation, and public leadership belong together in the work of renewal.
Together, these four events promise a fall season marked by intellectual seriousness and spiritual depth. They will offer the Rice community opportunities to hear from leading scholars and practitioners whose work addresses law, theology, mental health, and the renewal of culture at the highest level.
