The After Dinner Scholar

The day after tomorrow is July 4th and the Semiquincentennial celebration. As we along with our fellow Americans celebrate the Declaration of Independence, the driving emotion should be love for our country. Why is that the case and what does love for country mean?

Even in 1630 as the Massachusetts Bay Colony was being founded—and, in fact, all the way back to Adam and Eve—the notion as liberty as “doing whatever I want to do” and liberty as doing “without fear all that is just and good” have been and still are in conflict.

Wyoming Catholic College president, Fr. Dcn. Kyle Washut has thought a great deal about the nature of liberty or freedom and with it the nature of the American founding.

When the framers of the Declaration of Independence listed “self-evident truths,” they began with three truths that precede any sort of state: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yet about one third of the signers of the Declaration were slave owners. Wyoming Catholic College professor Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos helps us to make some sense of that.

While the Revolutionary War—as expected—ruined the economy, the lessons learned in the Colonial period, the habits of most Americans, and the entrepreneurial spirit of a new nation led to previously unheard of human flourishing and prosperity.

Our guest this week is Fr. Robert Sirico, founder and president emeritus of The Acton Institute. Fr. Sirico has long been a defender of the free-market system that built the American economy—from the very beginning.

The French Revolution that began in 1789 like the American Revolution that began in 1776 were both revolts against a king and against despotic rule. Both sought the expansion of human liberty and both intended to form republican governments. But that’s where the similarity stops and the contrast between the American Revolution and the French Revolution could not be starker. What made the difference?

Our guest this week, Dr. Joseph Loconte, addressed this question at a conference at The Institute of Faith and Freedom at Grove City College, Dr. Joseph Loconte, director of The Rivendell Center in New York City in a lecture entitled “Reason, Revelation, and Revolution.”

General Washington served as Commander-in-Chief from July 15, 1775 to the end of the War for Independence and was relieved on December 23, 1783—eight and a half years. After that he served eight years as our first president—with all the attending problems of a new nation—from 1789 to 1797. And he was, as historian James Thomas Flexner titled his biography: Washington: The Indispensable Man.

There are few Americans who admire Washington as much as Wyoming Catholic College professor Dr. Virginia Arbery, our guest this week.

The purpose of the Declaration of Independence, wrote Thomas Jefferson, was “to place before mankind the common sense of the subject; [in] terms so plain and firm, as to command their assent, and to justify ourselves in the independent stand we [were] compelled to take.”

To make their case they called on “the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” on a Creator who endows humans with “inalienable rights” including the right to abolish a tyrannical government and replace it.

Natural law and natural rights were central to the founders’ thinking and I know of no one more qualified to help us understand why that’s true than Dr. Hadley Arkes.

The Catholic Church in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries defended monarchy and so many assume that "the divine right of kings" was a Catholic idea. But it wasn't. So, if the Catholic Church didn’t teach the divine right of kings, what did it teach about civil government and what could that have to do with the Second Continental Congress of thirteen English colonies in North America declaring, “That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved”?

In his new book, The Making of the American Mind: The Story of Our Declaration of Independence, Hillsdale College professor Dr. Matthew Spalding writes,“We must know the Declaration if we truly are to love America.”

This week, Dr. Spalding explains how that's the case and how the Declaration expresses the American mind.

Ten weeks and two days from today, we will celebrate America’s Semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. In honor of that event and in order to think more carefully about this our “experiment in ordered liberty” two and a half centuries later, we welcome you to this, the first of ten special After-Dinner Scholar podcasts from Wyoming Catholic College about the American founding.

While the Declaration was signed in July 1776, the "shot heard around the world" was fired 15 months earlier in April 1775. Dr. Glenn Arbery, Dr. Michael Wilmer, and Dr. Jim Tonkowich explore some of the history of those 15 months.