Upcoming Lecture:

“Russell Kirk”

featuring Dr. Bradley Birzer, Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College

Date: Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Time: 6:30 p.m.

Location: Rathburn Hall, Grove City College

RSVP required. Click here to RSVP.

What is conservatism?

What does it mean to be a conservative?

The founders of modern conservatism, from the likes of Russell Kirk to William F. Buckley, Jr. to Ronald Reagan, had a well-informed understanding of what conservatism is. Kirk said that conservatism is less an ideology than it is an attitude. Conservatives believe in the “permanent things,” in an “enduring moral order” based on Biblical law and natural law. They believe in an “ordered liberty” anchored in both faith and freedom.

Many of today’s self-identified conservatives, however, are not so well-grounded. They sometimes struggle to articulate conservatism’s distinctive ideas.

Grove City College has been dubbed the most conservative college in America—the college “most nostalgic for Reagan.” We here at “Freedom’s College” boast an Institute for Faith & Freedom, which every year since 2005 has hosted an annual Ronald Reagan Lecture and an annual conference that in past years has tackled the question of what it means to be a conservative. Now, in 2022, we see the need to take a step further, to do a more lasting examination of this question.

Beginning in the fall of 2022, the Institute for Faith & Freedom at Grove City College will be launching an important new lecture series, titled, “The Conservative Mind: A Lecture Series on Understanding Conservatism and the Foundations of Freedom.”

Each semester, this series will bring to campus a leading conservative thinker or scholar to explore the precise question of what it means to be a conservative. These lectures will be open to students and the general public alike. The lectures will be posted online and transcribed for publication in a series of companion volumes. This will be a wonderful learning opportunity for both young people and older individuals struggling to understand what it means to be a conservative today. This is a subject that the Institute for Faith & Freedom and Grove City College are uniquely positioned to tackle.

Watch the first episode featuring Jonah Goldberg here: