A panel discussion featuring Charles Taylor, Patricia Nanz, Jason Blakely, and Fr. Patrick Gilger, SJ. that is free and open to the public.

This event will be held online via Zoom (registration required) and live-streamed to YouTube. This event is co-presented with the Lumen Christi Institute and co-sponsored by America Media and the Collegium Institute.

We are experiencing a crisis of democracy more powerful than anything seen in a generation: inequality continues at a galloping pace; policing is increasingly racialized and militarized; political decision-making appears remote and divorced from the lives of ordinary people.

This panel discussion—including renowned philosopher Charles Taylor--will consider sources and solutions to the present crisis of democracy by drawing on two recent books: Reconstructing Democracy by Charles Taylor, Patrizia Nanz, and Madeleine Beaubien Taylor and We Built Reality by Jason Blakely. 

Both works identify within our political and cultural crisis the loss of democratic participation and the rise of top-down technocratic, managerial rule.

Charles Taylor is Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at McGill University. Although his work has covered a great breadth of subjects, he is perhaps best known for his contributions to political and moral theory. Among his many authored books are A Secular Age (2007), Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity (1989), and The Ethics of Authenticity (1991). He has received a litany of awards and recognitions for his body of work, including the Ratzinger Prize (2019), the Berggruen Prize (2016), the Kluge Prize (2015), the Kyoto Prize (2008), and the Templeton Prize (2007).

Patrizia Nanz is Vice President of the German Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management, professor at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Potsdam and Director of the German-French Forum for the Future. From 2016 until 2021, she was Scientific Director at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany. Previously, she was professor for political theory at the University of Bremen. In her work, she is exploring the future of democracy, especially the challenges connected to open government, public administration and citizen participation.

Jason Blakely is an associate professor of political science at Pepperdine University and is one of our very own Senior Fellows! His expertise is in political philosophy and hermeneutics. He is the author of We Built Reality: How Social Science Infiltrated Culture, Politics, and Power (Oxford, 2020) and Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and the Demise of Naturalism (Notre Dame, 2016). He also co-authored Interpretive Social Science (Oxford, 2018) with Mark Bevir. Blakely's work has also appeared in top scholarly journals as well as popular venues like the Atlantic and Commonweal.

Fr. Patrick Gilger, S.J. is completing his doctorate at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He will join the sociology faculty at Loyola University Chicago this coming fall, and is contributing editor for culture at America Media.