Founding Ideals

A More Perfect Union?

2015-16 Dinner at the Square Season

Founding Ideals: A More Perfect Union?

“A republic, if you can keep it.”

Ben Franklin, when asked as he left the Constitutional Convention about what form of government they had created.

The story of America is the biggest, boldest idea in human history writ large and offered for almost 250 years to its citizens, and as a beacon to the world. It’s also a story of some of its most central ideals – equality, liberty, free speech, still straining to be realized. And our country’s story is also the story of the founding sin of slavery, a legacy that still lives – squarely in the events of our time.

Through this season of Dinner at the Square, we’ll both celebrate the greatness of the ideals our country was founded on and ask ourselves how we can better live into them.

 

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After this last year of deep, heart-wrenching division across race, religion and political perspective – division that seems too often to create civic dialogue that finds the worst in us instead of calling our better angels – we think this is a conversation for our time, a checking back to consider how well we are hewing to the ideals of America, and perhaps a renewed promise to get there.

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2015-16 Season Events

Apr 19, 2016

Free Speech + Bad Manners

(in the Age of Political Correctness and Bad Manners)
Feb 16, 2016

Created Equal and Breathing Free

The straining ideals of equality and freedom
Sep 15, 2015

An Evening with Thomas Jefferson

A live taping of “The Thomas Jefferson Hour”
Past Event | April 19, 2016

Free Speech in the Age of Political Correctness and Bad Manners

As bad manners and ill-tempers replace conversations of substance, sometimes free speech seems to have simply gone to seed. Meanwhile, we seem to be in a societal-wide spitting match about just who is the most tediously offended.

Past Event | February 16, 2016

Created Equal & Breathing Free

In “Created Equal + Breathing Free,” we’ll examine the straining of the central – and sometimes competing – principles of equality and freedom. Does your freedom threaten my equality? And does my equality limit your freedom?

Past Event | September 15, 2015

Humanities Scholar Clay Jenkinson: The Thomas Jefferson Hour

In a live audience taping of The Thomas Jefferson Hour, we looked through the eyes of the author of the Declaration of Independence and marked our progress toward a more perfect union.