If you're someone who thinks there is an inherent conflict between Catholic tradition and the intellectual life of a secular university, the Rev. Robert Smith has a symposium series for you.

Smith is the Robert R. Colbert Sr. '48 Catholic Chaplain at Cornell; he and the Cornell Catholic Community, in collaboration with Cornell United Religious Work (CURW) and Chesterton House, are launching a semiannual symposia series this fall that aims to change minds about the place for Catholic thought in the context of a secular university.

"I wanted to communicate, especially to the Catholic undergraduates, that thought is part of religious life," Smith says. "If you think of yourself as a Catholic, you should be questioning, alive and engaged -- intellectually engaged."

The inaugural Colbert Symposium lecture will begin at 5 p.m., Sept. 14, in Goldwin Smith Hall's Lewis Auditorium, followed by a reception; the first speaker is George Dennis O'Brien, a former University of Rochester president and Middlebury College dean, and a philosopher and author. The talk and reception are open to the public and preregistration is not required.

In his talk, "Catholic Intellectual Life and Cornell Tradition," O'Brien will explore the similarities between how Cornell's founding changed the nature and character of higher education and how the founding of universities in 12th- and 13th-century Europe by the Catholic Church broke with the then-monastic traditions of higher education. Is there a continuing Catholic interest in higher education today, O'Brien will ask, and what relevance does that have to 21st-century Cornell?

The symposium series is named for Robert Colbert Sr. in recognition of his long and generous support of the Cornell Catholic Community; a recent disbursement from Colbert's estate and the support of the Rev. Daniel McMullin, director of the Cornell Catholic Community, made funding this series possible. Each semester, the series will invite to Cornell contemporary Catholic thinkers and artists based on the advice of an advisory board, whose members will include faculty, the provost, the head of CURW, members of the Colbert family and McMullin.

Each symposium speaker will present a major talk, and host a dinner discussion with invited faculty members and two lunch conversations with students. The symposium series' second guest (set for mid-April) will be Eleonore Stump, Ph.D. '75, a professor of philosophy at Saint Louis University.

Smith has long wanted to create a symposium series like this, cementing a role for the Catholic community in Cornell's intellectual life and adding to the vibrant conversations and questioning that are natural parts of a university community.

"One of the principal parts of the human life of the campus is the great intellectual conversation that goes on," Smith says. "It's not just in formal studies, but it's among students, between faculty members … it's the light of a place like this. There is continual, serious conversation going on."

The time seems right for a symposium series like this, Smith says, especially at a time when ethical, intellectual and political discourse sometimes seems limited to ideologues who shout the loudest and when fewer and fewer people seem able to actually listen to each other without retreating to extremist positions. Some of the loudest voices purporting to come from religious viewpoints seem narrow-minded and judgmental, Smith says, hoping that symposia like these can give people a very different view of religious conversation.

Smith celebrated his 50th anniversary as an ordained Catholic priest in 2008. To commemorate the occasion, he created a competition, the Janus Essays, to engage the Cornell community to have a conversation through essay writing with the theme "time lived/time to be lived."