2022 Providence College Veritas Conference
Strangers in a Strange Land: Alienation and Identity in America
Spring Conference | April 22-23, 2022 | Providence College
The Providence College Humanities Program is pleased to announce its inaugural Veritas Conference, Strangers in a Strange Land: Alienation and Identity in America, to be held at Providence College April 22-23, 2022. Keynote speakers include Timothy P. Carney (American Enterprise Institute), Carl R. Trueman (Grove City College), and Peter J. Leithart (Theopolis Institute).
About the Conference
What concrete resources does Christianity, more broadly, and the Catholic and Dominican tradition, in particular, offer those living in secularizing America, given that we cannot flourish unless we have communal structures to sustain us, but are culturally pressured toward an individualized understanding of ourselves and our own good? What is unique about the modern sense of “self,” and where did it come from? What positive contributions does it make? What role does “civil society” play in the formation of personal identity? And what effect does the modern conception of the “self” have on the health of civil society?
In the humane spirit of the Veritas Conference, the Humanities Program welcomes abstracts that engage the themes of personal identity and the state of civil society from a variety of points of departure, including theology, philosophy, political theory, law, history, economics, and the social sciences, as well as the natural sciences, literature, and the arts.
Please direct inquiries to veritas.conference@providence.edu.
About the Keynote Speakers
Timothy P. Carney
Tim Carney is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a columnist for the Washington Examiner, and the author of three books, most recently Alienated America: Why Some Places Thrive While Others Collapse. Tim has written articles in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlantic, National Review, and other publications. He and his wife raise six kids in the Washington, D.C., area.
Carl Trueman
Born and raised in England, Carl Trueman is a graduate of the Universities of Cambridge and Aberdeen and has taught on the faculties of the Universities of Nottingham and Aberdeen before moving to the United States in 2001 to teach at Westminster Theological Seminary (PA). Since 2018, he has served as a professor at Grove City College. He is a Contributing Editor at First Things, an opinion columnist at World magazine, and a Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington DC. His most recent book is The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Expressive Individualism, Cultural Amnesia, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.
Peter J. Leithart
Peter J. Leithart is president of the Theopolis Institute, a Christian think-tank and leadership training program in Birmingham, Alabama, and also serves as Teacher at Trinity Presbyterian Church. He is the author of many books, including most recently God of Hope (Athanasius, forthcoming) and Great Stage of Fools (Cascade, 2021). He and his wife Noel have ten children and fifteen grandchildren.
Conference Overview
Friday, April 22
- 3 – 4:30 p.m.
Welcome and inaugural John F. Fay ’68 Plenary Address: Timothy Carney, American Enterprise Institute (Humanities Forum reception to follow) - 6 – 8 p.m.
Dinner
Saturday, April 23
- 8 – 8:45 a.m.
Continental Breakfast in Ruane Great Room - 9 – 10:15 a.m.
Breakout Sessions - 11 – 12:15 p.m.
Second Plenary Address: Carl Trueman, Grove City College - 12:30 – 1:45 p.m.
Lunch in Raymond Dining Hall - 2 – 3:15 p.m.
Breakout Sessions - 4 – 5:15 p.m.
Breakout Sessions - 5:30 – 7 p.m.
Dinner - 7:15 – 8:30 p.m.
Third Plenary Address: Peter Leithart, Theopolis Institute
Breakout Session Paper Titles
Saturday, April 23
- 9 – 10:15 a.m. (Ruane 105)
Andrew Doran: “American Caesar: The Expansion and Dominance of the State over Civil Society”
Mark Shiffman: “A Political Phenomenology of the Modern Self”
Ján Tomaštík: “Public Reasons without Liberalism” - 2 – 3:15 p.m. (Ruane 205 and 206)
Concurrent Session 1 (Ruane 205)
Dylan Belton: “The Modern ‘Buffered’ Self in Anthropological Perspective”
Paul Clarke, O.P.: “Ethics of Alienation: On the Double Politics of the Economy of Charity”
James Keating: “Liberalism: The Best of all Likely Worlds for the Church”
Concurrent Session 2 (Ruane 206)
Iain Bernhoft: “Zombie Identities”
John Seiffert: “The Sense of Self in Artificial Intelligence and Dominican Mysticism.”
Victoria Bergstrom: “To the Beat of Their Own Horn: A Study of the Catholic Church, Education, and Culture in South Louisiana.” - 4 – 5:15 p.m. (Ruane 205 and 206)
Concurrent Session 1 (Ruane 205)
Richard Barry: “Where Prayer Has Been Valid: The Jerusalem Temple, Eliot’s Little Gidding, and the Christian Hope for Life After Alienation”
Bruno Shah, O.P.: “For Jean-Luc Marion’s Phenomenology, Love is Love”
Jeremy Wilkins: “Absurdity and Hope”
Concurrent Session 2 (Ruane 206)
Rebecca Farias: “Doe as Thou Wouldest Be Done By: Relief Responses to Mental Illness in Puritan New England”
Craig Iffland: “Property, Polity, and Human Flourishing in Thomas Aquinas”
Andrew Bertodatti: “The Resources of Church Membership for a Culture of Narcissism”
