April 16, 2026
Location: Heritage Hall at The Catholic University of America | Washington, D.C.

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A conference dedicated to the writings of Orestes Brownson, particularly on the U.S. Constitution, in his masterwork, The American Republic.

What Aquinas was to Aristotle, Orestes Brownson is to America’s founding.

We invite all those seeking a vision of the United States to carry us into the next 250 years
— including Congressional staff, think tanks, undergraduates, graduates, and academics.

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“Every living nation has an idea given it by Providence to realize, and whose realization is its special work, mission, or destiny. Every nation is, in some sense, a chosen people of God…The United States, or the American Republic, has a mission, and is chosen of God…for the realization of the true idea of the state, which secures at once the authority of the public and the freedom of the individual—the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy. 

But the United States have a religious as well as a political destiny, for religion and politics go together…The religious mission of the United States…separates church and state as external governing bodies, but unites them in the interior principles from which each derives its vitality and force. Their union is…in the fact that, though moving in different spheres, each obeys one and the same Divine law.”

- The American Republic
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With little formal schooling but with intelligence and grit, Orestes Brownson rose from poverty in Vermont to be one of the original Transcendentalists. As the editor of the Boston Quarterly Review and then the Brownson Quarterly Review, he wrote incisively about many of the constitutional and political debates of his day. Brownson’s The American Republic, published just after the Civil War, was praised by both Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

In his 1939 biography of Brownson, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. asserts that there was no other American writer who equaled him: “For thirty years in his magazines he commented on virtually all important questions both of the day and of eternity… His observations on society had a profundity no other American of the time approached.”

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of Brownson’s death, the Politics Department of The Catholic University of America, with American Family Project and the Orestes Brownson Studies Foundation has organized a conference dedicated to his writings, particularly on the U.S. Constitution, in his masterwork, The American Republic.

Who Should Attend?

• All those seeking a vision of the United States to carry us into the next 250 years
• Congressional staff, think tanks, undergraduates, graduates, and academics

Date, Location, & Registration

• April 16, 2026, from 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.
• Heritage Hall, The Catholic University of America
  620 Michigan Ave NE  |  Washington, DC 20064
• Register to attend using our registration form

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Conference Program

 

 

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Learn more about our event cosponsors:
The Orestes Brownson Studies Foundation and the American Family Project.

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