Humanity has been marching, ever more efficiently, toward its own destruction, from bare hands to nuclear weapons, each new instrument of harm outpaces our capacity to understand why we keep building them. This is the premise Michael Conforti opens with in Emerging from the Shadows: Our Hopes for Freedom from the Eternal Cycles of Violence, the first lecture in the Assisi Foundation’s new 2026–2027 International Distinguished Lecture Series.
Conforti draws a straight line between Oppenheimer’s “Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds” and Dr. Frankenstein’s ecstatic “It’s alive!”, arguing both capture the same archetypal pattern. Once a discovery is unleashed, it takes on a life of its own, like an autonomous complex no longer within human control. Rather than build his case through argument alone, he turns to image, pointing to Michelangelo’s Pietà and a devotional sculpture of the Virgin pierced by seven knives as accurate depictions of the soul’s experience of violent transgression, the same kind of imagery that surfaces in dreams. He poses the lecture’s most unsettling question directly, might the ongoing escalation of global conflict be the soul’s own response to what humanity has done? Rather than falling back on religious apologetics or hero projection, Conforti argues the real task is developing genuine discernment and a mature relationship with the soul.
The lecture takes place October 3rd and opens a five-part series running through April 2027. James Hollis follows on December 19, Carol Pearson on January 16, Jacqueline Dürmüller on March 20, and Mihaela Minulescu closes the series on April 24, each bringing their own perspective to the study of archetypal patterns. Registration details for each lecture will be released individually ahead of time.
More than three decades ago, a personal pilgrimage to the hill town of Assisi, Italy left Conforti with what he describes as “an odd, yet compelling feeling of belonging,” tied to the town’s sacred origins as the eventual home of St. Francis. That visit led to the founding of the Assisi Institute and its inaugural 1989 conference, bringing together Jungian analysts, scientists, and artists around the relationship between Matter, Psyche and Soul. The Assisi Foundation itself, a nonprofit established in 2006 to steward the Institute’s growth, now supports an Institute that draws more than 20,000 participants from 25 countries, with training programmes across Latin America, Spain, Australia, and Russia, and new initiatives taking root in South Africa and Italy.
You can register here for the first lecture in the series, taking place on 3 October 11:00am–12:30pm Eastern time, with a $35 registration fee.