Greetings from Tampa, where I have been attending the spring meeting of the Philadelphia Society since Thursday. I have been on the road attending conferences for seven of the past eleven days and have had almost no time to read or write, so this post will have to be a relatively brief update.
New Content for All Subscribers
A decade ago, I contributed chapters to a symposium titled Christian Faith and Social Justice: Five Views, edited by my old friend Vic McCracken and published by Bloomsbury Academic. I was asked to supply a libertarian perspective on social justice; the other contributors represented Rawlsian liberalism, liberation theology, feminism, and virtue ethics. The exchange of views was instructive, if not always enlightening.
The guys who host the Libertarian Christian Institute’s podcast interviewed me about the project not long after the book’s publication, and this January they reissued the episode as part of their “greatest hits” series. I am posting the link to the interview here as well as on the My Work Around the Web tab of this Substack’s website. Enjoy.
Update
I attended the annual conference of the Association for Core Texts and Courses at the downtown Sheraton in Memphis, April 11-13. This conference has been around for almost 30 years, but I had never attended it before despite its obvious overlap with my academic interests and the degree programs I direct.
At most conferences I attend these days, I know a fair number of people. I quickly realized that I knew almost no one at this conference besides the organization’s executive director, who for years had encouraged me to attend, and one or two other people. (One attendee whom I had not previously met, a graduate student at Baylor, recognized me and identified himself as a reader of this Substack!) There were many faculty as well as graduate students from smaller schools and community colleges with which I was unfamiliar.
ACTC had a very packed schedule, with several sessions each day and half a dozen or more concurrent sessions running during each time slot. The majority of the sessions were what I’d describe as traditional, with paper titles implying efforts to interpret canonical works in standard ways. But there were also a fair number of sessions representing some of the contemporary preoccupations in the academy. I always had plenty of interesting options from which to choose in each session and never felt like I would have to sit through anything weird. I recall a fascinating panel on Aristotle, for example. I also enjoyed watching one of my doctoral students present a paper on Henri Bergson that she had originally written for a course in the program I direct.
I hope to attend ACTC again in the future and encourage my students to consider submitting papers to it.
For the past four days, I have been in Tampa for the spring meeting of the Philadelphia Society (PhillySoc). On Thursday evening, I attended a banquet sponsored by the National Review Institute (NRI) for PhillySoc’s “Founders Fellows,” a group of graduate students and young professionals who were selected from a competitive pool of applicants to come to the meeting a day early and discuss a set of readings from NRI’s “Burke to Buckley” program. This was an impressive group, and I was able to spend time getting to know almost all of them.
Friday and Saturday were a blur, beginning with a board meeting and followed by lectures, discussion panels, receptions, and dinners. The conversations always continue late into the evening in the hotel’s common areas. I did manage to get back to my room before midnight each night.
A personal highlight for me was being asked to lead the invocation at the gala on Saturday evening to mark PhillySoc’s 60th anniversary. The Heritage Foundation’s Ed Feulner, one of Phillysoc’s founding members, personally sponsored a big-band orchestra to play at the event, and there were five (FIVE) toasts during the banquet to honor the society’s founders.
I always come away from these meetings with many ideas for projects and collaborative efforts, but invariably the best part of the events is reconnecting with friends I have made over the years.
Now it’s back to Arkansas for what I hope will be a productive week of writing and teaching as I wrap up the spring term.