Center for Western Civilization

New visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy to join CU Boulder

Anonymous — Wed, 19 Jun 2019 22:31:21 +0000

New visiting scholar in conservative thought and policy to join CU Boulder Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 06/19/2019 - 16:31

Andrew Sorensen

New Conservative Scholar, other visiting scholars join Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization

Colleen Sheehan, new visiting scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado Boulder

William B. Allen, returning Senior Scholar in Residence

This fall, Colleen Sheehan, a professor of political science at Villanova University, will become the newest visiting scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization (CSWC).

As announced last week, the Center for Western Civilization, Thought & Policy changed its name to honor outgoing CU President Bruce Benson.

Sheehan will join William B. Allen, who will be returning to the CSWC for a second year, as a Senior Scholar in Residence for the 2019-20 academic year.

The CSWC is also announcing four other visiting scholars for the coming academic year, each looking at different aspects of Western Civilization: John Doody, Renaud-Phillippe Garner, David Yee and Scott Hill.

“As the Bruce D. Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization has grown and matured over the last several years, it continues to attract top talent in the studies of culture, languages and ideas in Western tradition,” said Robert Pasnau, director of the center. “This new cohort of scholars will add to that mission with expertise in history, philosophy and political science.”

Sheehan will be teaching two courses each semester. In the fall, she will be teaching a survey of the Western intellectual tradition, and a political science course on the Lincoln-Douglas debates.

Sheehan says the Lincoln-Douglas debates are a favorite topic because of the nail-biting story and morals she sees as relevant to modern life.

“The principles at stake in pre-Civil War America are actually still at stake in America today,” Sheehan said. “And how we respond to the problems our nation is facing today is no less important than it was in 1860. I am excited to work with the students of CU Boulder on these critical questions and civic concerns.”

2019-20 CWCTP visiting scholar biographies:

Colleen Sheehan
2019-20 Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy

Colleen A. Sheehan is professor of political science at Villanova University and director of the Matthew J. Ryan Center for Free Institutions and the Public Good.

Sheehan has served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and was a Pennsylvania gubernatorial appointee to the Pennsylvania State Board of Education, and to the Governor's Advisory Committee on Academic Standards.

William B. Allen
Senior Scholar in Residence

William B. Allen is emeritus dean at James Madison College and emeritus professor of political philosophy at Michigan State University. Allen was the 2018-19 CWCTP Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy and is a Senior Scholar in Residence for 2019-20.

Allen has served as chairman for the United States Commission on Civil Rights, as a member for National Council on the Humanities, as executive director on the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, among other accolades.

(from L to R) Renaud-Philippe Garner, Jack Doody, Scott Hill, David Yee

John Doody
Senior Scholar in Residence

John A. Doody holds the Robert M. Birmingham Chair in Humanities at Villanova University, where he serves as professor of philosophy. He is the director and founder of the Villanova Center for Liberal Education. Doody has served in numerous leadership positions during his career at Villanova University, including interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, acting chair of the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions, chair and acting chair of the Department of Philosophy among other positions.

Renaud-Philippe Garner
Bradley Scholar in Residence

Renaud-Philippe Garner holds a PhD in philosophy (2019) from the University of Toronto, where he is an instructor. His areas of specialization are ethics and political philosophy, with particular focus on the ethics of partiality and just war theory.

David Yee
Scholar in Residence

Yee is an instructor at the Department of History at Stony Brook University, where he will receive his PhD in history in 2019. He holds an MA in U.S. history from the City College of New York and a BA in film and media arts from Temple University. Yee was a co-coordinator of the New York City Latin American History Workshop and in 2018 was awarded a fellowship on Land Policy and Urban Development in Latin American from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Scott Hill
Snider Scholar in Residence

Scott Hill, who holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a BS in philosophy and mathematics from Kansas State University, is a lecturer at Auburn University. He is the co-author of "Beyond the Code: A Philosophical Guidebook for the Ethical Engineer" with Heidi Furey and Sujata Bhatia. His areas of specialization include ethics and philosophy of religion.

Center for Western Civilization, Thought & Policy also appoints four other visiting scholars for the coming year

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Nature of truth is subject of former Episcopal bishop's talk

Anonymous — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 21:47:46 +0000

Nature of truth is subject of former Episcopal bishop's talk Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 01/29/2018 - 14:47

Durango Jenkins

In Andrew Lloyd Webber’s rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, Pontius Pilate sings, “What is ‘truth?’ Is truth unchanging law?” Those are questions that the Right Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, the former presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, will address this week on the University of Colorado Boulder campus.

Jefferts Schori will speak on “The Measure, Dimension, and Intersectionality of Truth” on Thursday, Feb. 1, at 5:30 p.m. in Hale Science 270 on campus. The event is sponsored by the CU Boulder Center for Western Civilization, Thought & Policy and by St. Aidan’s and Canterbury Campus Ministry.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, shown here lecturing on campus last fall, will speak again this week at CU Boulder. Photo courtesy of the Center for Western Civilization, Thought and Policy.

Jefferts Schori will talk about truth in relation to race, rights, reality, and relationships, and she said she plans to explore truth from a “special model.”

“We think of truth as something fixed,” Jefferts Schori said, “and yet once we look at it more carefully, we can recognize that there are different levels of truth, and I want to talk about it in terms of current challenges in the world around us.”

The description of her event lists these issues as “race, rights, reality and relationships.”

When asked what called her into the priesthood, Jefferts Schori mentioned sea creatures. Growing up in the Seattle area gave her appreciation for nature and, in particular, the ocean.

She spent a significant portion of her adult life working as an oceanographer, receiving her B.S. in biology from Stanford University and a PhD in oceanography from Oregon State University.

After governmental budget cuts in the mid-80s, she began to discern a call to the priesthood. She received her master of divinity from Church Divinity School of the Pacific and was ordained into the priesthood in 1994.

According to her official biography for the Episcopal Church, Jefferts Schori has been a strong advocate for “issues of domestic poverty, climate change and care for the earth, as well as the ongoing need to contextualize the gospel” throughout her ministry.

Jefferts Schori’s election as the first female presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church and a primate in the Anglican Communion in 2006 represented a time of change for the Episcopal Church.

“The challenge was dealing with the conflict and dealing with people’s different expectations of what the Episcopal Church is and should be,” Jefferts Schori said. “That is a natural process of growth and evolution for all creatures.”

Time Magazine named Jefferts Schori as one of the "Women Who Are Changing the World.” She is a continuing 2017-8 guest of the Center for Western Civilization, Thought & Policy and gave numerous talks and public appearances in October 2017.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is not required, but is suggested. You can find information on how to register here.

Katharine Jefferts Schori will speak on “The Measure, Dimension, and Intersectionality of Truth” on Thursday, Feb. 1, at 5:30 p.m. in Hale Science 270 on campus.

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Trump's America, one year later, is focus of diverse panel discussion

Anonymous — Mon, 15 Jan 2018 04:47:32 +0000

Trump's America, one year later, is focus of diverse panel discussion Anonymous (not verified) Sun, 01/14/2018 - 21:47

It's been one year since President Donald Trump took office after the most surprising and controversial election in American history. Has the Trump presidency lived up to its expectations, good or bad?

That question will be discussed by a diverse panel of undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty from across the political spectrum at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The panel discussion, titled “Trump’s America: One Year Later,” is scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 24, at 5:30 p.m. in Hale Science Room 270 on campus.

The event, which is sponsored by the CU Boulder Center for Western Civilization, Thought & Policy (CWCTP), includes the following panelists:

Michaele L. Ferguson, associate professor of political science, faculty associate of women and gender studies
Eric Alston, scholar in residence, finance division, and faculty director, Hernando de Soto Capital Markets Program at Leeds School of Business
Caroline Grego, Ph.D. candidate in history
Blake K. Herron, law student and president of the Colorado chapter of the Federalist Society
Katiana Hutchinson, CWCTP undergraduate fellow and former organizer for Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign in Cuyahoga County, Ohio
Alex Vela, CWCTP undergraduate fellow and president of CU College Republicans

The event is free and open to the public. Registration is recommended.

The Center for Western Civilization, Thought & Policy promotes critical reflection on the distinctive traditions and political perspectives that characterize Western Civilization. The center encourages residents of Colorado and the United States to more fully understand and appreciate their past, their future and a free and creative American society within an International environment.

A panel discussion titled “Trump’s America: One Year Later” is scheduled for Wednesday, Jan. 24, at 5:30 p.m. in Hale Science Room 270

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Should Christians exercise ‘The Benedict Option’?

Anonymous — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 17:46:30 +0000

Should Christians exercise ‘The Benedict Option’? Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/24/2017 - 11:46

Clint Talbott

Rod Dreher to make the case for emulating St. Benedict’s retreat from a decadent world in CU Boulder appearance

Rod Dreher, a widely quoted author who argues that Christianity is under siege and that Christians should prepare for a coming dark age of persecution by forming their own communities, will discuss the topic at the University of Colorado Boulder next month.

Dreher’s presentation, titled “The Benedict Option: The Future of Religious Conservatism in Post-Christian America,” is scheduled for Wenesday, April 5, at 6 p.m. in Eaton Humanities 150 on the CU Boulder campus.

The event is free and open to the public, but registration for the event is strongly encouraged to ensure that enough seating is available.

Dreher, a writer and senior editor at The American Conservative, is the author of “The Benedict Option,” a New York Times bestseller that urges Christians to follow the example of St. Benedict of Nursia, a sixth-century monk who retreated from the chaos and decadence of the collapsing Roman Empire, and found a new way to live out the faith in community.

Rod Dreher

Dreher writes: “There can be no peace between Christianity and the Sexual Revolution, because they are radically opposed. As the Sexual Revolution advances, Christianity must retreat—and it has, faster than most people would have thought possible.”

Dreher answered questions from Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine about his work:

Q: The New York Times columnist David Brooks and The Atlantic characterize your view of the threat to Christianity as being primarily from the sexual revolution. Is that distillation correct?

A: Not really, but I can see how someone would interpret it that way. The threat to Christianity, as I hope the book shows, is from modernity in the sense that what characterizes modernity as a mindset (as distinct from what came before) is a metaphysical belief that truth is in the eye of the beholder. Gradually, over centuries, we in the West came to see truth as a subjective phenomenon; it became “truth.” In the 20th century, the sovereign self moved clearly into the center of our collective consciousness, and fulfilling the self’s desires became our telos, or ultimate goal. “Freedom” meant not freedom for moral excellence, as in the classical view, but freedom from constraint.

The Sexual Revolution is the most important revolution of our time, because it is predicated on a cosmic revolution — that is, the shattering of Christian norms. The Sexual Revolution proclaims sexual desire as central to human identity, and fulfilling sexual desire as the near-absolute telos of life. In 1966, the social critic Philip Rieff, a secular Jew, observed that the emerging permissive sexual ethic was radically incompatible with historic Christianity, but the church today would not be able to stop it. I think there is a direct correlation between the ongoing triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the decline of Christianity. It’s not that there was ever an era in which all Christians were chaste; that would be a silly claim. What has changed is that we have abandoned the old standard, however badly we failed to live up to it in the past. From that, a great deal of moral and social disorder has taken hold in society. I think it’s no accident that the churches that have accommodated themselves to the Sexual Revolution have not flourished, but are collapsing faster than those that have mounted some resistance.

I think this is inextricably tied to consumer capitalism, too, and the way it teaches us to find our identity in our desires and their fulfillment. But that’s another story.

Because people might have different conceptions of what the sexual revolution was or is, how would you define it?

It’s a broad term referring to events from the years 1960 to 1980, roughly, during which time the older view of sexuality, its meaning, and the ethics surrounding it. For various reasons—including, note well, the advent of the birth control pill—American society began to embrace, indeed to celebrate, sexual autonomy. This led to the skyrocketing divorce rate in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, and the ongoing fragmentation of the family in the decades since. And now, we have not only lost the natural family model, but we are watching the connection between biology and gender being demolished. Has anything like this ever happened to the human race—and so quickly?

To be sure, the Sexual Revolution is only the leading edge of the broader revolution firmly establishing the Self as sovereign in our society.

I’m talking about preserving the faith in community so that decades, even centuries, from now, if American society, or its successor, is willing to embrace Christianity again, and return it to the center of culture, there will be an orthodox form of Christianity for them to embrace.

You’ve argued that journalists tend not to represent Christianity or Christians fairly; if you were to offer one piece of advice to American journalists about covering religion and Christianity, what would it be?

This is a hard one, because there are so many things I could say. I suppose the main one is to put aside the idea that Christianity—or any religion, really—is an add-on to life. For people serious about their faith, it is their life. It is true, alas, that many, perhaps most, American Christians don’t live their faith this way, but however imperfectly, many of us understand our faith as the thing that orders all of our life, and not the other way around. Along these lines, I would strongly encourage journalists to set aside the assumption that secular liberalism is a neutral stance. It is not. It has its own dogmas and doctrines, but the fact that so many journalists and American elites are secular liberals, the dogmatic nature of it is hidden from their sight.

If like-minded Christians were to withdraw from society, at least in part, would they be able to insulate themselves sufficiently from discrimination and harassment (e.g., job loss and name-calling)?

Not if by “insulate” you mean avoid it. It’s coming, and we had better prepare for it. Preparing for it means forming ourselves spiritually to endure without losing our faith or our composure. Christians are not permitted by our faith to hate those who persecute or ill-treat us. This is going to be a challenge, for sure. But I also believe that we should build the economic and social support infrastructure to support each other when we lose our jobs or are treated badly. That’s not insulation, exactly, but it does make for resilience.

In the longer term, if some Christians were to build communities of resistance that would “outwit, outlast and eventually overcome the occupation,” how would you suggest that those future Christians later live with those who had engaged in a secular “occupation”?

In peace. I don’t want to give you the impression that I’m talking about some kind of weirdo Christian militia. I’m talking about preserving the faith in community so that decades, even centuries, from now, if American society, or its successor, is willing to embrace Christianity again, and return it to the center of culture, there will be an orthodox form of Christianity for them to embrace.

Dreher’s appearance is sponsored by CU Boulder’s Center for Western Civilization, Thought and Policy.

Conservative author Rod Dreher to make the case for emulating St. Benedict’s retreat from a decadent world in CU Boulder appearance.

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