Russia After Putin Is Not a Solved Problem

August 20, 2019
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By Jakub Grygiel

Tyrannies are fragile things and when the fear upon which they are based crumbles, they collapse. The protests in Russia over the past weeks may be a sign of the growing fearlessness of some Russian citizens and the resulting weakness of Putin and his gang. There is good reason, therefore, to be hopeful that the Putinist kleptocracy may end. Who, or what type of regime, will follow the two decades of Putin’s rule is another matter. We can hope that it will be more lenient and less authoritarian, but the future of Russia’s domestic system is anyone’s guess.

In any case, the inevitable end of Putin—after all, sooner or later through elections, revolt, or their own death, all political leaders lose power—will not bring a solution to the security problems Russia creates. The Kremlin can change its occupants, but there is more continuity than change in Russian foreign policy. Putin will leave and Russia will remain.

Geography imposes a consistent simplicity of conception on Russian foreign policy. In a nutshell, Russia wants to be in Europe, but not of Europe. While it cannot be an Asian great power, Russia has sought in the past (as it is seeking now) to be the key European potentate.

Read more here.

Originally published on 15 August 2019 at The American Interest

Is Nationalism Consistent With the Catholic Faith?

August 19, 2019
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By Bradley Lewis

It was not long ago that all right-thinking people believed in globalization as both an irresistible fact and a goal to be earnestly sought and promoted.

Globalization would feed the hungry, cure the sick, teach the ignorant, and bring with it the conditions of enduring peace. We had, it seemed, reached an era in which narrow identities and rivalries were transcended by a universalism that was increasingly embraced by more and more of the world. This universalism embraced nearly borderless free markets, the free movement of capital and labor, and a commitment to liberal democratic political institutions.

Certainly aspects of globalization did have extraordinary effects: Tens of millions of people were lifted out of dire poverty in China and India. Information began to move at blinding speeds, spurring innovation and real progress in many areas of human life.

Read more here.

Originally published on 6 August 2019 at the National Catholic Register

Civitas Dei Summer Fellowship: Seeking Earthly and Heavenly Flourishing

August 6, 2019
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By Very Rev. Aquinas Guilbeau, O.P., Prior, Priory of the Immaculate Conception — Professor of Moral Theology, Dominican House of Studies

Robert Frost famously observed that good fences make good neighbors. The same could be said of good roads: they, too, can make good neighbors. The Catholic University of America and the Dominican House of Studies (DHS) know this to be true. Perched on opposite sides of Michigan Avenue in Northeast Washington, D.C., Catholic University and DHS have been good neighbors for nearly 115 years.

As across-the-street neighbors, Catholic University and DHS pursue distinct missions in Catholic higher education, the former as the official university of the nation’s bishops, the latter as a studium of the Dominican Order. As across-the-street friends, these two schools—each enjoying pontifical right—support each other’s work through frequent exchanges among faculty and students. Between the two schools, St. Peter’s counsel to the Church takes flesh: “As each has received a gift, employ it for one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace” (1 Pt 4:10).

Over a century strong, the friendship between Catholic University and DHS continues to find new expression. An example lies in the growing collaboration between Catholic’s Institute for Human Ecology and DHS’s Thomistic Institute (TI). Recent creations of their respective faculties, IHE and the TI co-sponsored in July their second Civitas Dei Fellowship. Organized by Prof. Joseph Capizzi and Fr. Dominic Legge, O.P., the directors of the institutes, the Fellowship “supports rising scholars seeking to better understand the Catholic intellectual tradition.” To that end, the Fellowship gathers graduate students from around the country—future lawyers, entrepreneurs, and professors—for intensive introductions to Catholic political thought.

At the invitation of Prof. Capizzi and Fr. Legge, I had the honor of lecturing at this year’s Fellowship. My topic was St. Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the common good. These presentations complemented two other series of talks: Catholic’s own Chad Pecknold led discussions of critical chapters of St. Augustine’s City of God, and Harvard Law School’s Adrian Vermeule treated questions in contemporary constitutional law. All together, the three series, and the lively discussions they launched, offered fellows an overview of Christian legal and political theory, pinpointing how important parts of the ancient, medieval, and modern Catholic tradition aptly address contemporary concerns.

The Civitas Dei Fellowship is just the latest fruit of the long friendship enjoyed between Catholic University and DHS, a camaraderie stretching across Michigan Avenue but extending itself in service to Church and State. For the flourishing of both societies—the heavenly and the earthly—may this friendship thrive for years to come.

The Impact of Common Core

August 1, 2019
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By Emmett J. McGroarty, J.D., director of the Subsidiarity and the Constitution program at the Institute for Human Ecology

We often think of centralized government as impairing sound decision-making, efficiency, and liberty. But it has other consequences to human flourishing. When centralized government makes decisions that individuals or local government should be making, it places the human person in lower standing. That may be abstract, but invariably it has practical consequences. The sad story of great, classic literature in America demonstrates this.

One of America’s great cultural achievements was the popular view that all children should have an academic education. That’s not to say that all should attend university, and it’s not to discount the trades, which certainly offer wonderful opportunities. It simply means that to flourish children should have a grounding in their culture and have an appreciation for the good and beauty of the Almighty’s creation. They should be equipped to pursue the truth, to fully exercise their liberties, and to be persons of substance in their communities and in their families. Early on, such an education took root in America. It included the study of classic literature–fiction, poetry, and biographies in narrative form.

Great literature sparks the imagination. It develops the ability to express one’s self, in verbal and written form, providing a sound means for the exchange of ideas. It hones one’s analytical skills.  Through it, one develops empathy and practices prudential decision-making without the consequences of the real world. It helps one handle uncertainty and ambiguity, enabling one to better resist rushing to conclusions and assuming the ill-will of another. Through great literature, we pass culture to others, including to following generations. It is a gateway to a passion for history. Reading great literature facilitates the study of the human condition.

In the 1800s a counter-theory arose to the American Experiment and began to gain favor in elitist camps. Experts must manage society to peaceful and prosperous ends. Citizen-directed government must be marginalized, all the better to give experts the necessary leeway. Likewise, the fabled checks-and-balances our Constitutional structure must be circumvented. That view favored a different type of basic education for the masses—a lower, utilitarian education that would further the narrow aims of employers and bureaucrats in a managed economy.

For over a century that view was increasingly reflected in public policy and the growing administrative state. From the1990s that trend accelerated and reached its apex with the development, and federally driven adoption of, the Common Core standards. Fidelity to those standards required a dramatic reduction in the amount of classic literature children read: as noted in the Revised Publishers’ Criteria for the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts and Literacy, Grades 3–12, “[m]ost ELA programs and materials designed for them will need to increase substantially the amount of literary nonfiction they include.”
See study here and commentary here and here.

What does this mean to the formation of the person? Does the trend away from classic literature lend itself to a climate of rancor and divisiveness, a rush to judgment and an inability to understand the perspectives of other? Does it callously deprive the human person of all but crude practices in the sharing of ideas with others? Does it deprive them of the beauty of appreciating another’s point-of-view, without necessarily agreeing with it?  Are we disintegrating into a society composed not of mere rivals but of enemies, as Alexis de Tocqueville described France to have been on the eve of the French Revolution?

State Department launches panel focused on human rights and natural law

July 22, 2019
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By Carol Morello

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday announced the creation of an advisory commission on human rights that has engendered controversy since it was proposed.

Pompeo said the Commission on Unalienable Rights “will provide the intellectual grist of what I hope will be one of the most profound re-examinations of inalienable rights in the world since the 1948 Universal Declaration.”

The panel will be headed by Mary Ann Glendon, a Harvard Law School professor who wrote a book about the United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pompeo was Glendon’s research assistant when he studied law at Harvard. Glendon is also a former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

Read more here.

Originally published on 8 July 2019 at The Washington Post

Reflections from an Institution

July 12, 2019
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By Robert Royal

It’s a commonplace today that people have lost faith in institutions. And it’s no wonder. Wherever you look – politics, culture, education, even the Church – the institutions that normally provide us with stable identity and points of reference have become sources of disorder and disorientation.

Hillary Clinton famously wrote a book: It Takes a Village. She was expressing something not so much wrong as deceptive. It does take a village – and a family, and a church, and a school, and a community – to form children into mature and responsible adults. The “village” that progressive politicians talk about, however, is not an assembly of these natural civil society institutions, but an array of government programs designed to replace and, often, hasten the demise of real human connections.

In healthy times, people identify with family, faith, nation. At least among our cultural elites, identity these days revolves around race, class, and gender.

Read more here.

Originally published on 1 July 2019 at The Catholic Thing

Former US Ambassador to Holy See to Chair New Human Rights Commission

July 12, 2019
, News

Mary Ann Glendon, former U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, will head a new human rights advisory body to the U.S. State Department, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday.

“It’s a sad commentary on our times that more than 70 years after the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, gross violations continue throughout the world,” Secretary Pompeo stated at a July 8 press conference announcing the new Commission on Unalienable Human Rights.

Pompeo said that “the time is right for an informed review of American human rights in foreign policy,” and that Glendon was “the perfect person to chair this effort” and chair the new commission.

Read more here.

Originally published on 8 July 2019 at The Catholic World Report.

Is a Civil Public Discourse Even Possible?

June 25, 2019
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By IHE Fellow Emmett McGroarty, J.D.

Over the last 20 years, public discourse has tended toward the shrill and irrational, punctuated with occasional violence. No sharing of opinions. Don’t ask questions.  No discussion of points of view. Empathy is dead. Socialization—an essential human activity—is regulated by the mob, and its walls are shrinking.

 

Does the form or practice of our government have anything to do with this dystopia?

 

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville made a few observations worth mulling.

 

The structure of our government, he noted, preserved the power of the townships, most notably in New England but everywhere resting on the “same idea.” It preserved the natural order. Man, Tocqueville declared, “makes kingdoms and creates republics; the township appears to issue directly from the hands of God.”

 

“It is in the township, at the center of ordinary relations in life, that desires for esteem, the need of real interests, the taste for power and for attention, come to be concentrated; these passions, which so often trouble society, change character when they can be expressed so near the domestic hearth and in a way in the bosom of the family.” It is through local governance that the individual “gets a taste for order, understands the harmony of powers, and finally assembles clear and practical ideas on the nature of his duties as well as the extent of his rights.”

 

“Local freedoms, which make many citizens put value on the affection of their neighbors and those close to them, therefore constantly bring men closer to one another, despite the instincts that separate them, and force them to aid each other.”

 

As the Catechism observes, participation in civic life “develops the qualities of the person . . . and helps guarantee his rights” (par. 1882).  This subsidiarity—embracing socialization—leads to solidarity.

 

Given a century of increased centralization—taking more and more power away from local communities, should discord and rancor in the public square and on college campuses be such a surprise?

Emmett McGroarty studies public policies that undermine the constitutional structure and the principle of subsidiarity. He is the co-author of Deconstructing the Administrative State: The Fight for Liberty. He is also co-author of Controlling Education from the Top: Why Common Core Is Bad for America, Pioneer Institute, No. 87 (May 2012); and Cogs in the Machine: Big Data, Common Core, and National Testing, Pioneer Institute, No. 114 (May 2014). Mr. McGroarty is co-founder of truthinamericaneducation.com, a nationwide network of individuals and organizations that sheds light on the Common Core system and the collection of private data on children and their families. His published works have appeared in, among others, Breitbart, Christian Post, Crisis, Daily Caller, The Federalist, FoxNews.com, New York Post, Public Discourse, The Hill, Townhall, USA Today, and The Washington Times. He has testified before state and federal committees and commissions. Mr. McGroarty received an A.B. from Georgetown University and a J.D. from Fordham School of Law.

The European Slide Toward Irrelevance

June 10, 2019
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By Jakub Grygiel

Elections for the European parliament, regardless of the results, are always a celebration of the EU project. Blue flags with the 12 golden stars are omnipresent when a “European electorate” casts its vote in what is considered the largest election in the world outside India. But the most recent elections are important for a different reason: They are part of a longer trend that is pushing Europe toward global irrelevance.

Two election results in particular are striking, not because of their novelty but because they demonstrate the resilience of certain political forces that are leading to Europe’s withdrawal from the global chessboard.

First, the rise of the “greens” in Europe. While not a new political force, the “green” movement is no longer an afterthought. In Germany it is now the second-largest party, replacing the Social Democrats. These results reflect a continent-wide drift toward environmental concerns instead of “social justice.” Essentially, they show the greening of the Left; the social justice warriors are now climate change worriers.

Read more here.

Originally published on 3 June 2019 at The American Interest. 

Exploring Wonder and Beauty in the Scientific World

June 5, 2019
News

How do aesthetic factors such as beauty, awe, and wonder play a role in scientific research? And how does this change in different cultures or fields?

These and other questions were explored during the first International Symposium on the Aesthetic Dimensions of Science, a day-long conference held at The Catholic University of America on June 3.

The interdisciplinary symposium was organized by Brandon Vaidyanathan, associate professor and department chair of sociology and a fellow with the University’s Institute for Human Ecology. Vaidyanathan chose to organize the event as part of an ongoing research project that explores the ways in which scientific research is not only methodical, rational, and objective, but is also shaped by aesthetic and emotional elements.

“When you read what prominent scientists have written across centuries, they’re often writing rather eloquently about the importance of beauty in science, and beauty as a driving principle, along with awe and wonder,” Vaidyanathan said. “What interests me as a sociologist is whether this is simply the providence of famous celebrity scientists and Nobel prize winners, or is this a part of the ordinary experience of the way scientists work?”

To explore this topic, Vaidyanathan invited astrophysicists, biologists, sociologists, and other renowned experts from around the world to present. The day began with a talk from James McAllister, a professor of philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands, who spoke about how scientists often describe scientific equations as beautiful. The question McAllister tries to explain is why scientists consider theories that strike them as beautiful as more likely to be true than those that do not.

To explain this, McAllister offers a theory which he calls aesthetic induction, a “learning process where scientists update their aesthetic preferences in the light of empirical performance.” Through this process, he theorizes, scientists look back on past successes and unconsciously begin to think of those experiences as more positive or aesthetically pleasing than other solutions, until eventually the correct solutions begin to seem beautiful to them.

“This provides a link between scientist’s preferences and the objective properties of theories and encourages scientists to think that their aesthetic preferences are tuned to true theories,” he said.

Also presenting during the morning was Mario Livio, an astrophysics professor from the University of Nevada in Las Vegas, who spoke about the various kinds of human curiosity and why curiosity should be supported. His talk was followed by one from Robert Gilbert, a biology professor from the University of Oxford, who discussed the relationship between natural beauty and knowledge.

Afternoon presenters included sociologists Renny Thomas from Jesus and Mary College in New Delhi, India, and Stefano Sbalchiero from the University of Padova, Italy, who spoke about the ways scientists in India and Italy express their religion or spirituality in their work.

Duilia de Mello, Catholic University professor of astrophysics and vice provost for research support, also spoke in the afternoon and shared how she uses wonder and beauty to build curiosity and excitement for kids learning about science.

“Many of us here are actually teachers and we have a role in kids’ lives of triggering their curiosity,” de Mello said.

One of the keys to triggering curiosity among young people, de Mello said, is to start with interests that they already have. Another method is to use the technologies and communication styles that they use and to keep conversations going.

“Triggering dreams is relatively easy,” she said. “The problem is how do you follow up and keep them interested.”

This article was originally published by The Catholic University of America on June 5, 2019 and written by Katie Bahr, Assistant Director of Communications and Media Relations.

A Meaningful Life

May 24, 2019
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By IHE Fellow Angela McKay Knobel, Ph.D.

For years, I have taught The Apology in my introductory philosophy class. Every year, some students hate Socrates. One year, one of my students found Socrates particularly annoying. As we were working through the text, she slammed her book down in frustration. “Why doesn’t this guy just get a job?” she exclaimed. The University of Tulsa apparently agrees with her. Just last month, the university announced the elimination of all traditional liberal arts majors. The rationale for these changes is made explicit in the introduction to the university’s strategic plan, entitled, “Jobs as Central to Life.” After stating in the first sentence that “higher education prepares people for a meaningful life,” the remainder of the document articulates a vision of just what preparation for a meaningful life amounts to. A university prepares its students for a meaningful life by giving them the skills they need to get a job when they graduate.

Socrates believed that a meaningful life is an examined life: that the unexamined life is not worth living. The administration of the University of Tulsa, by contrast, appears to believe that a meaningful life is an employed life. In this respect they seem to understand even less than that irritated college freshman.

Those of us who side with Socrates think that the value of a university education lies in its ability to stimulate the self-examination that makes life meaningful. We think that to engage in a sustained and serious study of subjects like history and philosophy and literature is invariably to come up against life’s most important questions, and we think meaning is found only in the process of grappling with those questions. Indeed, the hope is that the process that begins in the university will bleed into the rest of life: that students will emerge from university with a sense of seriousness and purpose and not least, humility.

Young people emerge from the university into a world that offers them more choices than ever before, choices that are as or more difficult than the choices any preceding generation will face. Should I accept a job that requires me to act dishonestly? Should I choose a higher salary if it requires me to spend more time away from my family? Do I have any obligations to an unplanned child or an ailing parent? The way they navigate these choices will determine the meaningfulness (or lack thereof) their lives have. If we merely give them jobs we will have given them nothing meaningful at all.

Angela McKay Knobel is an associate professor of philosophy. She has published extensively on medieval and contemporary ethics. Recently, Dr. Knobel was invited by the U.S. Naval Academy to participate in a review of the academy’s Leadership Education and Development (LEAD) Division curriculum, particularly of the area devoted to moral character. 

Only by returning to the Faith can we truly rebuild Notre Dame

May 24, 2019
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By IHE Fellow Chad Pecknold, Ph.D.

Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris was built out of stone and wood and glass without electricity or computers. It was not built by committee, or consultants or according to state regulations. It was built by a culture superior to our own. And we know it.

Perhaps not everyone who has ever stood in awe of Notre Dame knows why it attracts them. Not everyone who watched an entire forest of oak as old as Charlemagne collapse in flames knows why its destruction made them tremble. But tremble they did.

As the spire cracked and buckled, millions of us felt civilization trembling. But trembling at what? At the loss of God? At the sudden recognition that, for all our progressive confidence, deep down everyone knows that Western civilization lacks the philosophical and religious principles that once made such a structure possible in the first place?

Read more here.

Originally published on 16 April 2019 at the Catholic Herald. 

Washington Insider – June 2019

May 22, 2019
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By William Saunders, JD, Program Director of the MA in Human Rights at The Catholic University of America

 

The March for Life, the President, and Executive Branch Developments

In November, the UN Human Rights Committee published Comment 36 to guide the understanding and implementation of article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). In doing so, the HRC attempted to make abortion an accepted part of every nation’s law and practice. First, it is important to note that, other than a regional protocol in Africa, no binding international document mentions abortion. Abortion advocates have, thus, long sought to shoehorn abortion into the provisions of binding international documents. This is precisely what the HRC is trying to do with Comment 36.

The ICCPR is a treaty; that is, it contains legally binding obligations for any nation that ratifies the treaty. Most nations have ratified it, but those that have not are not bound by its terms. The ICCPR is one of the two major treaties designed to implement the provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was issued by the United Nations after World War II.22 It is worthwhile to pause and consider the preamble to the Declaration in order to understand how far off-line the HRC went with Comment 36.

Read more here. 

Originally published in the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly. 

Professor Robert George Addresses Human Rights in Conversation with Program Director William Saunders

May 9, 2019
, MA Human Rights, News

More than 80 students, faculty, and members of the local community gathered for a discussion of human rights and religious liberty with Robert George, Princeton University’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at The Catholic University of America’s Heritage Hall.

The discussion, which was hosted by the Institute for Human Ecology, was held to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The lecture also marked the opening of a new Center for the Study of Human Rights at Catholic University, along with an interdisciplinary degree, a Master of Arts in Human Rights.

Throughout the hour-long conversation, George answered questions from William Saunders, an IHE fellow who serves as director of the master’s program and the Center for the study of Human Rights in the School of Arts and Sciences.

George, who is a member of the Center’s advisory council, began the conversation by discussing the positive influence the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has had on the world since it was issued on Dec. 10, 1948, as a response to the horrific violence seen during the two World Wars.

He called the declaration “an extraordinary achievement” that brought together people from many different faiths and backgrounds to “make a profound statement of the dignity of the human person … and an affirmation of the rights that human beings have, not in virtue of any special strengths — beauty, intelligence, social standing — but simply in virtue of their humanity.”

Though he noted that the document is “not self-executing,” George said that it “gives civil society an instrument in the name of which to demand of repressive governments and offending regimes respect for the dignity of the human person and his rights.”

Continuing the conversation, Saunders and George discussed how the declaration — in Saunders’ words — is “not a perfect document.” Among the dangers of the declaration, the two professors noted, is how easily its language can be used to promote specific ideologies.

“Whenever the rhetoric of a good thing becomes the dominant rhetoric, then people are going to seize upon that rhetoric to advance whatever agenda, whatever ideology they have,” said George. “People will try to win at ideological battles, advance their agendas whatever they are, with the language of human rights. So they’ll inflate claims, whatever they desire, and treat it not as a desire, a want, a feeling, a passion, but a human right.

“We lose our sense of the power and importance of the fundamental rights because of the inflation that happens when you conflate whatever it is you desire, whatever is on your agenda, with rights,” George said.

Saunders and George also spoke about the many responsibilities that go along with human rights, and the differences between positive and negative rights, and how the idea of religious freedom ties in with the declaration of human rights.

At the beginning of the night’s event, George spoke highly of Catholic University’s new Center for the Study of Human Rights, which seeks to bring the Catholic perspective to bear on the discussion and understanding of human rights. The master’s program, which is accepting students now, will begin officially in Fall 2019.

“I think this institution will really bring something new to the table,” George said. “That is an understanding of human rights rooted in the deep tradition of thought that takes us back to Athens and to Jerusalem, an approach to human rights that really anchors human rights in the truth about the human person and the flourishing of the human person. … We need that kind of deep understanding.”

In his introductory statements, Moral Theology Professor Joseph Capizzi, executive director of the Institute for Human Ecology, spoke about the new center and master’s program. He said the program is unique because it “draws on the interdisciplinary strength of this University and also the Catholic intellectual tradition.” Aaron Dominguez, the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, also gave introductory remarks welcoming the establishment of the Center and of the master of arts degree.

For more information about the new master’s program in human rights, please contact William Saunders, Program Director at saunderswl@cua.edu.

This article was originally published by The Catholic University of America on October 1, 2018. Watch the video from the event here.

Photos by Deirdre McQuade/DMcQuade Studios.

Love and Light: Reflections on the Meaning of Notre Dame

May 3, 2019
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by Dennis Coyle, Ph.D.

I suppose it’s a bit preposterous for me to feel a deep personal connection with Notre-Dame. I’ve been there maybe a dozen times during brief Paris sojourns over the past decade. Hardly exceptional compared with the experience of the legions of faithful who worshipped there regularly, or of the millions of Parisians and French who learned the moods of Notre Dame as they passed by on vacations or just going about their daily business over the years. Notre Dame was literally as well as figuratively the center of the island in the center of Paris, and thus the center of France, and what it means to be French. Even the most jaded cosmopolitan Parisian could not avoid a relationship with Notre Dame, as it is impossible to go much of anywhere in Paris without passing by it.

Despite my limited familiarity, Notre Dame was my Notre Dame. Great architecture does that to you. The embodiment of history and culture does that to you. Faith does that to you. A great cathedral is a bit like a great author, a great performer. He may be read by millions or perform in sold-out stadiums, but you know he is speaking directly and personally to you. That was my Notre Dame.

Two visits to Notre Dame stand out; both visits were unexpected. I had intended both days to be in Lille, and ended up in Paris due to train misfortunes. I suppose there are earthly explanations in each case, though I’m inclined to believe that something more profound is involved.

Read more here.

Originally published on 1 May 2019 at The Imaginative Conservative.

Dennis Coyle, Ph.D. is an IHE Fellow and an associate professor and Politics Department Chair at The Catholic University of America. Dr. Coyle’s research interests include liberal constitutionalism, property rights and regulation, social science theory, and generally the interplay of institutions, culture, and values in law, policy, and administration.

 

The Catholic University of America’s<br> Second Novak Symposium

April 23, 2019
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by IHE Fellow Andreas Widmer

An unusual mix of scholars, friends, and students met on campus at Catholic University March 19 for the second Novak Symposium, a project of the Ciocca Center for Principled Entrepreneurship, directed by IHE Fellow Andreas Widmer.

Michael Novak, the esteemed author, philosopher, and theologian for whom the Symposium is named, loved to examine commonly held ideas to see whether or in what sense they were actually true. For example, although it’s usually held that the United States is the land of the “rugged individual,” Novak studied life in early America and saw that it was really the story of communities being built by common needs and interests — the land of the community barn-raising, not the isolated loner. Thoroughly orthodox in his Catholicism, he nonetheless excelled at bringing a fresh perspective to our sometimes too- conventional thinking.

It’s in this spirit that the annual Novak Symposium convened: not to repeat what Michael Novak said, but to continue his genuinely open-minded and big-hearted manner of confronting problems. This year’s theme took as its starting point Novak’s Templeton lecture from 1994, which student participants were asked to read. In 1994, with the collapse of Soviet Communism, the world assumed that the free market had “won” the debate with Socialism. Is that still true in 2019?

The event took place in two parts. In the morning, in the fashion of a traditional academic conference, three speakers engaged the question from their distinct perspectives. Author Mary Eberstadt, a close Novak friend, discussed what it means to engage a problem with a “catholic mind.” (A taste of her remarks is available here.) George Mason University Professor of Economics and Philosophy Peter Boettke argued that free markets require virtue, but do a better job than the alternatives when it comes to fostering the needs of the human person, who has more than just material needs. Economist and techno-visionary George Gilder offered a fascinating presentation on how the Chinese economy has begun to outpace the American in dynamic innovation. It was an intellectually bracing morning.

In the afternoon, students competed in a “social justice hack-a-thon,” during which they tried to tackle a current social problem in a “Novakian” manner — that is, applying Novak’s definition of social justice as a personal virtue aimed at building the common good. Professor Elizabeth Shaw, Director of Special Academic Projects for the Ciocca Center at The Busch School, and a long time collaborator with Michael Novak, organized the event. She was especially pleased by the high student participation rate, since an important aim of the program is to spread Novak’s legacy to a new generation. “Interacting with students was a priority and a joy for Novak, so the good turnout of undergraduates, both for the morning conference and for the hackathon in the afternoon, was especially gratifying,” she said.

Andreas Widmer is an IHE Fellow and the director of entrepreneurship programs at the Busch School of Business. Mr. Widmer works closely with top entrepreneurs, investors, and faith leaders around the world to foster enterprise solutions to poverty and promote virtuous business practices.

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