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brad gregory is the author of "the uninteded reformation" them resented his look on the protestant reformation in western society and culture. professor agrees the recipient of the 2013 isi henry and anne paulucci book award. good. all right right, well, good eveg and welcome. welcome to the 2013 isi henry and anne paulucci book award presentation. my name is mark henry and i'm senior vice president and chief academic officer at the intercollegiate studies institute, isi. for those of you who may be new to us isi is a national education organization founded in 1953 and philadelphia and headquartered since 1996 on centerville rd. in greenville.

isi's mission is to educate for liberty, inspiring college students to discover, embrace and advance the principles and virtues that make america free and prosperous. with the thousands of student and faculty members on virtually every college campus in the country, isi each year produces a class of young and energetic leaders who, thanks to isi programs and publications embark on their careers with a particularly deep understanding of and commitment to the american ideal of ordered liberty. isi and the conducts over 200 educational programs around the country including lectures, debates, conferences seminars and summer schools. isi also offers fellowships for aspiring college teachers. through our collegiate member we support dozens of newspapers.

we also publish the quarterly journal and under our imprint isi books we have -- the general reader soft on penetrating conservative insights of recent decades. the isi henry and anne paulucci book award is named for two remarkable individuals who together constituted an extraordinary couple. henry paolucci was the university professor and prolific writer who possess a broad mastery of the history of political thought as well as a keen sense of the influence of the past upon present political and economic realities. a polymath scholar ballucci's interests range from mathematics and astronomy to literary theory and political philosophy from greek and roman antiquities to american history and christian doctrine. another of the staggering number of books he taught english literature i am a college roman

history at city college in brooklyn college government and politics at st. johns university and medieval culture at columbia university. he was also a key figure in any candidate for for the conservative party of new york. he passed away in 1991. henry's wife and intellectual partner of more than 50 years was ann belluci. she was an internationally acclaimed scholar and comparative literary studies as well as an award-winning playwright poet and fiction writer peered her most enduring critical were works on the playwrights edward albee and luigi -- in addition to leading the council and national literature for 30 years pre-she served on the national council or the humanities and is a trustee and chairman of the board of trustees at the city university of new york. she passed away in 2012. it was a ann who came to isi in

early 2000's because she recognized isi is a conservative institution with an enduring commitment to culture. she also recognize that isi is a faithful steward of all its undertaking. her final than affection both endows this book award in perpetuity and will allow isi to expand its programming in the area of national literature. the isi henry and anne paulucci award is $5000 presented by isi each year to deserving scholar whose intellectual achievement in the form of a look published in the previous year embodies the spirit range and scholarly rigor of the -- so our main event. brad gregory is professor of history and dorothy g. griffin collegiate chair at the university of notre dame where he was also recently named the director of the notre dame institute for advanced study. he has had a meteoric academic

career. in 1996 to 2003 he taught at stanford university where he received early tenure in 2000 won't. before teaching at stanford he earned his ph.d. in history at princeton university and was a junior fellow in the harvard society. he also holds two degrees in philosophy both earned at the catholic university in belgium. he has delivered lectures of many the most prestigious universities in the united states as well as in england scotland ireland norway l. jim the netherlands italy israel and taiwan. he is also a standout teacher having received to teaching awards at stanford and three at notre dame. the end intended -- the "the uninteded reformation" is brad's most recent book.

a very controversial book epochmaking strong claims however ironical. it is a very big book. though there are those that believe that it ought to have been still longer in order to carry its argument. the book is in a certain sense history turned upside down. that is to say most of us carry around in our heads something of historical cartoon inherited her hats from edward gibbons among others in which the middle ages are seen as a time of darkness and stagnation. a turning point occurs 16th century after which there is a leap of human progress first in northwestern europe but at length everywhere across the globe. indeed the historical forces unleashed and now modern turn are such that progress becomes inevitable. history mounts ever higher and there are no genuine losses associated with the modern age. breds look contests this

basically on two counts. on the one hand he observes that there are indeed losses as well as gains in modern progress and at some level everyone will have especially conservatives knows this. on the other hand and this is what is intellectually exciting about the book he demonstrates there is very little inevitable about the contours of our contemporary world. in fact the road by which the past became the present is filled with contingencies, with things that did not have to turn out quite the way they did. alternatives are indeed imaginable. that is not to say that brad gregory is nostalgic. in fact, this concluding chapter is entitled against nostalgia. there he observes that quote judged on their own terms and with respect to the objectives of their own leading protagonists, medieval christendom failed. the reformation failed.

confessional lies to europe failed and western modernity has failed. but each in different ways and with different consequences. did i mention that the book was controversial? ladies and gentlemen, brad gregory. [applause] >> the thanks very much mark are the gracious introduction and tanks to all of you for being here and for coming this evening. you can tell from that last quote that mark offered that the look is a real up beat and encouraging diagnosis of the situation which we find ourselves. it's an extraordinary honor and a privilege to receive this year's henry and anne paulucci book award to be added to a list of award recipients that in the last five years alone includes

polly mayor, philip hamburger and charles taylor is humbling to say the least. i'm grateful to the intercollegiate studies institute for selecting my book from among many others that i'm sure were also worth and i would like to express my particular gratitude to mark henry for his standout hospitality. i will speak for probably about 30 minutes or so and be happy afterward to answer any questions that anyone might have needless to say a brief presentation like this one cannot hope to convey the fullness of the book that is nearly 600 pages long but i do hope it will give some of you who have not yet had a chance to read the book some sense of its principle aims in arguments and i should just say that the actual size of the book is somewhat smaller than the representation that you see so you need not worry about how you will carry it home with you should you decide to buy a copy.

"the uninteded reformation" is a work of historical analysis that takes its presence as a point of departure. it does not aspire to be comprehensive but the book does aim in the first instance to be as explanatory weight powerful as possible while making as few theoretical and methodological assumptions as necessary. assume as little as possible and try to explain as much as possible. secondarily the book addresses some major contemporary concerns based on this historical analysis. my remarks this evening are going to be mostly about the first ambition, the explanatory powerful aspect in near the end i will say a few things about the second speaking to contemporary concerns on the basis of that historical analysis. i endeavor in "the uninteded reformation" to answer basic a very big question. how did contemporary ideological and institutional realities in

north america and europe come to be the way that they are? the book intends to characterize these realities matter-of-factly in ideological terms, they include an open-ended range of secular and religious truth claims by individuals about matters pertaining to human meaning, morality, purpose and priorities including some religious truth claims articulated with great intellectual sophistication by theologians and philosophers of religion. insofar as the present is the product of the past, any adequate historical accounts must be able to pay attention to antics lang all of these claims. the modern liberal institutions variously characteristic of all contemporary western states permit this ideological heterogeneity through the legal and political protection of individual citizens to believe

and live as they please so long as they obey the established laws. so that is what needs to be accounted for. these institutions in the ideologicideologic al heterogeneity that they bring. the book's explanation of how the past became the present question says mark mentions many widely held assumptions. the reason is simple. typical narratives, common conceptions of change over time and ordinary historical methodologies cannot answer the book central question. they fail to do justice to the full range of moral and metaphysical commitment encompassed under the first-person plural, we. when it is used inclusively have all present-day europeans and the americans. who are we? we should not underestimate the importance of this question and the content of the answer.

predominant large-scale historical narratives in which catholicism is thought to have been superceded by the protestant reformation which was in turn superceded by enlightened modernity only to be superceded in turn by the postmodern present would seem to imply that now we are all secular skeptical fragmented selves that we are not. i am not and i suspect that many of you gathered here this evening are not either. this inaccurate generalization then does not describe even highly educated westerners because it fails to account for the wide variety also of secular moderate rationalist or contemporary religious believers. what needs to be explained then is not a nonexistent uniform secularism that doesn't exist but a heterogeneous pluralism of individuals who hold rival secular and religious truth

claims that diversely influence their actions and then contribute collectively to public life. complex questions of historical explanation confront anyone who seeks to know what people today believe, where their beliefs come from and what their beliefs are based on. this is not only because individuals change over time and are usually complicated hybrids. not only the beliefs but also their related assumptions arose through historical processes. the believe is are also embodied practitioners who enact behaviors within social relationships of political institutions all of which can and do change over time in complicated ways. no explanatory narrative could consider all of the relative evidence. ..

in order to answer the question of how the past became the present, we have to bracket some of the ways in which historians ordinarily proceed. we need a more promising method. one that could, in principle, if never in fact, integrate all the relevant findings of specialized historical scholarship, while

simultaneously recognizing that not only this research but all knowledge-making depends on assumptions that are themselves part of what requires explanation. this line of thought lies behind the unusual method and approach of the unintended reformation. in its attempt to explain how the past became the present, the book is both more analytical and more synthetic than most works of history. and it's more analytical first because it's deliberately selective use of reconstructive descriptions of past individuals, institutions and ideas, is subordinated to explanation and what is what relentlessly argument driven book. second it's highly an lit tall because the chapter structure is based on untangling different parts of life that are more easily grasped when considered

one at a time. i'll say something more about each of the books' six chapters in a moment. human beings act on certain desires rather than others. they believe some things and not others. they inhabit particular socioeconomic and political positions rather than others. and, yet, it is difficult, all at once, to see these things. and to pursue their changes overtime. hence, six chapters, each of which concentrates on a different concern. the "the unintended reformation" is more synthetic because each of its chapters contributes to the collective argument of the whole. no chapters are meant to stand alone, despite their diversity. the book seeks to show that intellectual, political, social, and economic history, cannot be neatly separated from one

another, because human beings embedded within social and political relationships, enact desires in relationship to the natural world, influenced by beliefs and ideas. and the book synthesizes specialized historical scholarship about the middle ages and the modern era in a manner consistent with its overall explanatory objectives. the specific and particular in the human path are incorporated, not by directly including enormous numbers of individual examples. rather, i synthesize and incorporate into the analytical narrative a considerable body of more specialized and conventional historical scholarship. now, answering the seemingly straightforward questions about how the past became the present, turns out also to place considerable demands on the reader. please do not let this deter you from buying and reading the

book. i think it's quite clearly written. not an easy read but that's because the past is not easy to understand. there are multiple reasons why it places demands on the reader. different dough mains of human life are analytically distinguished from one another and are also intertwined parts. this simultaneous distinguishing and relating covers a chronological span of more than half a millennium. why? because restricting ourselves to the modern era cannot explain how the past became the present. when required particular attention to the reformation era. the book, thus, transgresses common boundaries of historical periodization, and substantively the book incorporates in a highly come pressed way the relationship among signs, metta

physics and conceptions of god, catholic, protestant claims about fundamental matters of human mean egg, values and publishing. the public exercise of institutional power. moral theories and practices in relationship to political theories and institutions. human desires in regs so capital him and consumption and the character and institutional sites of knowledgemaking along the human intellectual inquire. i toss readers many balls and ask you to keep juggling. let me say a bit more about the chapters. chapter one. excluding god. explores some of the long-term consequences of what was initially a subtle rejection of the long-standing christian view of god's relationship to creation beginning in the late middle ages. this rejection tacitly and yet

far from subtly, continues to dominate modern intellectual life. among to the most significant consequences have been the pervasive modern spread of the view that increasingly powerful scientific explanations of natural regularities, what we call science, provide progressively compelling evidence against the claims of revealed religion as such. so the more science explains, it is thought, the less room there is for god. this view turns out to be the result of contingent and often unknowingly held metaphysical assumptions with immediate -- medieval roots the historical significance of these assumptions became unexpectedly important starting in the 17th 17th century because of the ways in which controversy in the reformation era unintentionally marginalized theological

discourse about god in the natural word. that leaves scientific and fifth sol cal discower discough of trying to talk about god. in chapter 2, the protestant reformation are analyzed as the two mores important and related means by which attempts were made to ground truth claims by those who rejected immediate evil christianant. thatthat's has unintended pleasurisms based on the bible and reason. impasses and the rear familiar -- reformation era helped -- but historically, and empirically. reason alone, has proved no more capable than scripture alone

since luther, of providing a basis for reaching shared answers, to questions about what is true, how people should live, or what they should care about. the long-term result is the open-ended, multiplication of truth claims about such issues. that proliferate within modern western states today, and that collectively contribute to what i call in the book, western hyper pleurallism. hyper pluralism. another phrase i use in the book, in the kingdom of whatever. chapter three, controlling the churches. shows how the reformation transformed the already growing late medieval oversight of ecloseasiccal institutions by nonecclesiastical authorities which eventually left a lasting legacy of the modern state's control of religion and the secularization via religious

toleration. among those christians who rejected the roman church, only politically supported forms of protestantism were able to have a wide lasting influence, alongside catholic regimes in the early modern period inconclusive conflicts in the reformation era prompted the political protection of religious freedom in exchange for religions' privatization. although states today control churches, no less, although very differently, than did confessional states in early modern europe. the subject of chapter four, subjectivizing morallate, is the transition from the -- to the formal ethics of rights. this transition came about through the disagreements and disdisruption of the christian

goods because reflected disputes about the good and its implications for human life. modern moral and political discourse transformed the traditional discourse on rights and left depression of the good up to individuals -- left determination of the good up to individuals but the extent to which modern moral and political communities continue to rely on substantive beliefs about the good derived from christianity. the growing abandonment of those beliefs has precip tated divisions among citizens today that put increasing pressure on the liberal democracies that enable those very divisions. one result is the notable ran core and incivility of our public discourse, not to mention our dysfunctional congress in recent years. whether or not we think this is accurately referred to as a culture war.

chapter five, manufacturing the goods life. it's the only clever title among the six. concentrates on consumption in conjunction with capitalism and technology from the middle ages through the renaissance, so the 17th century dutch republic and the industrial revolution. this forminged a ideology and related practices that dominate western modernity and increasingly through globalization, the world. given the destructive fruitlessness of conflicts in at the reformation era, catholics and president president tess pros stands decided to go shopping instead of continuing to fight about religion. that's what we're still doing in combination with the exercise of power by hegemonic liberal said states, sim bio sis of consumerism is today more than anything else the cultural glue that holds together the hyper

pluralism. the final chapter, secularizing knowledge, analyzes the relationship among different sorts of knowledge, together with the site of where new knowledge has been transmitted from the middle ages to the present. the confessionallization of universities in the reformation era, included a privileging of theology that insulated the logans from new knowledge. the pursuit of which often migrated outside of universities in early modern europe. persistent doctrinal disaagreements born of political protection rendered most theologians diversely unable to cope with 18th century innovations. in the following century, knowledgemaking was centralized and in research universities, beginning the germie germany,

theology was marginalized and knowledge was increasingly secularized. this process was complete by the early 20th century, accept among catholic universities which followed through. none of the chapters is meant to stand alone from the others. together they comprise a whole that endeavors to explain many features of the western world, as the unintended, long-term outcome, of diverse rejections as well as retentions and appropriations of -- to study the past and the influence on the presence and to shed new light on the character of some present problems and to question some of the basic assumptions that frame contemporary intellectual life, by understanding where the assumptions come from and what

they're based on. the conclusionen did he evers to view the six chapters synoptic include and offers final reflections. like the book as a whole, it hopes to make good on the words of john noonan, looking intently at the past can improve our present vision. not many readers are likely to be accustomed to thinking about the relationships among so maybe different areas of human life. disstilled in such a contented manner and analyzed over such a long period of time. while simultaneously being asked to rethink many seemingly settled cornerstones of modern intellectual life. the balls in the air. but this is what we must do, it seems to me, if we're to understand how the world in which north americans and europeans are living today came to be as it is. the unintended reformation is a demanding, intricate book because the human path is complex, just as human life is

complex. human decisions and actions taken many centuries ago continue to influence the present in ways that often go unrecognized but which the sort of genealogical historical analysis in the book can discern and trace. the book was written with care and it must be read with care in order to be understood. not least because the analysis of many historical realities is threaded through and distributed across multiple chapters instead of being treated in only one place. at the heart of the narrative is the reformation era, because it is unresolved doctrinal disagreements and concrete geo political disrunnings are the key to answering the book's central question. the ongoing consequences of those controversies and conflicts continue to ininfluence all western women and men today, regardless of anyone's particular commitments.

the book is not an argument about any secularizing suspect of protestantism per se, rather indirect. i say explicitly in the book that president tessantism did not enchained the world. more important were the disputessen between catholics cs and protestants. and their con conflicts. because late mid eve veil christianity was not religion in the modern sense, a discrete domain of life separate from economic exchange and so forth, but, rather, it was, as i say in the book, a far from home egenius yet institutionalized world view that, for good or ill, influenced and was ended to

inform all domains of human life. because of that the rejects of the roman catholic church's authority by protestant reformes affected nearly everything. this included transtransformations that were already underway, such as metta physics. the increasing control of ecclesiastical affairs by noneclose wyattas stick cal authorities, and a highly monetized economy. the book traces the processes by which conflict over true christianity prompted novel conceptions of religioning a separate and send rabil of life, and then analyzes the disimbetting from religion some science, modern moral and political theories, economic views and practices and higher education. an emphasis on doctrinal

disagreement is not only wanter warranted but necessary to understand the era. the socially and politically divisive disagreements about what was true, how one ought to live and what matters most in life that emerged within a clinton text in the early 1520s, have never gone away. instead, they have been transformed, they've been modified, they've been expanded, in terms of content and character, even as efforts have been made to contain some manage their unintended and enormous effects. the most important institutional facilitators of the process have been, and remain, modern liberal states. which solve the problems of early modern confessional coexistence. as i note in the introduction of the book the unintended

reformation expands upon and develops conclusions that i reached at the end of my first book, salvation at stake, christian martyr dom insuring case you want to read another book of mine after this one. it was already clear to me then that critical aspects of the era can be seen if modern christianity is studied comparatively, across confessional boundaries, incorporating state-pouter it protestantses, and catholics. it would be an exaggeration, wrote, in the conclusion of salvation at stake to say that unresolved religious disagreement caused the enlightenment, the early modern renaissance of skepticism. and the importance on modern thought is clear. the unintended reformation, then, seeks to delineate how this is so.

by tracing trajectories from doctrinal disagreements to our die very gents religious and secular truth claims. in salvation at stake i also gestured toward the institutional aspect of the analysis that i pursue in the unintended reformation. i wrote there, because the prospect for peace coexistence minnesota mark christians -- individuals would eventually have the right to believe and worship as they saw fit, or they might not choose to worship at all. or they might eventually campaign against religion as a source of intolerance throughout human history. all these activities would be protected by the modern state which permits virtually anything that it has rendered private and

that it can control. my new book is directed not only against modern reductionist their arrives religion applied to religious believers in the safely distant premodern past, as was salvation at stake, a book about 16th century christians willing to die for their views. this book also exposes the faith-based confessional character of contemporary secular ideologies. with their historical roots in modern responses to reformation era dock trinal controversies. no one likes having their most basic beliefs challenged, whether those beliefs are religious or secular. it's just that most academies whose beliefs are secular aren't used to it, whereas religious believers in the academy have to confront it all the time. besides its primary aim of seeking to explain how we have

arrived historically where we are today, the unintended reformation uses historical analysis to highlight and to speak to contemporary concerns. this is the second of the two points i mentioned at the outset. this is a practical corollary of the fact that the present is a product of the past. understanding the makings of the contemporary world, then, should give us insight into some of its problems. i should say they seem to me to be problems, and i think they do to many other people. these include issues as disparate as our intermable and apparently irresolvable moral disagreements and the social rancor and friction, and our lack of any substantive common good and the seemingly impossibility of device one, and the inability to articulate that humans are real if we assume

metaphysical -- and the conspicuous absence of attempts to understand how different types of knowledge might fit together, which masks the incompatibilities of different disciplines and contributes to incoherence of undergraduate university education. the unintended reformation argues that all these features of present-day western life and more, are unintended products of tangled historical trajectories that derive from the unresolved doctrinal controversies and the evandal institutional solution to the political conflicts of the 16th and 17th centuries. how one evaluates them, whether one finds in them cause for concern or celebration, is a matter separate from the persuasiveness of the historical analysis that purports to explain how we arrived at them.

in other words, one could agree with the analytical narrative in the unintended reformation, but praise these features of present day western life, exuberant multiculturalism. they seem to me troubling for reasons on which i expand in the book, notwithstanding numerous positive aspects of modernity, with which they coexist i also acknowledge. despite the ways in which some readers have misread the book, it's not a lament for an allegedly golden able of medieval christian dom that we lost, nor does it naively assume that because modernity has brought unquestionable gapes, everything is commendsable, we should ignore the problems it also created, some of which have only become clear in recent decades. the payoff of my book, i would hope, has multiple aspects.

it reconceptualizes the reformation by historically reintegrating those protestants who did not receive political support with those who did. the key to understanding the reformation is looking at the full range of interpretations of scripture, among those who rejected roman catholicism,ot just at lutherans or reformed protestants. by challenging conception -- conceptions of change, the book offers fresh insight to how we have reached the situation today in north america and europe and contributes to greater self-awareness. i hope that not only historians but also other scholars and scientists, as well as educated read efforts in general, will be inspired with the book to look beyond their respective areas of expertise and interests and indeed beyond interdisciplines.

the difference between different kinds of knowledge generated in social sciences and humanity hope the book will convince colleagues that the exclusion of intellectual research from universities is inconsistent with the open mindsness that should characterize the academy's supposed commitment to academy freedom and intellectual inquire without ideological restrictions. i am well aware also that entrenched and frequently unacknowledged prejudices are unlikely to make this likely. that many readers were and are bound not to like the unintended reformation goes without saying. and has been clear from some reviews of the book. it is far too unsettling and subversive to garner anything approaching unanimous mouse approval. what matters to me is whether those who liked the book understood it, and if so, whether they have per waysive

counterargue. s to mount against it. and once again, it's enormously gratifying to be receiving this year's pew -- paolucci award for my book. it shows there are some readers who get it. thank you. [applause] >> we have time for questions. >> given the number of students who are pursuing the study of the humanities, is the faculties in universities at high risk that universities will no longer

support large humanity faculties and only rules the -- reduce the supply of information which is so vitally needed? >> a big question and an important question about the sustainability, the future viability, and strength of the humanities in america's colleges and universities. the question i think is -- it's difficult one to answer in general terms simply because american higher education is so diverse and enormous compared to other countries. my sense is that i think that humanities, ate least for the foreseeable future, will be fine in elite colleges and universities. what i worry about much more are state universities that are more strapped and pressed for funding at state legislators try to contend with rising costs and

other concerns. i also worry about he humanities particularly at less well-funded, less well-equipped liberal art i also worry about the humanities at less well-funded, less well equipped liberal arts colleges. i think the overwhelming pressures in our society toward economic reduction and increased efficiency and essentially the bottom line means that the so-called stem disciplines, the sciences technology engineering and mathematics, will continue to receive increasing funding in the future. so it's not clear to me that for many of america's future university college students that they are necessarily going to have a very robust humanities education at their disposal which is a huge problem. the kind of questions i'm talking about, how do we think about values and what kind of lives should we live? those questions can't be answered by science or engineering. those are ethical questions.

they are normative questions. you can't get that from how we understand subatomic particles or what's the most efficient way to increase the production of a certain manufactured good. >> the one of the other issues regarding humanities is not perhaps the number, it's also the kind of material and the knowledge base and the sort of approach of the communities themselves. could you address some of those concerns? >> yeah i mean i touched on that very briefly near the end of my talk. one dimension of it by talking about what seems to me a very widespread often unacknowledged ideological restriction on academic freedom in many colleges and universities and that is, it's not so much a kind of hard and fast prohibition is a sort of understood restriction

that intellectually sophisticated religious perspectives are not welcomed in universities and colleges. to me that's restriction on academic freedom. so that is one thing that i think, basically if you want to know the punchline or what is recommended out of this dire situation where do we go from here, i can preempt that by saying i am an historian not a policymaker or a prophet and the only thing i say at the end that has rankled some of my colleagues as they say it should be and secularized. the assumptions of the 19th century that were made to exclude religion from academic discourse i think can be shown now in terms of that highly contingent not in fact a new one for all decisions that were made so for me that's the one area in which i have particularly trust on. so that is a pretty controversial thing to say actually in the academy today.

anyone who is familiar knows that. >> could you help me with the term western hyperpleura some please? >> yes. think pluralism but even more. now of course some people have said as well as hyperpluralism or this is clearly a polemical term as opposed to just pluralism. i mean in unprecedentedly wide range of different views about what is valuable in human life. what kinds of plurality op we have? what sorts of families and what should families look like for example? what sorts of sexual practices are acceptable? what should people devote their leisure time to? how should we organize our institutions and so forth? the range of use about that seems to me by the late early 21st century is much more than it was say in the late 19th century one at the time even nietzsche at the time talked

about the exuberant wide range of different forms we see when we look across not only western europe at the world. i think interactions among peoples of different cultures and so forth the increased ease of travel in the world that we live in today increases that even more. in and of itself it's not necessarily a problematic thing. it depends on the content of what those particular views and actions that they embody lead to and depending on how people exercise their politically protected rights in order to believe and act the way that they want to, there might be not so many problems. there might he really serious problems. so hyperpluralism is meant as a kind of description really of the enormous variety and range of ways in which people answer what i call in the book life questions. how should we live in what should we care about? what are your priorities? what matters to you? does that help? okay.

>> can you hear it? i think one of your questions is how then shall we live? and we can't get the answer to that strictly out of academia. academia has problems addressing that but the think-tanks are not subject to that type of constraint, and i think they have been useful and i'm speaking only -- speaking specifically around the american enterprise institute where they have looked at it from a total viewpoint and they have come up largely with a simple formula that is not

faith-based but includes faith. starting with charles murray and now being pushed i believe by the current president arthur brooks and it comes down to this. the essentials of a meaningful life are our family, faith, career, calling what you do yourself and your involvement in civil society. indeed all four have a really rewarding, satisfying life that you look back on to say it was great. the secular idea that you would do without faith tries to say that's wrong. we have the empirical evidence and here again that we must compel the left wishful thinking people to face up to the fact that you must accept and face

empirical evidence. the think-tanks have you. plummet us. the other guys have theories. we must compel the recognition of empirical evidence. >> yeah. i agree with you that think-tanks do offer an important supplementary necessary voice in public discourse in the united states. just to go along with the way you set it up though, the difficulty as far as answering the question of how a now shall we live is a course that there are also think-tanks on the left who have their respective answers and there studies that they draw on and they say those people on the right, those ideologues that are really the problem. so the point is yes think-tanks are part of the picture but they also participate in the kind of and contribute to at least in the united states at the current moment that ideological divided in problematic character.

even the question of family. families important but there will be people on the left to to say why do you find family? does that mean a heterosexual marriage between one man and one woman, why can't can it include marriage? this is an oppressive write arbitrary -- you know the arguments,. i am not defending that. i'm saying in the structures that we have, we have political protection for people to argue for those things and in the current situation it has led to a kind of tension, i think division and a real unwillingness to try to find ways forward. that is what concerns me. >> that tension i think is another opportunity for us to say all right, let's have it out.

let's get up and public and let's define the question and then presents, presents, presents alternative alternative and again week, the right, have the evidence. we have the compelling arguments and i think that we can clearly rethink him and take a few bruises here. we are going to hurt a lot of feelings but we have the compelling evidence. >> you are an optimistic gentleman. [laughter] i am less sanguine. >> professor gregory i haven't read your book yet and i look forward to doing so and you have whetted my appetite this evening but i'm struck by your remark which he said some of your colleagues bristle at that the university needs to be on secularized. the united states and not only there but taking the united states of as an example the university is very much a state

supported and state-owned enterprise in many places and where words not owned is supported by the state. does it follow from your prescription from the university of the state ought to be on secularized and where does the threat of that thought take you? >> that's a great point. i actually think and i think i say this in the book. i can't remember. i set it at some point somewhere, that i think the exclusion of religion from higher educational context in fact is a sort of reflection, a parallel to the institutional separation of church and state. that is, just as we have this distinction very fraught, very contested and some would say impossible to resolve in satisfactory ways but insofar as we have it it's a terrific call and legal reality. that is in higher education by saying this is an academic institutions a religion doesn't belong here. other different clinical

theorists and so forth have argued as well. as long as somebody can make their religiously based arguments in the public sphere, in a political forum they ought not to be excluded from doing that simply because the arguments aren't religious. to me the same logic as well, you really ought to exclude secular arguments from the public sphere then. i mean, secular commitments are not nontheological. they are theological claims. they are claims about the unimportance or the nonexistence or practicability of religious claims. i don't see any difficulty without whatsoever. i think it behooves those who do want to make religiously based or religiously inflected arguments in the public sphere for political purposes to do so in such a way that they think they can do it in a way that's going to be intellectually and persuasive and compelling to others. really in terms of being persuasive saying jesus is as my

personal savior so therefore listen to my political. i don't think that's going to follow or you have to your audience and how to argue. but being a priority exclusion, that doesn't make sense to me. >> you my question is you had said effectively you have two sorts of claims and i have a hard time relating. one is that you have the polemic against the wheat. that we postmodern men are using fragmented things. three years ago i think was charles taylor was here and he was very comfortable. he basically says we are these people for whom faith is a choice in a way that was not true for people in the past. but what i want, so you had said we are catholic protestant secularist whatever but on the other hand you are also arguing that we are all inheritors of

the reformation in some way so help me out on sort of the diversity of who we are today versus the fact that we'll all are somehow. >> a great question and i do think it's possible to answer that. we are all affected by the long-term consequences of the reformation era of whether we like it or not, regardless of what we individually affirm or how we live within the hyperpluralism insofar for example as we all live within western liberal political institutions. everybody who lives in the western country lives in this kind of a structure with the variations of belgium or the u.s. is the case may be. we also all live within capitalist market economies that are part of the interconnected global market network. even the people who live in the most intentional, i want to get off the grid, let's have a commune in rural missouri, they still have to interact with those markets in certain ways.

in that sense we all are within those institutional structures. regardless of the particular ways in which we either affirm or don't affirm or have various kinds of ways in which we can answer those questions. actually it was the ways in which charles taylor and charles taylor is a great thinker but to my mind he is a frustrating way of using a first-person plural, we end it was his frustrating way of using that and the sources that planted the seeds for my thinking about this. i think alastair macintyre is much better at this and to the point. he sees the kinds of disagreements and heterogeneity that helps us explain more about the kinds of political and wider cultural realities that we inhabit the taylor does. when it's taylor is they who do you mean because lots of times when he says we are other writer

say we i don't recognize myself. if i don't write as myself i start to hold the thread. >> i was struck by a comment you made sort of that there hasn't been much change in the states influence on religion from a confessional state to a privatized version of religion and this does those individual rights. my question in terms of looking at this with a sense of society as a small organic whole in the political and the theological and economic more intertwined, what you do with the fact that some of the very structures and institutions that used to make that possible now formally support the individual aided

right to let's say religious freedom to that effect? where'd he go without? >> if you're asking specifically about the relationship of the catholic church to the individual support of religious freedom and individual rights, it's a complicated question. it's a complicated question historically but also conceptually. the short answer, i would say this. the way in which post-vatican ii catholicism thinks about individual rights and individual freedom is never divorced from a wider conception of human person understood theologically and understood as having a tale as that is not to be answered simply in this life. it's not the kind of preferential understanding of i will choose what is good for me. this is not john rawls digna

taught us you money. it's an understanding that there is an inviolability of the individual as created in the image and likeness of god. it is wrong to coerce somebody about fundamental matters of belief and so forth. that according to the church has to be understood in relationship to it broad conception of her since understood as a t. a logical -- teleological destiny. that's the short answer. it's a good question in the confiscated one. >> one or two more questions. >> or we could just go have a glass of wine. >> would you say that one of the unintended consequences of the reformation is what we see manifested today in a world that is becoming a place where

everything is gray, and there are no absolutes of right or wrong. in a conversation with someone a few months ago, i turned to them and they said you don't believe in absolutes. i said i can't have a conversation with you where i would be like, actually said it would be like a sophist. you argue just for the sake of arguing and you don't come to any resolution. you say that's one of the consequences of what happened. >> yeah. it's a great question. the short answer to this one is shorter, the one i just gave him the answer is yes. but in complicated ways. i mean, what i tried to do in the book is to suggest there are some very dramatic and deep consequences of things that happened a long time ago but the ways in which they have turned out to be is not a simple

straight line. i will say this though, and abe it's a little bit more positive than what you suggested. in my experience almost everyone, even people who claim not to believe it's an absolute, if you really given the situation like that ask somebody to think under certain circumstances genocide is acceptable or selling 12-year-old girls into sexual slavery or having children tortured in front of their parents. i have never met somebody like that, thank goodness. those people, now i make the case obviously i'm choosing things that i'm hoping our way on the other side of the line. but i think if you are getting in conversations with people about these issues and asked them it has to be the right kind of relationship. it's not like the guy on the street use you say hey what are

your absolutes? it has to be someone you have a relationship that i do think most people when pressed to think there are certain things that are really wrong. >> one of the things that is scaring me more and more is that more and more people are embracing the unjustified -- that is one of the consequences. >> is very pervasive. it's an intra-mental -- an instrumental way of thinking. i think it's related to the de facto utilitarian akamai good way of thinking that pervades so much of society. >> one last question. >> a lot of ideas that have come to my mind as you are sharing these concepts, one of the things i thought about for a long time is what is stopping an individual citizen from putting together monies and hiring

professors to teach their children, because right now if the administration has its way, the less expensive universities will not have the kind of education if they don't teach logic. which is how are we going to have these discussions if we have the thought that everyone lives by feeling? has that been done in? have there have been groups of people getting together and hiring five professors to have a decent education? >> take homeschooling to the next level essentially. >> yeah. thank you. >> there might be people here who know the answer. i empirically don't know. there was a form of it done in europe called hiring a tutor. a tutor that would edgy hate your student all the way through. it could be cheap.

our humanities professors don't make as much as lawyers or doctors do but we do okay. probably not many people are going to want to pay our salaries. i think it's a serious question. i mean i am very concerned as an academic and as an intellectual i'm very concerned about, i don't know what else to call it that the ignorance of the american electorate. it's distressing and extreme to see the level at which crucially important national issues are reduced to a series of propagandistic bullet points to a series of slogans that depending on whether you on the right of the left you put an appropriate number sticker on your car. you know the world that we have created for ourselves is an incredibly complicated world. it's not a world that you can simply reduced to a few slogans and think i'm just going to bulldoze my way to the other

side. we don't have an electorate that is receptive to that. i don't mean to say this in an elitist way. i just think it's kind of empirically demonstrable. when jay leno goes out there and asked people who is the vice president of the united states and you know over half of the people in the u.s. don't know. that's dire. not because they don't know that fact but because it's indicative of a total disconnect and lack of awareness and the shoulder shrugging attitude. who cares as long as i can hang out with my friends and my smartphone is charged. that is a bit cynical but i think you know what i mean. anyway on that happy note. [applause] >> we have to present to professor gregory the 2013 isaf

and pelosi award presented to the author of "the unintended reformation" and we have the seal. we also have the remuneration. >> thank you very much. excellent. [applause] so we would like to invite you all to a reception following this. we have copies of the book on sale for $25 which is cheaper than you can get it on amazon and we will also have repressor grigory available to sign copies >> for only an additional $5. [laughter] >> so thank you very much for coming and please join us for the reception. [inaudible conversations]

e. we are here at the national press club with bob drury and tom clavin talking about "the heart of everything that was" their new book. tell us who was red cloud? >> the only thing you have to know about red cloud is he is the only american indian to ever win an award not a battle or a war against the united states. president andrew johnson, general of the army's ulysses s. grant generals of the western army tecumseh sherman went to him and said after two years of kicking out that, what do you want? we will give you anything you want. i think that says it all about red cloud. >> tell us more.