Our Mission: To explore, evaluate, and pass on the Great Conversation of Western Civilization by way of a Christian view of life and the world.
Our faculty, board, students, and supporters are a group of academics, artists, and businessmen (many more than one, and Dan here is all three!) who are concerned that the Christian Faith just doesn’t seem to carry much weight in our culture these days. Arguments that used to sound reasonable and compelling now seem to fall on deaf ears -- in government, the arts, poplar culture, academia, the business world, even the Church... How do we regain a hearing for the Faith? Christians are pretty good at pointing out that everything is falling apart, but what we may need to do is to paint the watching world a picture of the Good again -- to show how beautiful and attractive the Good can be. Make people want to do it rather than evil because by comparison evil is so clumsy and thread-bare. For example, it may be that before we can gain a hearing again for the biblical definition of marriage, we first need to find some example of a man leading and a woman following that everyone would agree is beautiful and delightful and worthy of praise. If it is hard to imagine an example like that, then you see my point. Have you ever seen two really good waltzers? They move like one person. It is far easier to make a biblical case seem plausible when we can show beautiful results of its implementation.
For centuries the Good has been mediated to the next generation through the great literature, art, architecture and music of our ancestors. So, one of the best ways to keep future generations from taking the Faith seriously is to disconnect young people from their cultural inheritance. Old Uncle Screwtape would probably advise “just don’t let them see great works -- or if you can’t keep them from seeing, at least keep them from understanding them.” For a long time now, the universities have been rejecting first, the biblical God, but then 2nd, the Western art, music, and literature that came about partly as a result of faith in that God.
And it is into this university system that we Christian parents send our young students -- students who have grown up in the Church and been taught in Christian private schools and we are seeing studies now that 50% of these Christian students will lose their faith by the time they finish their undergrad degrees.
At the Center we draw attention again to our rich and dynamic culture -- in hopes that people will fall in love again with it. We want students who can stand up against the pressures of this fallen world - not just to say no to partying, but to know how Nietzsche’s take on Dionysus encourages those parties... we want adult students to know not just that Impressionists were painters of pretty pictures, but to know how to read Impressionist paintings, and Greek epics, and Shakespeare’s plays with a Christian mind. These ancestors of ours are, like the descendants of Abraham, a scurvy lot...but they are OUR scurvy lot. They are OUR parents and grandparents, and we are commanded to honor our parents -- and they have left us an attic and a storage locker FULL of marvelous things they have made and collected - cathedrals, symphonies, novels, paintings, films, statues, poems -- things that Edmund Burke said furnished the wardrobe of our moral imagination. Those who know these works have larger souls - they have more to enjoy and communicate to their peers and the next generation, and by knowing them, they are more likely to be able to see through the flashy, trashy, superficial, and sentimental that every generation produces, and the present one in spades. This experience can get us out of ourselves and open our eyes to the full spectrum of the human condition. CS Lewis said we should read 2 old books for every new one because while every generation makes errors, not every generation makes the SAME errors -- so while we scoff at the blindspots of our ancestors, we no doubt have blindspots of our own that they didn’t have and could teach us about.
At the Center, we don’t see the student as the client who chooses the things he wants to study according to his own interests -- rather we see the wisdom of the ages as the client, and the students as gifted and chosen means by which that client wisdom might be passed down through the ages. The Center for Western Studies exists to reacquaint this generation and the next with its own culture inheritance.