In 2020, while the world was on lockdown due to COVID-19, Carl Trueman published one of the most important books of the last several decades. In The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, Trueman built on the insights of contemporary thinkers such as Philip Rieff and Alasdair MacIntyre to show how modern thinkers and artists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, Percy Shelley, and William Blake gave expression to a worldview—what Charles Taylor called a “social imaginary”—that made possible and plausible the arguments of the late-modern theorists who shaped the postmodern sexual revolution, people like Sigmund Freud, Wilhelm Reich, and Herbert Marcuse. It is a penetrating analysis of recent intellectual history that shows why people are willing to believe ideas today that our grandparents would have rejected out of hand—without need of argument, evidence, or proof—just two generations ago.
On Friday, April 1, EPPC’s HHS Accountability Project Scholars Senior Fellow Roger Severino and Fellow Rachel N. Morrison met with federal government officials to discuss concerns over an upcoming proposal by the Department of Health and Human Services that would rescind health care conscience regulations. Among other points, the EPPC scholars argued for continued regulatory protections for the conscience and religious freedom rights of health care professionals and faith-based institutions, listing many of the costs of removing such protections.
A written version of those comments, submitted to the government, is available here (PDF).
APPEARANCES
On March 31, EPPC President Ryan T. Anderson delivered the Archdiocese of Milwaukee's annual Pallium Lecture on the topic “Religious Liberty is Important but it’s Not Enough.”
National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez offers a generous tribute to EPPC Kate O'Beirne Senior Fellow Mary Rice Hasson in honor of Mary's ten-year anniversary at EPPC.
EVENT: Religious Liberty & Law: In the Courts, In the Public Square, & In Administration
On Friday, April 8, the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State and the Ethics and Public Policy Center will host a conference on religious liberty with panel discussions on government regulation and religion, the public square and religious freedom, and the courts. Speakers include EPPC’s Ed Whelan and Roger Severino along with leading litigators and former and current senior government officials.
