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. Continue reading →

The Institute is pleased to announce its 2016-17 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? Continue reading →