Tradition, Place, and Things Divine with the Ciceronian Society
Season 2, Episode 4
In episode 4 of the Conversatio podcast, Dr. Joseph Wysocki is joined by Josh Bowman, Vice President of the Ciceronian Society, to discuss the meaning of tradition, place, and things Divine.
00:38 – 01:15
Dr. Wysocki
Hello. My name is Dr. Joe Wysocki. I’m the dean of the Honors College at Belmont Abbey. Welcome to the Conversation podcast. Today I’m joined by my good friend Dr. Josh Bowman, who is the vice president of the Ciceronian Society, who received his Ph.D. in Politics from the Catholic University of America. Josh was gracious enough to host me on the Ciceronian Society’s podcast a couple of months ago, The Sower, and so we’re really excited to have him here to talk about a number of things, but especially because we’re going to be hosting the Ciceronian Society’s annual conference here at Belmont Abbey. So, Joshua, welcome.
01:18 – 01:19
Dr. Bowman
Thank you so much for having me.
01:19 – 01:29
Dr. Wysocki
Well, before we begin, just tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey in terms of your learning and what brought you to the Ciceronian society. Anything we should know?
01:30 – 01:52
Dr. Bowman
Yeah, I’m still learning, that’s for sure. The journey towards my learning. I graduated from I originally originally from southeast Michigan, from Monroe, Michigan, which is where I was born and raised and ended up at Lee University down at in Cleveland, Tennessee. That’s where I did my undergraduate and graduate there a while ago and early sort of.
01:52 – 02:23
Dr. Bowman
So it seems. So I love the Southeast. I’m really excited to come back to North Carolina. And then I went to we got married to Melissa. She and I went to Washington, D.C., very different from southeast Boise. And I got my Ph.D. in politics at the Catholic University of America. And political philosophy ended up back in Michigan. For a little bit taught at LSU for two years after I finished the dissertation and ended up at Heidelberg University in Tiffin, Ohio, for a few years.
02:23 – 02:49
Dr. Bowman
And am currently at Hope College in a temporary position that will conclude at the end of this spring 20, 23 semester. Then we’ll see what happens after that. But this writing society started back in 2011. I was not there at the at the founding, but Peter Haworth and a gang of great scholars and people started off our first conferences at University of Virginia back in the day.
02:49 – 03:17
Dr. Bowman
I was again I unfortunately I was not there. I had never heard of it, but it was initially started because there’s if you are a conservative or classical and especially a Christian scholar and you want to advance in academia, you need peer reviewed publications, you need conference appearances, you work in France, and there’s not a lot of friendly places for people like that.
03:17 – 03:35
Dr. Bowman
And so it was initially created as a kind of sanctuary for for them. And I was certainly among those people as a as an early grad student. That’s how I discovered it. So that’s kind of where it’s started. Now. We’ve we’ve made some changes and things have developed since then. But yeah. Well, we’ll talk more about that.
03:35 – 04:01
Dr. Wysocki
That’s great. Yeah. I did not know that you came from Lee mentioned, as you mentioned, sort of friends who are the fellow seekers in this sort of space that you mention. I have great friends at Lee, and every year they host a conference where I bring the honors college students, a sort of interdisciplinary intercollegiate conference. And every year we host a conference in the sense people here, it’s a beautiful campus and it seems like they’re doing great things there too.
04:01 – 04:19
Dr. Bowman
So do great things that, you know, Tom Pope, he’s he is a great guy. He’s do a lot of good work there as the other professors. And what am I, one of the people that recruited me into political science, Leigh Cheek. Yes, I’m a legend. And, you know, in that area, he’s a he’s coming to this conference. I’m really excited.
04:19 – 04:28
Dr. Bowman
I haven’t seen him in person years. So we’re looking forward to seeing it. But he was at Lee when I was there, as a lot of other friends. So I’m really looking forward to to that. Right.
04:29 – 04:55
Dr. Wysocki
Well, we’ll talk a little bit more about the conference maybe towards the end. But so this is a Ronin Society dedicated to tradition, place and things divine. I thought maybe we could just talk about those three things for a while and we’ll just start at the beginning and and tradition. Why? Why should people care about tradition? How is it how is it different from nostalgia?
04:55 – 05:15
Dr. Wysocki
Right. I mean, I think some people look at tradition. They go, you know, that’s dad like in commercials from the 1980s and it’s, it’s emotive and you know, it’s the good old days yearning for the good old days. But, but what is it about tradition that’s so important that the surrounding society places it, you know, it’s yeah.
05:15 – 05:39
Dr. Bowman
Right, right. Yeah. And I think, I think part of this goes to the heart of what we’re trying to do and it’s not, it’s not just in style though I’m certainly guilty of that. I there’s a lot of things that, you know, the, the fights with technology I have all the time I feel like it make me nostalgic for passenger pigeons and other ways of communicating that were more reliable.
05:39 – 06:05
Dr. Bowman
But I, you know, for tradition, for us traditions not simply a golden age we want to go back to its not simply loving that which is old and that which is, you know, for its own sake necessarily although I think there’s there’s some value there. But tradition is something that we need to think we aren’t we are not simply born and starting over in a new story.
06:05 – 06:39
Dr. Bowman
We’re born into a story that’s already happening that we’re a part of, and we need traditions to think through and navigate life to understand ourselves why we are the way we are individually and as groups and societies politically. You know, Edmund Burke’s a good example here where he admonished us to not abandon traditions, not try and start over that look at tradition as the bank and capital of nations as this great reservoir of resources, of wisdom and of self understanding that we could draw on.
06:39 – 06:57
Dr. Bowman
So we didn’t have to constantly reinvent the wheel. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. But tradition also helps us understand when things are broken. You know, we’ve tried this before. We’ve gone down this road. It may not look exactly the same but we don’t want to go down there again. And so tradition is invaluable for what we’re doing now.
06:58 – 07:20
Dr. Bowman
Let me connect that a little bit better here. One of the things that is necessary for tradition is that it’s transmitted, that it’s passed down and that it we constantly revisit it. And one of the things that we focus on is trying to find ways to help homeschooling communities, classical school educators, as well as other faculty like yourself.
07:20 – 07:47
Dr. Bowman
You know, how can we provide professional development and networking and resources that help you and others do that transmitting of the tradition from one generation to another? But also what we found and this is actually another that is part of the origins of the Cicerone Society. There’s lots of thinkers in our tradition. I say our I mean, kind of Christian Western classical tradition that have been forgotten.
07:47 – 08:06
Dr. Bowman
And how can we go back and recover some of those neglected thinkers and the ideas that we have just not paid attention to. And so we love seeing proposals and ideas, for example, like, hey, no one’s read this book, but it’s really, really valuable for understanding hey, no one’s looked at this thinker that this kind of obscure 19th century thinker.
08:06 – 08:18
Dr. Bowman
Let’s go back and revisit what he or she said. And those are great opportunities. And so not only are we trying to preserve a tradition, we’re also trying to recover traditions that we’ve lost.
08:18 – 08:22
Dr. Wysocki
Great. Well, a follow up on tradition.
08:23 – 08:23
Dr. Bowman
Yeah.
08:25 – 08:53
Dr. Wysocki
Those students, maybe we both teach undergraduate students and these students are coming from a sort of pluralistic society where because there are so many traditions out there that often leads to how do we pit, how do we how do we choose one? And then, you know, a regime that we always talk about progress. And so they come they’re sort of disposed to thinking in terms of progress, being good.
08:54 – 09:05
Dr. Wysocki
You know, if they’re coming to you as an undergraduate, any any thoughts or tips about how do you sort of make that first inroad to get them to even sort of consider being open to tradition?
09:07 – 09:37
Dr. Bowman
You yeah. I mean, in some ways there is a tradition of not being part of a tradition. Like they’re they don’t understand progress as rejecting traditions. You know, one of the things I you know, in America, we we we sometimes think of ourselves as as is going on our own or this kind of individualism, like we’re going to just, you know, the self-made person who or the student who’s like, you know, I’m going to I’m going to I’m going to pick my own truth, if you will.
09:38 – 10:00
Dr. Bowman
None of us actually do that in the sense that we we can’t reinvent language or material. Our own world and so I challenge the students who might say that and say, you know, I’m not saying, you know, that you need to accept my particular tradition. No one needs to do all that because tradition is very diverse. It’s not it’s not monolithic.
10:00 – 10:19
Dr. Bowman
It’s not look the same everywhere you go. And Will, you know that that’ll bleed into our conversation, my place. But one of the things that challenge is like, okay, where are you getting these ideas that this is wrong, right? You don’t you want to abandon this tradition because you’re actually probably drawing from another tradition to make that argument, right?
10:19 – 10:45
Dr. Bowman
In a sense, you can’t escape tradition. The question is what tradition are you loyal to and have you been self-reflective about that? And that’s that comes up in political philosophy a lot when people say you know, I instead of a philosopher example, I often say that Rousseau for me, this is just my argument that it’s he’s one of the most influential human beings in the last 100 years by far.
10:45 – 11:06
Dr. Bowman
Yeah. And I see you’ve never heard of him, but he’s in your head. I know he’s in your head. Because what you’re about to say to this questioner, this question is going to sound a lot like Rousseau or actually more just as frequently. John Stewart. Yeah. Have you ever read him either? No. Okay. You know, it’s going to show up so I think there’s a lot of opportunities there to point out you’re living a tradition.
11:06 – 11:12
Dr. Bowman
It’s not about rejecting tradition. It’s about what tradition is has. It’s all there. And so that’s usually what I know.
11:12 – 11:40
Dr. Wysocki
That’s great. That’s great. You know, every time I teach democracy in America by Tocqueville, he has, you know, these two chapters paired right next to each other at the beginning of Volume two, right whereas the philosophic method of the Americans where he says we’re all Cartesian, so we’re like Descartes, and we try to figure out everything on our own and we accept any traditions looking going to doubt everything and then the very next chapter, which is on the dogmatic beliefs of democratic peoples.
11:41 – 12:02
Dr. Wysocki
And he says, look, everybody has dogmatic beliefs, right? After saying, like, Americans are Cartesian and they try to they won’t accept automatically, she says, but they’re inescapable. And if you’re not going to get them from the great books or from religion or, or from, you know, your class, it’s going to come from somewhere in democracy. It’s like it’s public opinion.
12:02 – 12:17
Dr. Wysocki
But it just sort of shows them, look, even as you said, we sort of have this tradition of rejecting tradition, but that’s coming from somewhere, right? And that’s a choice even if it’s well, maybe not a choice, but there are alternative choices, right? Yeah.
12:17 – 12:45
Dr. Bowman
Right. And traditions aren’t chains. They’re there’s something that connect us to our places, to our families, to the people we love. And it’s how we get a sense of ourselves and what we belong to. And and who we belong to. It’s how we teach one another. And so I think I can’t even imagine a life without tradition is much as I used to think that I mean, I’m I’m very Protestant in some ways.
12:45 – 13:10
Dr. Bowman
I think about how I mean, I embrace it more than just some ways. But, you know, I remember when I was younger and very immature, thinking about and thinking about Catholics and thinking about Anglicans, which I am now, you know, I don’t I don’t want to go with those traditions, you know, that’s just stuffy and it’s not free I’m not freely expressing expressing my faith I mean, I just can’t help but laugh at that thought to me.
13:10 – 13:26
Dr. Bowman
Now, if I go to church and I participate in the liturgy, I read the Book of Common Prayer, even if I’m in a Catholic mass, you know, I to me, I’m I am I’m connected to those traditions, to people thousands of years before me and to those who come after me and to the different places and communities that they’re part of.
13:26 – 13:52
Dr. Bowman
To me, I don’t feel less free participating in those traditions, that liturgy I, I feel I feel less alone. Yeah, that makes sense. And, and that this is, I’m, it’s, I’m part of something much larger than myself. And that is so counter-cultural to experience that and think of it. And I, I wish I would have, wouldn’t have rejected it for those few years.
13:52 – 13:57
Dr. Bowman
And when I was younger and I’m just not theologically let’s put it that way.
13:57 – 14:23
Dr. Wysocki
Well, I think that’s, that’s a great segway into, into the sort of the second commitment of the surrounding society as you mentioned, sort of Catholic tradition. And it’s so fitting in my mind that this just Iranian society come to be with us, with them on Abbey, because we’re a Benedictine monastery. And unlike other religious orders, you know, our monks take a vow stability, whereas, you know, other orders, mendicant orders go out into the city.
14:23 – 14:46
Dr. Wysocki
They go where they’re called they move around these monks, you know, they take a bath of stability and they’re buried when they die in our cemetery here. And they and so there’s something really attractive about that that’s in the sort of air we breathe here at Belmont Abbey. But tell us a little bit about I mean, this is Iranian society’s commitment to place outside of, say, a religious community of monks.
14:46 – 14:51
Dr. Wysocki
Why is it important for for for laypeople, for our culture as a whole?
14:52 – 15:15
Dr. Bowman
Yeah, I think of all the things that make us as the society in society unique. I think this is the big one. I don’t know of another organization that focuses on this the way we do. And I could be wrong, but I’ve never encountered it. And it’s hard to describe in the abstract. It’s precisely because what place means to me and what it means to you is is intentionally meant to be different.
15:16 – 15:40
Dr. Bowman
When I think of home, when I think of what I’ve rootedness, of where I’m supposed to be in a sense, it’s naturally going to be different depending on who you are. But I think place gets us to this notion of particularity that the particular is not a problem, if that makes sense. You know, it almost goes back to a Plato and Aristotle type debate, depending on how you read him.
15:40 – 16:17
Dr. Bowman
You know, thinking of Plato is thinking of, you know, there’s the form of the good, but Aristotle teaching us that it’s the particular good, the true and the beautiful, that that points us toward the universal true and the good true and the beautiful. That’s one way to think of it. And to me, whatever is good, lovely, whatever is divine, whatever is whatever happiness is, whatever joy is, whatever all these different universal goods virtues they’re going to manifest, themselves in an infinite number of ways and in very particular places, especially beauty, I think.
16:18 – 16:40
Dr. Bowman
And we want to celebrate that. You know, it’s not that we want to come impose in imposing your classical score, your home school or your university particular sense of what beauty is or what the virtues necessarily are, that there is a universal sense of this, but that what this is going to look like where you are is going to be different than what it looks like over here.
16:41 – 17:06
Dr. Bowman
And so I think that particularity is really, really important to celebrate because it celebrates genuine diversity and that we don’t have to conform to everything. We want to conform ourself to the Word of God to to the teachings of the church and to this tradition. Yes, but not at the expense of particular places and lifestyles, if you will.
17:06 – 17:29
Dr. Bowman
I mean, there is there’s orthodoxy, there’s boundaries, and there’s these, you know, rules that we live by. But at the same time, we don’t we want that town to look differently, that church to look differently in a way that I think is valuable. And I get I’m having a hard time explaining this because what place means is is not universal.
17:30 – 17:52
Dr. Bowman
You know? So right now I live in Holland, Michigan. And when I think of Holland, Michigan, I think a very specific things. I think of the Tulip Festival and I think of windmills and its Dutch heritage and the fact that it has the largest municipal snowmelt system in the world. I think in a world where like basically right now it’s snowing and it’s it melts the ground because it does have a system.
17:52 – 18:21
Dr. Bowman
And I think of the people here, I think of certain restaurants, they think of certain stores, you know, local stores, and traditions. And that’s what I mean by a sense of place that we don’t. And I would I would juxtapose and maybe helpful to juxtapose this with what it’s what we are not I think right now there’s a tendency toward rootlessness, toward kind of always trying to escape from a place toward disparaging the local in the particular.
18:22 – 18:44
Dr. Bowman
And I don’t think that’s healthy. I think there’s something that we we love the and we don’t necessarily just mean the local rural areas. Those are wonderful. But also that’s particular particular city block, that particular neighborhood within a city, you know, and and that we think about ourselves as part of that economy, part of that place. I think that’s part of what we’re going for.
18:45 – 19:06
Dr. Bowman
And we actually we have a rule about an award for that at the conference. So a someone will receive a award for a paper reflecting on the notion of place at every conference and we hope to expand our scholarship there. Actually a lot of the papers for this this bigger conference, probably more so than any other conference, are focused on place this this time.
19:06 – 19:14
Dr. Bowman
And so if you want to get a better sense of what it means, then what I’m trying to say, come to the conference. Yeah. We have a lot of great people talking about.
19:15 – 19:43
Dr. Wysocki
How do you how do you train the affections of people to love place and to commit to having roots and for each other, that this always seems to be such a threat. Right. He says, like the independence and the the vitality of the township, for example. Right. Which he thinks is so great in America. Yeah. You know, political life it’s always under it’s always under threat because larger organizations have more money and they can say we do things more efficiently and well.
19:43 – 20:05
Dr. Wysocki
Diversity and people doing things in their little backward ways. That’s not the best way to do it. And with an Internet that shows you, well, you can do it this way, I, I don’t know if I have a great question here, except, you know, you know, even Wendell Berry, it’s interesting. We did at, at last year, we read one of Wendell Berry’s novels and a culture and, you know, her sons go off to college.
20:06 – 00:20:08
Dr. Wysocki
They go off to college and.
20:08 – 20:09
Dr. Bowman
Right.
20:09 – 20:30
Dr. Wysocki
You know, part of college in a way, is getting you to be more cosmopolitan. And in a certain sense, reading these things you never would have read and having these experiences you wouldn’t have read. And then she’s sad that her son doesn’t want to come back home and live in in Fort William and so I don’t know if you thought about the stretch of that.
20:30 – 20:38
Dr. Wysocki
How do you how do you sort of make the case or show people the good the how how place is related to flourishing for human being?
20:39 – 21:05
Dr. Bowman
Yeah, I think that that’s very much a tough one because we have to it is whatever the answer to that question is, is countercultural because we recognize that it’s going to be we’re going to be resisted. You know, I also think of when you talk about a hand of culture, but also I think it was a he gave a commencement speech, Wendell Berry did on homecoming, I think it was called basically, you know what, if we got degrees and went home all right.
21:05 – 21:29
Dr. Bowman
And contributed to to that because there’s and part of that is this belief that we go to college and we get an education to make money and to do something for ourselves, that the whole purpose of our education is to do something that’s going to make us wealthier, us successful. I think if there’s one thing I would I would change and I was I was guilty of that.
21:30 – 21:46
Dr. Bowman
You know, if I were to give a commencement speech, for example, I think one of the biggest things I would point out, and Barry points this out as well, is you’re educated and you’re developed to help and serve others. Not, not, not, not to help and serve humanity. In general is kind of abstract sense, but to help particular people.
21:47 – 22:06
Dr. Bowman
Now, that may not be back home, but it it very well might be because you’re from there. You understand those people and you go back now, how do we train them? You know, one of the things I hope to come out of the Cicerone say over time is to answer this question, is to think about how can we come together and share ideas and share experiences of how we’re doing this.
22:06 – 22:25
Dr. Bowman
I think homeschooling and classical schooling are amazing examples of this because in order to successfully teach you know, offer a classical education, especially for home schooling, you you use the place that you’re in to educate your kids, right? We’re going to start homeschooling next year. And we’re thinking like, okay, how are we going to use this museum that’s downtown?
22:25 – 22:47
Dr. Bowman
How are we going to use the parks around us? How are we going to use these different examples here? To teach our kids math and science and history and all this other stuff? And I think that’s I think that’s invaluable. I also think it’s valuable to experience other places you know, I think when I went to, gosh, it’s almost 17 years ago now when I was at LA, they had a Semester in Europe program.
22:47 – 23:14
Dr. Bowman
It was amazing. One of the most Life-Changing experiences of my ever, and I loved everything I saw in Europe. Right? Just going we went all over England, Ireland, Scotland, and the mainland, and the particularities of the places we visited did not have to make me long for those places necessarily. But when I came home, I saw I remember thinking, I see architecture differently.
23:14 – 23:35
Dr. Bowman
I see the food I’m eating. I’m seeing I’m seeing the way the way that the cities laid out. I thought I thought of that differently, right? You go to old Europe, everything revolves around what the church except for the new town, which revolves around usually a government or business. I thought to myself, like my own hometown, which was founded in the early 19th, late 18th, early 19th century.
23:37 – 24:07
Dr. Bowman
At first it was it revolved around the the church, one of the oldest Catholic Church in Michigan, actually. But then it would eventually revolve more around the businesses, paper mills and eventually the auto factories. And I think to myself about how experience in other places with the right guy the right way teaches you to love your own place more and so I don’t you know, I think coming together and learning, you know, what are you doing down at Belmont?
24:07 – 24:19
Dr. Bowman
What is so-and-so doing over at Leigh I over in Cleveland, what it’s also doing over you know, down in Atlanta, you know, that’s I think that’s invaluable for understand asking the better questions and experiencing place more intimately and deeply.
24:20 – 24:53
Dr. Wysocki
Great and wonderful. For those of our listeners who aren’t familiar with Wendell Berry, who we were waxing on about, he is an author of both fiction. He has an entire series about this one town. He’s a Kentucky author, but also writes a number of really interesting essays on everything from farming to community to economics. So, yeah, we’ll get let’s we’ll just move on to the so the last commitment of this surrounding society things divine.
24:55 – 25:16
Dr. Wysocki
And my question here might be, yeah, how how do we approach how do we approach that in a sort of religiously pluralistic society? How how do you sort of commit to that substantively when there’s so much diversity in terms of our religious commitments? And what does that mean to you? That’s yeah.
25:17 – 25:38
Dr. Bowman
Yeah, there’s there’s a lot to say here. And one of the goofy things about us is we’re called the Cicerone Society. Cicero is not a Christian you know, I think I could be wrong, but this I think he actually invented the word religion, but he he saw the value of religion even if he didn’t necessarily believe it entirely.
25:39 – 26:05
Dr. Bowman
And in some cases, as this ordering force of understanding the world in a way. But I think of Christianity in particular as completing what classical thought started as basically classical thought and reason. And one of the reasons why we still read people like Plato and Aristotle and Aeschylus and, you know, whoever that we we see them reaching for something that is that is completed in Christ.
26:05 – 26:35
Dr. Bowman
Now, when we say things divine things divine is a phrase taken from Cicero, but and he emphasized he never gets to the full answer. He’s still a pagan are obviously days before Christ are born. But we see that what makes the primary tradition that we draw on, what makes place sacred is this religion, religious tradition and the religious teachings that we draw.
26:35 – 26:55
Dr. Bowman
We we don’t want we are deliberately and explicitly Christian ecumenical, and that’s because we’re Catholic, Protestant Orthodox. And they will all be. Yeah, I know that because I have to do the catering for Friday during that essay and talking to our friends at Belmont about that. It was so funny just trying to think of like, I have to here’s the Protestant salad with chicken on it, right?
26:55 – 27:13
Dr. Bowman
Here’s the, you know, and you know, we got, we got to, we’re going to have fish on Friday night. And so it’s the think about all that stuff as an Anglican, which was kind of funny, but it’s also great, you know, these traditions are wonderful. But I think, I don’t think we can find and maybe this is controversial.
27:13 – 27:45
Dr. Bowman
I don’t think we could be held together as well as a society, as a group. It’s a strange say simply by another ideology, simply by even by a particular place or even by a particular philosophy or even just by an affection for Cicero, which we all have. Right particular thinker. I think the deepest friendships are those rooted in a common love of Christ and of the Word of God and I think and of the church.
27:45 – 28:23
Dr. Bowman
And I think that what we have found is that in order to develop a society that wants to help, where we as a society want to help one another, love one another rightly and and love our families and our places, our communities and our churches and our schools, rightly it will be more successful. It will be deeper if we center it in Christ in prayer and in the Christian tradition, because all our work as academics, as educators, as publishers, as writers, as thinkers, they will only go so far.
28:23 – 28:45
Dr. Bowman
We need the grace of God. And, you know, the whole mystic kind of notion that grace perfects nature, I think is deeply embedded in what we’re doing. Grace perfects, tradition, perfects, place perfects our education, it perfects our writing. You know, when you go back and read something you wrote and it’s better than than what you thought it was, you realized, thanks God.
28:45 – 29:06
Dr. Bowman
Yeah, because I didn’t do that on my own. And I think if we’re going to these these themes that we focus on and the broader mission, you know, behind the system in society of developing local communities in a society that helps one another educate the next generation and educate each other. Yeah. And and this this intellectual discipleship is the word I use.
29:07 – 29:20
Dr. Bowman
We need a lot of grace for that. And I think it without it, we’re done. We’re only going to get so far, get burnt out. And so grace is is necessary for all of it.
29:20 – 29:45
Dr. Wysocki
Thank you so much. You know, we’re so excited about the conference coming because as, as I look through the panels, I go, man, there are going to be some incredible conversations, incredible opportunities for learning a number of the honors. College students are planning on coming. We have a lot of the Abby faculty here are just planning to come, some as discussants, others just to be part of the conversations.
29:46 – 29:56
Dr. Wysocki
Tell me a little bit. Well, maybe I’ll force you to be controversial. Is there panel you are looking forward to the most as you went through that that.
29:57 – 30:14
Dr. Bowman
Yes. Me think here I’m I mean, I’m not on any of them so I can’t I can’t be selfish here. I mean one of the one of the worst things about this I’ll let me start there’s so many wonderful things about the conference. The only bad thing is you can’t go to all the you can’t get.
30:14 – 30:14
Dr. Wysocki
All right.
30:15 – 30:31
Dr. Bowman
Because we’re going to have to do different streams because I’m thinking myself. I want to go to all of these. So I’m not just saying no. Right. You know, I mean, we we have created a conference that we all want to go to, but the problem is we can’t go to all of it all the time. I am you know, one of the first panels I got proposed was a panel on talking.
30:31 – 30:57
Dr. Bowman
And I love talking, so I’m really excited about that one. We have some other ones here, though, that I am I’m also really excited about. There’s a on Friday morning, there’s a author meets Critics panel that’s sponsored by the Institute for Human Ecology, The Looming Christians two and the Nova Forum for Catholic Thought. And we’re going to be discussing Jason Blakely’s book We built Believe, which is a critique of social science, the 20th century, and how it has become a kind of version of scientism.
30:58 – 31:20
Dr. Bowman
I just finished that book yesterday. I am ridiculously excited for this conversation. I just want to recommend if you’ve never read Blakely’s book, it is it is provocative in all the right ways. It is a really, really good conversation starter. And we got several amazing people on that panel that are going to have a good conversation right after that.
31:20 – 31:42
Dr. Bowman
The Center for Religion, Culture and Democracy has been a big supporter of yes, they just did a project on the religious liberty in the state. And so looking at how individual states rank in terms of how they recognize religious liberty, that project is just getting started. They published their first report this just this past year, I believe in September, and that was led by Sarah Stahl, who’s going to be here.
31:42 – 32:03
Dr. Bowman
She can be talking about it and several people discussing it. We have other panels on one on the work of George Grant. Speaking of a neglected anchor, especially in the in the in an American thought. I’m going to be talking about him. There’s a panel with the folks, your neighbors over at the CAC Institute on Socratic teaching. They’re going to be coming by.
32:04 – 32:24
Dr. Bowman
We have all three of panels on farming and farming and see what you know. We’re actually going to find that right. You see that, of course, a very there’s a lot of overlap, especially from the very beginning with what we do with the front porch with public people. And I think that’s we’ll see that here. We’ll see stuff from Shakespeare and of course, on Cicero.
32:24 – 32:44
Dr. Bowman
Also Abraham Kiper. Augustine, there’s just some there’s so many fun things we’re going to talk about. And of course, the best conversations usually happen over the food, which is usually honestly, if I’m going to say what I’m most excited about, that we’re going to have some barbecue. Because, you know, speaking of sacrament, that’s you know, that’s how I experience it.
32:44 – 32:46
Dr. Bowman
So, yeah, sacred barbecue.
32:47 – 33:09
Dr. Wysocki
Yeah. You know, I stopped going to sort of academic disciplinary conferences many years ago I’m sure there are some out there that are maybe worth going to. But, you know, these are these are the types of conferences that I just love the idea of hosting and going because, I mean, ultimately, we’re talking about human flourishing in a really comprehensive way.
33:10 – 33:28
Dr. Wysocki
And I just go, like, my students have gone, you got to come to this I mean, they’re going to be really bright people here talking about economics and talking about literature. And and it’s all I mean, it’s rooted in Christ. It’s rooted in a care for tradition. For soul craft. We all we all we’re all thinking about education in terms of soul craft.
33:29 – 33:52
Dr. Wysocki
And that’s what’s going to be such a delight. Well, good Let’s see we’re kind of coming to the end of our time. Let’s maybe just sort of remind people the conference is March nine. Through 11th here at Belmont Abbey College and the website if they want to register. What is that again, Joshua?
33:52 – 34:31
Dr. Bowman
That is a Cicerone and society org. CIC R and I-and society dawg. And they are not. They have shownotes or not, but go ahead and put it in there. You can register to the website. They’ll also give you the schedule for the conference, tell you about, you know, if you’re coming from a distance where you can stay got large blocks at two hotels locally closest airport to Charlotte and it’s pretty easy to get to and we will have we’re working on getting some shuttles so we can get people between the hotels and campus and I know there’s ridesharing and stuff you can use to get from the airport to the hotels will have hospitality activities in
34:31 – 34:52
Dr. Bowman
the evenings as well. And so there’s a lot of time to socialize, connect with people, put together different ideas about writing projects. There’s been there’s been entire, you know, books and symposiums and courses that have come out of us. This range say conference because it’s smart. Where are you going to meet everybody there and you’re going to get to know them really, really well.
34:52 – 35:11
Dr. Bowman
And if you’re if you’re a student, a graduate, student or an undergraduate student, you’re early in your career, this is just invaluable. You’re not going to get lost in the crowd like you will at that thing. Like an APEC conference, for example. You’re going to get to know some really amazing people. And it’s it’s going to be a great experience.
35:11 – 35:17
Dr. Wysocki
That’s great. And yeah, I mean, just to reiterate this is this is worth commenting, even if you’re not presenting, right?
35:17 – 35:19
Dr. Bowman
Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly right.
35:19 – 35:35
Dr. Wysocki
I mean, I got pulled into a panel and I was kind of like, oh, no, I got to do work. I was happy to just sit and listen to everybody else. But no, I’m excited. I mean, I’m very excited about my panel as well. But, you know. Yeah, so show up. Well, good. Any, any last words of thoughts?
35:35 – 35:36
Dr. Wysocki
You want to leave us with Josh?
35:37 – 35:57
Dr. Bowman
Yeah, I’ll leave with this. I just want to thank you and Belmont Abby so much for helping us with this conference. It would not be possible without you this was such an obvious choice for us to visit Joe in the Honors College. Yeah, job has been amazing in terms of support for us and you know, we’re we’re going to have a hard time leaving, I think, on that Sunday.
35:58 – 36:17
Dr. Bowman
So I just want to by anyone in everyone who’s interested in this, let us know. You can contact me info at this Iranian society. The org. You know, we’re an all volunteer organization. We’re looking for all the support we can get. And we do a lot with a little, which is our our specialty, if you will. And we the sky’s the limit, though.
36:17 – 36:36
Dr. Bowman
We have a lot of great plans going forward. There’s a lot of ways we can serve the church and classical schools and homeschooling. And if you want to be a part of that conversation, you know, and get it on the ground floor, if you will, and see where can we take this as a society, as a community. This is a great opportunity to be a part of that because I think there’s a lot of opportunities.
36:36 – 36:52
Dr. Bowman
The classical school world is growing. The homeschooling world is growing. Places like Belmont and other places you know, they’re growing and doing great. Why? Because we’re on to something. And if you want to be part of that conversation and what happens next, please, we’ll we’ll see in North Carolina.
36:52 – 37:14
Dr. Wysocki
Right well, thanks again, Josh, and to all of our listeners, thank you for tuning in to the conversation. Your podcast, if you like this episode, check out. We are now in season two and so we have over ten episodes and you can find it anywhere that you go to for your favorite podcasts. Thank you. And God bless. We hope to see you in March.
About the Host
Dr. Joseph Wysocki
Dean of the Honors College
Dr. Joseph Wysocki is Dean of the Honors College at Belmont Abbey College where he has also served as Assistant Academic Dean, and Chair and Associate Professor of the Politics Department since 2010. He is interested in all of the great books in the Honors College curriculum but has a particular focus on classical political philosophy and American political thought, especially the thought of Alexis de Tocqueville. Dr. Wysocki received his B.A. in Political Science and Economics from Belmont Abbey College and his M.A. and Ph.D in Political Science at Baylor University. He serves on the Council of Scholars for the American Academy for Liberal Education and CLT’s Board of Academic Advisors. He lives in Gastonia, NC with his wife Jeanne and his six children.