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It was a warm Monday morning in July 2025. Classes for the MLCT Men’s Summer Seminar were due to begin. After hours of reading our assigned texts, my peers and I were prepared for debate – or so we thought. But then, the clock struck 9:15. The atmosphere around Dr. Snell shifted instantly from convivial to philosophically demanding. I was utterly shocked by what happened next. Dr. Snell began arguing against propositions I thought we agreed on. He started defending the authors we disagreed with, speaking for the thinkers that would have ridiculed his own Christian faith. He pressed some of us so hard that, upon our incapacity to disprove the viewpoints he adopted, we were backed into a corner between atheism and nihilism. My classmates and I, over the week of instruction, thought long and hard about what exactly Dr. Snell was trying to do. Through his spirited defense of authors whom many in his religious tradition would reject, Dr. Snell reminded us that intellectuality is not merely deciding which values you hold and carrying on; it is exploring all viewpoints as if they were your own. Dr. Snell was forcing me and my peers to confront the best arguments on the other side so that we would be more prepared to debate them in the future. One cannot claim to seek the truth if he cannot contend with the very best opposing positions the world’s intelligentsia has to offer. Truly curious intellectuals – the kinds of students whom the Witherspoon Institute fosters – must come to the public forum knowing the other side’s arguments well. Dr. Snell has continued in his pursuit of the same message during my time at the John Witherspoon Fellowship. Studying complex topics such as beauty, reverence, and philosophical anthropology in a peer group with diverse viewpoints requires more than good debating skills. To succeed in the Fellowship, members must come to class having read the assigned texts, or they will be easily swept aside when the time comes for arguing the topics of those texts. I think that is the greatest lesson the Witherspoon Institute has taught me: real intellectual curiosity means doing the work to engage with competing views at their strongest.

One of my favorite memories from the MLCT Summer Seminar is an afternoon when our group decided to stage a spontaneous performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, improvising with our own white bed sheets wrapped around our shoulders as makeshift togas. What followed was part theater, part philosophy seminar, and part comedy. I ended up playing an unfortunate Roman who was “stabbed” and spent the scene lying dramatically on the floor. It was ridiculous in the best way. Between exaggerated death scenes and mock betrayals, we laughed constantly. I realize afterwards that we were discovering something real about the text. Acting it out forced us to inhabit the drama in a way that simply reading it never could. That mixture of humor and serious thought defined the entire seminar. In lectures we moved from Plato to contemporary thinkers like Peter Singer, wrestling with questions about justice, the human person, and what gives a life value; I also remember joking exchanges with Professor Snell about “people seeds” and playful but sincere debates about whether I had a soul or whether my life had value. Late at night my roommate and I would keep talking, circling back to ideas from the day’s lectures and trying to sort out what we actually believed. It was one thing to hear an argument in a lecture; it was another to wrestle with it alongside someone who was just as curious and unsettled as you were. And then there were the simpler moments of community, like eating pizza and talking about Calvinism and basketball with Professor Watson. The fact that our professors could move so naturally from serious intellectual discussions to ordinary conversations made the whole environment feel alive and human. Looking back, what made the seminar special wasn’t just the books we read or the lectures we attended. It was the way ideas seeped into everything: into improvised Shakespeare performances in bed-sheet togas, into late-night conversations, into jokes that turned into philosophy. The seminar made learning feel like something shared. It created a community of people thinking, laughing, arguing, and growing together.

I was born and raised in the Bay Area, which is famous for being as forward-looking and pro-technology as possible. However, I have been part of several philosophy clubs that have shown me that one can reasonably be more classic and humanities-focused. I joined Zephyr Philosophy Club, a monthly philosophical group for high schoolers, in sophomore year. For Zephyr meetings, I read many philosophical works, including excerpts of Aristotle, Mill, Singer, Russell, and Locke. I looked forward to every meeting. In junior year, I was invited to join a similar group, the Witherspoon Fellowship. I was surprised to discover that the Witherspoon Institute was full of Catholics. In Witherspoon, students need to state the authority that directs their ethical beliefs, which for them was God. I disagreed about the legitimacy of this authority. At first, I worried about insulting them, but our teacher’s intentionally provocative and well-argued materialism didn’t offend them, so I became comfortable speaking forthrightly and arguing in a reasoned fashion. Additionally, I sometimes found myself unknowingly using rationalizations instead of rationality, so I couldn’t claim intellectual superiority. I’m still not Christian, but I now appreciate their intellectual tradition which is actually more internally coherent than many secular philosophies. In the summer of my senior year, I went to the Witherspoon summer camp. Those precious days were packed with open debate. Before the camp, we all read Plato’s Republic. We spent hours deconstructing belief systems through argument. Whether through fate or free choice, we also spent our free time philosophically debating. I was frequently the “token atheist,” and even expressed excessively materialist and atheist views in order to stop the rest of them from ensconcing themselves in theology. We stayed up late debating Socratic curiosity, the existence of transcendence, if there is a US aristocracy, and anything else we could think of. One boy explained his strange metaphysical theories over dinner, and other people listened eagerly. In general, they seemed much more confident and happier than my friends back home. One night, we had a swing dance. As usual, few of us knew how to swing dance, so there were teachers there to teach us. We all happily danced to a few songs. Then, everyone who already knew the Virginia Reel decided the rest of us had to learn, so we all voluntarily lined up in two lines and learned it. The tempo was a bit too fast for comfort, so we had to sashay and reel down the line as fast as we could. We then learned Footloose, because apparently a movie about youthful rebellion has been turned into a formalized dance. Both dances were more fun than the dances back home. In California, people would usually cringe at the idea of line dancing, but at the summer camp everyone eagerly tried it and had a great time. The Witherspoon Fellowship showed me that I didn’t have to be rigidly materialist and effectively accelerationist to be reasonable, happy, and connected.

I have wonderful memories of my summer seminar at the Witherspoon Institute. It was 2012, and it was the Moral Foundations of Law Seminar (now run by the James Madison Program). It was truly a unique experience. Attending a small, top-level seminar on natural law, led by none other than the legendary John Finnis, was a dream come true for me. All this took place in the magnificent setting of the Princeton campus, surrounded by a group of people with whom I hit it off from the very first minute. The intense academic activity of the mornings continued with discussions in the Frist Campus Center during lunch. We became great friends, and after class, the most enthusiastic of us played sports together, then met up again in the evening at the Nassau Inn for drinks. Today, I am a full professor of constitutional law at the University of Navarra in Spain, and I can say that that course left an indelible mark. That is why I continue to recommend some of my best students to do it, and those who take the course always come back delighted with a unique experience.