The Academy of Philosophy and Letters will be holding its annual conference at the BWI in Baltimore on May 27-29. The Topic this year is “The Benedict Option: The Problems of Culture in Times of Crisis.” This will be the first serious academic conference dedicated to Rod Dreher’s idea of “the Benedict Option.” Rod will be the keynote speaker. Porchers speaking at the conference include Mark Mitchell, James Matthew Wilson, and yours truly (I’ll be on a panel with Rod, Claes Ryn, and David Walsh). Walter McDougall will be the Saturday evening dinner speaker.

Any readers interested in attending ought to contact Justin Garrison (garrison@roanoke.edu) for more information.

Updated Conference Schedule 2

Local Culture
Local Culture
Local Culture
Local Culture
Previous articleFrom the Multiversity Cave: Students and the State
Next articleGrowing Up Stoic
Jeffrey Polet
Jeffrey Polet
Jeffrey Polet grew up in an immigrant household in the immigrant town of Holland MI. After twenty years of academic wandering he returned to Holland and now teaches political science at Hope College, where he also grudgingly serves as chair of the department, having unsuccessfully evaded all requests. In the interim, he continues to nurture quirky beliefs: Division III basketball is both athletically and morally superior to Division I; the Hope/Calvin rivalry is the greatest in sports; the lecture is still the best form of classroom instruction; never buy a car with less than 100,000 miles on it; putts will still lip out in heaven; bears are the incarnation of evil; Athens actually has something to do with Jerusalem; and Tombstone is a cinematic classic. His academic work has mirrored his peripatetic career. Originally trained at the Catholic University of America in German philosophy and hermeneutical theory, he has since gravitated to American Political Thought. He still occasionally writes about European thinkers such as Michel Foucault or the great Max Weber, but mostly is interested in the relationship between theological reflection and political formation in the American context. In the process of working on a book on John Marshall for The Johns Hopkins University Press, he became more sensitive to the ways in which centralized decision-making undid local communities and autonomy. He has also written on figures such as William James and the unjustly neglected Swedish novelist Paer Lagerkvist. A knee injury and arthritis eliminated daily basketball playing, and he now spends his excess energy annoying his saintly wife and their three children, two of whom are off to college. Expressions of sympathy for the one who remains can be posted in the comments section. He doesn’t care too much for movies, but thinks opera is indeed the Gesamtkuntswerk, that the music of Gustav Mahler is as close as human beings get to expressing the ineffable, that God listens to Mozart in his spare time, and that Bach is history’s greatest genius.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR