Please join the Institute for Human Ecology for a reflection on the final days of Thomas More. The question will be raised why More’s silence was significant and why he was canonized beside Bishop John Fisher, an outspoken critic of Henry VIII’s attacks against the Catholic Church and his abandonment of Catherine of Aragon. From our distant viewpoint, More appears to have done so little publicly during the crisis of the English. Does he deserve his revered status?
This event is cosponsored by the Center for Law and the Human Person and the Project on Constitutional Originalism and the Catholic Intellectual Tradition (CIT).
You can watch the recording here.
Speakers:—
William Fahey
Dr. William Fahey is a Fellow at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (Merrimack, New Hampshire), where he also serves as the third president of the college. He holds a B.A. in History and Honors A.B. in Classics from Xavier University; an M.Phil. in Ancient History from the University of St. Andrews; an M.Sci. in Wildlife Conservation from Unity College; and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Early Christian Studies from the Catholic University of America. His love of the British Isle stretches from his early academic years when he was an English-Speaking Union Scholar studying the Saxon Shore Fortifications through his teaching in international honors programs at Oxford and Cambridge, to the present day where he is a regular speaker on St. Thomas More, and Catholic literary revival figures such as Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Keith Chesterton.—
Matthew Mehan
Dr. Matthew Mehan is the Associate Dean for Hillsdale College’s Washington D.C. campus, and Assistant Professor of Government for the Van Andel Graduate School of Government. For the last five years, he has also taught for the College’s Washington-Hillsdale Internship Program for undergraduates. He has been teaching and designing humanities curricula for twenty years. Dr. Mehan is a graduate of the University of Dallas and the valedictorian of his class. He received a B.A. in politics, an M.A. in English, and a Ph.D. in Literature (with honors) for his dissertation on Shakespeare, Thomas More, and the education of leading citizens. He is a founding fellow of the Center for Thomas More Studies. Dr. Mehan has consulted for national leaders and heads of state. He has written for various outlets both scholarly and popular, including Moreana and The Wall Street Journal. He is also the author of The Handsome Little Cygnet as well as Mr. Mehan’s Mildly Amusing Mythical Mammals, an illustrated, best-selling book of poems that one critic called “a new classic” in children’s literature. His lovely wife and their passel of children live in Virginia.
