Conference

Schedule

Opening debate: February 4th at 7:30 pm in the Eck Visitors Center. Reception to follow.

Panel discussion: February 5th at 4:00 pm in the Eck Visitors Center

Participants

Mark Lilla

Professor at Columbia University, Mark Lilla is the author of numerous books including The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern World and G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-modern. He is a frequent contributor to various publications such as the New York Review of Books and the New Republic.

Bill Galston

Bill Galston is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and is the author of six books and nearly one hundred articles on questions of political and moral philosophy, American politics and public policy. His most recent book is Public Matters: Politics, Policy, and Religion in the 21st Century (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005). Galston is also a co-author of Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Undermine Citizen Participation and What We Can Do About It. His current research focuses on designing a new social contract and the implications of political polarization.

He was the Executive Director, National Commission on Civic Renewal; Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy (1993-1995); Fellow, Woodrow Wilson Center; Director of Economic and Social Programs, Roosevelt Center for Economic American Policy Studies; and Senior Adviser, Gore for President Campaign.

Nicholas Wolterstorff

Dr. Wolterstorff is the Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. His diverse and prolific publications include: On Universals, Works and Worlds of Art, Art in Action, John Locke and the Ethics of Belief, and Thomas Reid and the Story of Epistemology. In theology he has published Divine Discourse, as well as Faith and Rationality with Notre Dame’s Alvin Plantinga. In political philosophy he published Until Justice and Peace Embrace. He has given both the Wilde Lecture at Oxford University and the prestigious Gifford Lecture at St. Andrews University.

Richard Garnett

Richard W. Garnett received his B.A. in philosophy summa cum laude from Duke University in 1990, and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1995. He served as senior editor of the Yale Law Journal and as editor of the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. After graduation, he clerked for Chief Judge Richard S. Arnold of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, and then for Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist. He practiced law for two years at the Washington, D.C., law firm of Miller, Cassidy, Larroca & Lewin, specializing in criminal defense, religious liberty, and education reform matters. At Notre Dame, he teaches courses on criminal law, criminal procedure, First Amendment law, and the death penalty.

John McGreevy

John McGreevy is the author of two books. The first, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1996. The second, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History was published by W.W. Norton in 2003. He has received major fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Louisville Institute and the Erasmus Institute, and has published articles and reviews in the Journal of American History, Commonweal, the New Republic, the Chicago Tribune and other venues.

Mark Noll

Mark Noll teaches in the Department of History at Notre Dame and was recognized by Time Magazine as one of the “25 most influential evangelicals in America.” He has written extensively about religion in American public life and authored a prolific number of books, including One Nation Under God: Christian Faith and Political Action in America, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, Turning Points: Decisive Moments in the History of Christianity, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln, The Work We Have to Do: A History of Protestants in America, and, most recently, What Happened to Christian Canada?

David Campbell

David Campbell is the John Cardinal O’Hara, C.S.C. Associate Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame. His recent book Why We Vote: How Schools and Communities Shape Our Civic Life demonstrates how communities foster civic norms, and how civic norms adopted in adolescence can lead to a lifetime of civic engagement. He is also the editor of A Matter of Faith: Religion in the 2004 Presidential Election, a co-author of The Education Gap: Vouchers and Urban Schools, and Democracy at Risk: How Political Choices Have Undermined Citizenship and What We Can Do About It, as well as co-editor of Charters, Vouchers, and Public Education. He has won awards from the American Political Science Association for the best doctoral dissertation in American politics, the best paper on elections and voting, and (twice) for the best paper on religion and politics at the association’s annual meeting. He is currently collaborating with Robert Putnam on a study of religion’s changing role in American civic life.

Michael Zuckert

Michael Zuckert is the Nancy Reeves Dreux Professor, and Chair, Department of Political Science. He works in political philosophy, American constitutional law and theory, and American political thought. He has published Natural Rights and the New Republicanism, The Natural Rights Republic, and Launching Liberalism: On Lockean Political Philosophy, as well as many articles on a variety of topics, including George Orwell, Plato’s Apology, Shakespeare, and contemporary liberal theory. His most recent book is The Truth about Leo Strauss (with Catherine Zuckert). He is currently completing a book called A System without a Precedent: Constituting the Natural Rights Republic, is co-authoring a book on Machiavelli and Shakespeare, and has been commissioned to write the volume on John Rawls for a new series on 20th century political philosophy. He co-authored and co-produced the public radio series Mr. Adams and Mr. Jefferson: A Nine Part Drama for the Radio and was senior scholar for Liberty!, a six hour public television series on the American Revolution, as well as a PBS series on Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. He has received grants from NEH, the Woodrow Wilson Center, Earhart Foundation and NSF, and has taught at Carleton College, Cornell University, Claremont Men’s College, Fordham University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and the University of Chicago.