1. Okay, so that title makes no sense. But I did see part of the CMA awards show the other night.
2. Marc Guerra, America’s leading theologian, reminds me that I haven’t posted on the wonderful conference (the first in our University of Chicago Science of Virtues/Stuck with Virtue series) we had at Berry last week on Descartes, Locke, and Darwin, featuring fascinating (and very high pay grade) lectures by TOM HIBBS, (Darwinian) LARRY ARNHART, JIM STONER, and (the Christian/Heideggerian physician) JEFF BISHOP.
3. There were also some very fine and genuinely entertaining panels on Being Cartesian, Walker Percy, and Tom Wolfe. I don’t have time to give all the presenters the praise they deserve (including the spirited and amusing but still genuinely instructive words of Berry College grads ELIZABETH [the Deist] AMATO and DAVID RAMSEY and of our own SAM GOLDMAN). What impressed me the most, though, was the large, attentive, and respectful audiences, including Berry students and faculty, people from the Rome [GA] community, and professors and other intellectual types from all over the South, and students from a half-dozen other colleges—including an impressive number from both Union College in Tennessee [which seems to be a fine college on the move] and Lee University. And all our guests were grateful that Berry’s president, Steve Briggs, played such a large and classy role in the event. It really was an interdisciplinary, inter-faith, and multiple-perspectives etc. occasion. I also want to thank the INTERCOLLEGIATE STUDIES INSTITUTE for helping us to cover the meals and lodging of everyone on the program.
4. Our RALPH HANCOCK, the distinguished president/founder of the JOHN ADAMS CENTER, concluded the conference with appropriately conservative and postmodern poetry, suggesting ways to reconcile the love of wisdom and the wisdom of love.
5. OUR NEXT CONFERENCE will be April 8-9 at Berry. The featured speakers will be DR. PAT DENEEN (who will scare to virtue those who don’t believe we’re on the eve . . . ), RONALD BAILEY (and his liberation/libertarian bioethics), CHARLIE RUBIN (and his fascination with transhumanism as a real clue about our possible post-virtue future), and BOB KRAYNAK (and his meat-and-potatoes Augustinian Catholicism).
6. YOU are invited to this conference. We’re still looking for respondents, commentators, and all that. Contact me at plawler@berry.edu. We (that is, ME and America’s leading theologian) could also use additional donations to cover essential expenses, although we’re not allowed to ask for them here.
7. I hope RALPH will post on the most relevant CONSTITUTIONAL event of the John Adams Center at BYU next week, which, of course, will include ME.
