Sunday, January 15, 2023 at 8:00 PM ET

A Tikvah Conversation in Partnership with the

400 4th St. SW · Washington, DC 20024

Registration is closed

American civilization is at a cultural and civic crossroads.
 
A series of major Supreme Court decisions has expanded educational freedom and opened up the possibility of moral renewal at the state level. And yet many of our public schools, major universities, social media, and corporate culture actively promote a value system that many traditional Americans find troubling. We have seen a dramatic expansion of many Jewish day schools and Christian classical education across the nation. And yet general attendance and engagement in church and synagogue life continues to decline. America remains—along with Israel—the most religious nation in the Western world. And yet the American family faces great challenges—with high levels of family breakdown and declining birthrates.
 
Can religious values help renew American civilization? What is the future of faith-based communities in America? Can we reform existing institutions—like our universities—or do we need to build new ones? How can we make America a “City on a Hill”? In a special Tikvah event in partnership with the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., two of America’s leading religious and moral thinkers—Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik of Yeshiva University—will explore these questions in conversation with Tikvah CEO Eric Cohen.

Co-sponsored with the Ethics and Public Policy Center

Prof. Robert P. George

Professor Robert P. George holds Princeton’s celebrated McCormick Chair in Jurisprudence and is the founding director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. He has served as chairman of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), and on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He has also served on UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Science and Technology, of which he continues to be a corresponding member. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award. He is the author of In Defense of Natural Law, Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality, The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion and Morality in Crisis, and Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School, he also received a master’s degree in theology from Harvard and a doctorate in philosophy of law from Oxford University.

Rabbi Dr. Meir Soloveichik

Rabbi Dr. Meir Y. Soloveichik is director of the Zahava and Moshael Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish congregation in the United States, and host of the “Bible 365” and “Jerusalem 365” podcasts. Rabbi Soloveichik has lectured throughout the United States, in Europe, and in Israel to both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences on topics relating to Jewish theology, bioethics, wartime ethics, and Jewish-Christian relations. His essays on these subjects have appeared in Mosaic, The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, First Things, Azure, Tradition, and the Torah U-Madda Journal. In August 2012, he gave the invocation at the opening session of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. He is the son of Rabbi Eliyahu Soloveichik, grandson of the late Rabbi Ahron Soloveichik, and the great-nephew of the late Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

Eric Cohen

Eric Cohen has been the chief executive of Tikvah since 2007. Under his leadership, Tikvah has grown to be one of American Jewry’s preeminent think tanks and educational organizations. He has been a leader in the world of ideas on America and Jewish thought for almost two decades. Eric was the founder and remains editor-at-large of the New Atlantis, served as the publisher of the Jewish Review of Books and is the publisher of Mosaic. He currently serves on the board of directors of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Witherspoon Institute, and National Affairs, and on the Editorial Advisory Board of First Things. Eric has published in numerous academic and popular journals, magazines, and newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Weekly Standard, Commentary, The New Republic, First Things, and numerous others. He is the author of In the Shadow of Progress: Being Human in the Age of Technology (2008) and co-editor of The Future is Now: America Confronts the New Genetics (2002). He was previously managing editor of the Public Interest and served as a senior consultant to the President’s Council on Bioethics.