“The Roots of Ordered Liberty: America at 250”

June 4-6, 2026

College Park Marriott – College Park, MD

Thursday, June 4

2:00-3:30pm Panel 1: An American Aesthetic: Locality and Liberalism

• Wendy Piper, “Looking Back from 250: Hawthorne as Postliberal Prophet”
• Gianna Ligotino, “An American Renaissance: Locality as the American Aesthetic”
• Raleigh Adams, “Educating the Affections: Jonathan Edwards, Yale, and the Moral Formation of Liberty”
• Hayden Proborowski, “A Moral Certainty: Selecting and Electing Virtuous Presidents”

3:45-5:15pm Panel 2: Republican Forms and Imperial Realities

• Colin Brown, “The American Imperial Project Through the Twentieth Century to Today”
• Matthew Riffe, “George Washington’s Concept of Empire”
• Thomas G. Lannon, “The Art of War and the Practice of Liberty in the American Revolution”

5:00-6:00pm Registration

5:30-7:00pm Reception

• Welcome
  Shaun Rieley, President, Academy of Philosophy and Letters

7:00-9:00pm Dinner Lecture

• Introduction
  Shaun Rieley, President, Academy of Philosophy and Letters

• “Recovering the Roots of Ordered Liberty”
  D. C. Schindler, The Catholic University of America

9:00-11:00pm Fellowship

Friday, June 5

8:00-8:30am Late Registration

8:30-10:15am The Thinkers “Conservatism, Inc.” Ignores: Meyer, Röpke, Nisbet, Kendall

• Dan Flynn (on Frank Meyer)
• Ralph Ancil (on Wilhelm Röpke)
• Luke Sheahan (on Robert Nisbet)
• Matthew T. Cantirino (on Willmoore Kendall)

10:15-10:30am Coffee Break

10:30-12:15pm Debate: Did The Federalist Get It Right?

• Michael P. Federici, Middle Tennessee State University
  For the Federalists
• Jeff Polet, Ford Leadership Forum at the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation
  For the Anti-Federalists
• Moderator: Shaun Rieley, President, Academy of Philosophy and Letters

12:15-2:00pm Lunch Lecture

• “The End of the Creedal Nation”
  Nathan Pinkoski, The Center for Renewing America

2:00-3:30pm Panel 4-A: The American Founding: What Do Our Official Documents Presuppose?

• Bruce Frohnen, “Consent of the Governed in The Declaration of Independence and American Constitutional Practice”
• Allen Mendenhall, “The Constitutional History—and True Purpose—of Corporate Personhood”
• William F. Byrne, “Democracy, Civility, and the Liberal Paradox”
• Ralph Ancil, “Authority, Character, and American Renewal”

Panel 4-B: Literature and the American Republic

• Michael Lucchese, “There’s No Forgiveness for Our Being Human”: The Jeffersonian Legacy in Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to Dragons”
• Christopher J. Scalia, “James Fenimore Cooper’s Revolutionary Novel: Imaging the American Founding in The Spy”
• Darrell Falconburg, “The Displaced Person”: American Humanitarianism in the Fiction of Flannery O’Connor

3:45-5:30pm Panel 5-A: Technocracy, Tyranny, and Mediocrity

• Madeleine S. Austin, “Legibility and Tyranny: Lessons from James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State”
• Ethan Alexander-Davey, “Artificial Intelligence, Culture, and Human Quality”
• Gene Callahan, “A Semiotic View of AI: There’s No Thirdness There”
• Miriam Dawson, “Modern Technological Society and Virtue: What Is Our Telos, and Who Decides?”

Panel 5-B: Contemporary Political-Philosophical Dilemmas

• Thomas Finan, “The Good and Liberty: Freedom Beyond Negation”
• José E. Idler, “Moral Order and the Interest Equilibria”
• Zachary Yost, “The Eagle and the Condor: Eric Voegelin and Ernst Jünger on America’s Present Existential Crisis”
• Katherine L. Bradshaw, “‘To Virtue And to Worthiness’: Dignitas, Gravitas, and Honestas in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar”

5:30-7:00pm Reception

7:00-9:00pm Dinner Lecture

• “The Art of Life: Thomas Jefferson on the Pursuit of Happiness”
  Kody W. Cooper, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

9:00-11:00pm Fellowship

Saturday, June 6

8:30-10:00am Member Meeting Breakfast

• For APL members only

10:00-12:00pm Panel 6: Religion and Civil Religion in America at 250

• John Weichel, “The Constitutional Personality and Christian Pedagogy”
• Paul C. Fine, “‘Worshiping the Spirit of Freedom’: The Spiritual Roots of Independence Day During the Early Cold War”
• John Parks, “Evangelical Civic Religion: The Meaning of American Religious Disestablishment”
• Kevan Keane, “No Room for Neutrality: The Polarizing Effects of New Liberalism on Education”

12:00pm Departures

12:00-2:00pm

• Meeting of the APL Board of Directors and Officers