Reintegrating Man Conference
Reintegrating Man: The Spirit of
French Catholicism In America
April 9-10, 2010
ASSUMPTION COLLEGE
Speakers:
- Keynote Speaker Peter Augustine Lawler
Professor of Government
Berry College, Georgia
"Descartes, Pascal, and the Mish-Mash of the American Founding"
Presentations by:
- Philippe Bénéton
Professor of Political Science, Université de Rennes I, France
"Maritain and Mauriac" - Henry Edmondson
Professor of Government, Georgia College and State University
"’Grace is Everywhere’: Flannery O’Connor and the French Novelists" - Daniel Mahoney
Professor of Political Science, Assumption College
"Three French Perspectives on Democracy and America: Tocqueville, Maritain, and Bruckberger"
No country in the world is less philosophic than the United States or more instinctively Cartesian—so said Alexis de Tocqueville in the first volume of Democracy in America. Like Descartes, the Americans whom Tocqueville observed were ready to cut the ties with the past and trust their own intelligence. But the American Founding half a century earlier, unlike the French Revolution, did not attempt a complete break with tradition, and the history of American thought can in some ways be understood as the history of accepting or contending with the thought of France.
This conference, part of the bicentennial celebration of the birth of Fr. Emmanuel d’Alzon, founder of the Augustinians of the Assumption, will address the influence of French Catholic thought in America. Tocqueville, writing from within a perspective informed by the heritage of Catholicism, helped shaped American self-understanding. Even more directly, the Catholic revival in France during the early twentieth century—the time of the founding of Assumption College—was a complex response to the spiritual inadequacy of modernity. From the creative work of Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel, Georges Bernanos, and Francois Mauriac to the recovery of Thomism in Jacques Maritain and Etienne Gilson, French thought before World War II helped charge American Catholicism with a new energy. Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day found their inspiration in the French example. Flannery O’Connor acknowledged Maritain, Bernanos, and Mauriac as mentors; Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and Walker Percy all looked to France. They saw in these French writers and thinkers an unsparing acceptance of the task of making whole the divided self. Speakers and panelists will discuss this traffic of ideas.
The legendary Assumptionist Fr. Ernest Fortin, who came of age in the generation most influenced by the French thinkers of the Catholic revival, saw the necessary centrality of recovering the wholeness of the tradition in political thought. Today, French political thinkers such as Pierre Manent and Philippe Bénéton continue the effort of recovery in new ways, and conference panelists (including their American translators) will discuss their contribution to American thought.
Program Information
April 9 - 10, 2010
Assumption College
500 Salisbury St.
Worcester, MA
01609