October 7-8, 2022
Restoring a Nation:
The Common Good in the American Tradition
Presented in collaboration with the Bonum Commune Foundation
The 2022 Veritas Center Conference at Franciscan University brings together leading scholars, elected officials, journalists, and students who recognize that America’s liberal consensus has enriched and empowered a narrow elite – but failed the nation and its people.
Promising equal opportunity, it has entrenched chasmic material inequalities, plunging working- and middle-class people into depths of job and health insecurity, and despair. Promising a marketplace of ideas and an endless array of lifestyle choices, it has yielded a suffocating conformism, a public square owned and controlled by a few corporations. Promising to liberate the individual from inherited obligations and unchosen communities, it has done just that, shattering the family and the political community and leaving the individual defenseless amid the topsy-turvy of the market.
There is another way: a different account of our common life ordered to the true flourishing of the whole. It’s a vision as old as the triple foundations of the West: Greek philosophy, Christian religion, and Roman law. And yet this vision is no foreign or exotic thing. Time and again, it has found expression, however inchoately, in America’s non-liberal traditions: from the classical frame that renders American law legible as law, to the vital resistance movements against liberal domination that shook the 19th and 20th centuries and produced enduring reforms. Our task, then, isn’t to fashion something new – but to recover forgotten wisdom.
The Post-Liberal Promise: Another World Is Possible
What does it mean to be post-liberal today? This panel discussion at the 2022 Restoring a Nation Conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville explores this question and more with panelists Sohrab Ahmari, visiting fellow at Franciscan University and conference organizer; Dr. Patrick Deneen, political science professor at the University of Notre Dame; and Dr. Gladden Pappin, visiting fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and political science professor at the University of Dallas.
The Perfect Society: Church, State, and the Common Good
For the 2022 Restoring a Nation Conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Dr. Scott Hahn, theology professor at Franciscan University, talks about how the sacrament of marriage and the family can transform culture. Dr. Chad Pecknold, systematic theology professor at Catholic University of America, then speaks to what constitutes a perfect society. R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, closes by discussing economic implications.
America’s Forgotten Common-Good Traditions
Michael Lind, author of The New Class War and Land of Promise, and Johnny Burtka, president of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, discuss the forgotten common-good traditions of America for the 2022 Restoring a Nation Conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville.
Political Economy and Family Policy After Dobbs
How can we foster more pro-life and pro-family policies, especially after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs? Dr. Anne Hendershott, sociology professor at Franciscan University and director of the Veritas Center, highlights the urgent need for policies that strengthen marriage and families. Dr. Gladden Pappin, visiting fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and political science professor at the University of Dallas, talks about the state’s role in family policy. Dr. Darel Paul, political science professor at Williams College, discusses how political economy impacts marriage and family.
What’s New in the New Right?
Rachel Bovard, senior director of policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute; Matthew Schmitz, founder of Compact magazine; and Dr. Mary Imparato, political science professor at Belmont Abbey College, talk about the history and future of the political Right in America at the 2022 Restoring a Nation Conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville.
What’s New in the New Right?: Josh Hammer (Audio)
Josh Hammer, opinion editor of Newsweek and syndicated columnist, talks about the New Right movement in modern American political life in this audio clip from the 2022 Restoring a Nation Conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville.