The Center for the Restoration of Christian Culture
The Thomas More Center for the Restoration of Christian Culture seeks to promote a vigorous public witness to the faith in New England. Following the lead of its patron, St. Thomas More, the Center will focus its efforts in five areas: education, culture, Church teaching, civic life, and family life.The Center hopes to address the crisis of our age: the crisis of a civilization that has drifted from the principles on which it was founded. Lacking a firm foundation, our society is unstable; we no longer have the shared set of fundamental principles that is required for productive discussions. So our public debates have degenerated into shouting matches.The purpose of the Thomas More Center, however, is not to mourn the decline in society, but to build an outpost of civility: a community in which reasoned discussion, animated by Christian faith, can work toward a revival. The Center will advance beyond the past battles of the “culture wars” (although from time to time our members may play their own roles in public controversies). Our goal is to set the agenda for the public discussions of coming years. Toward that end, the Center will invite speakers, host seminars, and organize conferences. We will encourage both intellectuals and civic leaders to take part in discussions, exploring the practical applications of our ideas. The Center will act as a bridge, bringing together town and gown—always under the guidance of the Church.The Center is a project of Thomas More College and finds a natural partnership with a school dedicated to the pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful. The Center will challenge students and faculty—and beyond the campus, our neighbors in the town and the region—not only to discuss and appreciate the principles on which our culture is founded, but to live those principles. The Center will support active involvement in the arts, in politics, in literature, in education, and above all in the life of faith. In short, the Center will explore the crucial questions of how mature Christians can live in freedom, and how people of faith can give new hope to a secularized society.The primary mission of the Center is unapologetically focused upon New England. We hope to stimulate a revival of Christian culture in a region that has always been a seedbed of new ideas and ideals—where the original European settlers, motivated by their own active Christian faith, first sought to build a “shining city on a hill.” Our own geographical scope will be limited, but we hope that others, fortified by our example, will build similar institutions elsewhere.To learn more, please visit https://restorationchristianculture.org/
The Center for the Restoration of Christian Culture
Was America’s Founding Fatally Flawed by the Provenance of Its Ideas? with Robert Reilly
•Season 1
Troubled by the ample evidence of a moral decline in the United States, some Catholic thinkers trace the problem to what they see as a fatal flaw in the American Founding: a reliance on the philosophical principles of the Enlightenment. Robert Reilly, the author of America on Trial, disagrees. He argues that the political ideas of the Founders are compatible with—and indeed derived from—the tradition of respect for Reason and Revelation, Church and State, developed by Catholic philosophers of the Middle Ages.
Robert Reilly is Director of the Westminster Institute. In his twenty-five years of government service, he served as Special Assistant to the President and as Director of the Voice of America, was Senior Advisor for Information Strategy to the Secretary of Defense, and taught at National Defense University.
Image: The Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull
