Join us as Dr. Harvey C. Mansfield, William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard University and senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, discusses Alexis de Tocqueville’s premise that religion supplies essential support to political liberty. For Tocqueville, Mansfield argues, “The task of politics...is to cooperate with religion and to guide our lives so that our virtue is rewarded and our freedom preserved.”

Thursday, November 3
7:30 p.m.
The Africa Room, Duquesne University Student Union

For more information, please call 412.396.6485.

About the Speaker

Harvey C. Mansfield has written on Edmund Burke and the nature of political parties, on Machiavelli and the invention of indirect government, on the qualities of a defensible liberalism and in favor of a Constitution-based American political science. He has held Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, has been a fellow at the National Humanities Center, earned a National Humanities Medal in 2004 and was the 2007 Jefferson Lecturer.

About Pascal Day

Pascal Day is a semi-annual lecture series devoted to the ways that reason and revelation inspire and inform our actions. The series is named for Blaise Pascal, a 17th-century French mathematician and scientist whose defense of Christianity, the Pensées, probed the tension between faith and reason in ways that have had profound meaning for each subsequent age, making the work a classic of religious philosophy.

Past Lectures

February 22, 2010
L’Esprit de la Frontier: Blaise Pascal and the American Mind
presented by Wilfred McClay, a noted expert on the American intellectual tradition

October 2, 2008
Science, Philosophy and Religion in the Embryo Debate
presented by Robert P. George, constitutional law and civil liberties expert