The Meister Eckhart Center for Catholic and Dominican Life

The Meister Eckhart Center for Catholic and Dominican Life engages the community in dialogue by integrating the Dominican values of contemplation and action with the calling to promote a more just and peaceful world. We pursue this mission through lectures, panels, workshops, and community initiatives around issues of contemplation, action, justice, and peace.

What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we will reap in the harvest of action.

Meister Eckhart


History

The idea for the Meister Eckhart Center for Catholic and Dominican Life emerged through conversations between Albertus Magnus faculty, staff, and Board of Trustee members for the College’s strategic plan, Albertus 2025: Lighting the Way to a Second Century. The Center is named in honor of the 14th century Dominican Friar, theologian, and mystic Meister Eckhart, whose writings reveal an intimate relationship with God and a practical approach to the life of faith.

In Spring 2021, the College’s sponsoring congregation, the Dominican Sisters of Peace, made a generous gift to seed funding for the new Center. That summer, Edward Dunar began as the Center’s founding Director. The Center and its programs launched that fall, with a formal dedication in the presence of the Board of Trustees and the leadership of the Dominican Sisters of Peace in June 2022.

One must not always think so much about what one should do, but rather what one should be. Our works do not ennoble us, but we must ennoble our work.

Meister Eckhart

Aims of the Center

  • To reflect our Catholic identity through engagement with the Catholic intellectual tradition and Catholic social teaching.
  • To bring to life the Dominican pillars of study, prayer, community, and service.
  • To promote the preaching of truth and justice through contemplation, word, and action.
  • To promote care for the Earth, our common home, and to advance the theological understanding of the interconnectedness of all creation.
  • To facilitate the encounter of our tradition with the contemporary world through scholarly reflection and the Dominican practice of disputatio.
  • To promote Dominican scholarship and the integration of faith and reason.
  • To celebrate the diverse richness of the global Catholic tradition.
  • To partner with neighboring institutions and organizations, in pursuit of the common good.
 


About Meister Eckhart

Meister Eckhart (1260-1328) was a Dominican theologian, spiritual writer, philosopher, and mystic. A student of St. Albert the Great, and influenced by St. Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart provides theological and practical wisdom for living lives grounded in contemplation and witnessed through action.