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The Witherspoon Institute is pleased to announce that Senior Fellow Helen M. Alvaré is a 2016 recipient of the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Edwin Meese III Award for Originalism and Religious Liberty. The award is granted to individuals who have made “significant efforts in publicly promoting and defending religious liberty and a principled jurisprudence through the active advancement of constitutional originalism.” The award was established in 2009 in honor of Edwin Meese III, the nation’s 75th attorney general under President Ronald Reagan. [Read more…] about Senior Fellow Helen Alvaré Receives Edwin Meese III Award for Originalism and Religious Liberty

The Institute is pleased to announce its 2016 reading group on Christianity, Open-Mindedness, and the Intellectual Virtues. This reading group is sponsored by the Center on the University and Intellectual Life.

This reading group will discuss texts and themes that address, directly or indirectly, the place and proper identities of particular academic virtues in the Christian tradition. Using philosophy (mostly Aristotle) and theology (drawing heavily on Augustine and Aquinas), the group will take up such questions as: What is the connection between open-mindedness (or its absence) and social segregation along ideological lines? What are the costs of such social segregation? What is the difference between true and false intellectual humility? Under what definitions would open-mindedness be (and not be) a bone fide virtue? What changes do the infusion of the theological virtues make to the academic virtues such as intellectual charity? Is it a sin to be intellectually boring? [Read more…] about Fall Seminar for Graduate Students: Christianity, Open-Mindedness, and the Intellectual Virtues

The Institute is pleased to announce its 2016 fall seminar on Ambition: Intellectual, Moral, Political sponsored by the Center on the University and Intellectual Life. This seminars is part of the Institute’s efforts to assist the next generation of scholars in reflecting on truly human questions.

In this year-long seminar, undergraduate students will study and challenge the ironism found in both society and the university, exploring the intellectual, moral, and political foundations for a healthy and reasonable ambition, including the quests for truth, free society, and statesmanship. Students’ readings will orbit around Robert Faulkner’s The Case for Greatness: supplementing this with readings on political glory and fame in Machiavelli, Nietzsche, Aristotle, Seneca, Montaigne, Josef Pieper, Aquinas, Tocqueville, and the life of George Washington. Professor Faulkner will lead one of the sessions, while all others will be led by Dr. RJ Snell. [Read more…] about Fall Seminar: Ambition: Intellectual, Moral, Political

The Institute is pleased to announce the appointment of R. J. Snell as Director of the Center on the University and Intellectual Life.

Prior to his appointment at the Witherspoon Institute, Snell was for many years Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University and the Templeton Honors College, where he founded and directed the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good.  His research interests include the liberal arts, ethics, natural law theory, Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the work of Bernard Lonergan, SJ. He is the author of Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Lonergan and Richard Rorty on Knowing without a God’s-eye View (Marquette, 2006), Authentic Cosmopolitanism (with Steve Cone, Pickwick, 2013), The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode (Pickwick, 2014), Acedia and Its Discontents (Angelico, 2015), and co-editor of Subjectivity: Ancient and Modern (Lexington, 2016) and Nature: Ancient and Modern (Lexington), as well as articles, chapters, and essays in a variety of scholarly and popular venues. Snell earned his MA in philosophy at Boston College, and his PhD in philosophy at Marquette University.

Snell and his family reside in the Princeton area.

The Institute’s monograph Religious Freedom: Why Now? Defending and Embattled Human Right is now available for free online as an audiobook. Religious freedom is under sustained pressure today around the world. In some places, it is fair to say that religious freedom is under siege. This book is a response to that sobering fact. Although scant attention is paid by governments, the academy, or the media, the implications of this crisis-and we contend that it is a crisis-are quite serious. A worldwide erosion of religious freedom is causing large-scale human suffering, grave injustice, and significant threats to international peace and security. [Read more…] about Free Audiobook of Religious Freedom: Why Now

The Institute is pleased to announce that it has recently added three new sections to its site on the history of natural law theory: sections on natural law in the thought of the Protestant Reformers and the sixteenth-century Anglican theologian Richard Hooker (whom John Locke quoted many times in his famous Second Treatise of Government), and on John Rawls as a critic of the natural law tradition. The Institute is very grateful to Dr. J. Daryl Charles, Prof. Robert Faulkner, and Prof. Christopher Wolfe, who contributed the essays on these topics. The site, Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism (nlnrac.org) is maintained by the Witherspoon Institute to educate students, scholars, and the general public about the intellectual history of natural law theory, particularly as it relates to the history of the United States and its constitutional tradition. [Read more…] about New Additions to Natural Law and American Constitutionalism Online Resource