This past November 6-8, the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture hosted its 9th annual fall flagship conference: The Family: Searching for Fairest Love. Toward the end of that weekend we canvassed the opinions of the conference audience regarding themes for the 2009 conference, and, interestingly, a clear consensus emerged. After such a stimulating conference focused on the various threats to the family here at the dawn of the 21st century, many of the conference participants expressed a desire to expand the discussion of family life outward to include the social, political, and spiritual common goods in which the common good of the family is nested. At the same time, there was a clear desire to focus on the virtues as those moral and intellectual habits that allow us to achieve, solidify, and defend the network of common goods in which we human beings realize our happiness. After deliberating on this broad consensus with the staff here at the Center, we concluded that our friends had advised us well. Thus we are delighted to announce the theme for the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture’s 10th annual fall conference: The Summons of Freedom: Virtue, Sacrifice, and the Common Good.
Final confirmation of the relevance of this conference theme came when we reflected once again upon the remarks made on the South Lawn of the White House by Pope Benedict XVI during his apostolic visit to the United States last April. In those remarks the Holy Father said:
Freedom is not only a gift, but also a summons to personal responsibility. Americans know this from experience—almost every town in this country has its monuments honoring those who sacrificed their lives in defense of freedom, both at home and abroad. The preservation of freedom calls for the cultivation of virtue, self-discipline, sacrifice for the common good, and a sense of responsibility towards the less fortunate. It also demands the courage to engage in civic life and to bring one’s deepest beliefs and values to reasoned public debate.
Here the Holy Father makes clear certain connections that are of utmost importance not only to us Americans, but also to anyone trying to sort through the enormous moral and political complexities of our dizzyingly globalized world. Pope Benedict underscores that freedom is both gift and summons, a call toward a particular “cultivation” or cultural formation in the virtues, virtues that always demand sacrifice—and sometimes even the total sacrifice of one’s life—for the sake of common goods higher than the merely private goods of the self. Earlier in his remarks the Holy Father had emphasized that “the great intellectual and moral resolve” that, in America, ended slavery and brought into being the civil rights movement, took religious belief as a “constant inspiration and driving force,” thus reminding us of Christianity’s role as the true preserver and defender of human freedom. In saying this, the pope invoked his revered predecessor, John Paul II, who tirelessly preached that “in a world without truth, freedom loses its foundation.”
In taking up the theme, The Summons of Freedom: Virtue, Sacrifice, and the Common Good, our 10th annual fall conference will reflect upon political and legal questions having to do with the very nature of the political common good, the particular conflicts that arise in trying to achieve it, and the precarious situation of freedom in the democracies of advanced modernity. But we will also welcome inquiries into social structures other than political ones—such as the arts—in which the virtues may flourish, or which are designed in such a way so as to choke off the development of genuine virtue in favor of ersatz versions. Particular focus will be placed on the analogous forms of virtuous self-discipline and sacrifice required to sustain the human network of common goods.
It is entirely fitting, moreover, that in this tenth anniversary edition of our annual fall conference we will be highlighting the theme of virtue. When, ten years ago, we launched our initial triad of fall conferences—A Culture of Death (2000), A Culture of Life (2001), Agendas for Reform (2002)—we took inspiration in large part from the Center’s senior research fellow, Alasdair MacIntyre, and his hugely influential work in recalling moral philosophy and theology to the tradition of the virtues. How better to celebrate this anniversary edition of the conference than to return to the fountain of Professor MacIntyre’s work for fresh inspiration, especially in the year of his eightieth birthday!
