February 21 - 1st Meeting
We examine unique foundational principles: unimpeded happiness, happiness defined by Washington as unimpeded acquisition of wealth and reputation (47 pp. reading).
Opening prayer and meditation: excerpts from then Josef Cardinal Ratzinger’s address to catechists and religion teachers on the Jubilee of Catechists, 12 December 2000, The New Evangelization: Building the civilization of love. (Full Text)
President George Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796.
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British Catholic historian Paul Johnson on Andrew Jackson and Jacksonian democracy in The Birth of the Modern: World society from 1815 to 1830, New York, Harper Collins Publisher, 1991, excerpts from chapter 1, “A special relationship,” and chapter 12, “The coming of the demos.”
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1 paragraph excerpt from Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, trans. Henry Reeve, ed. Phillips Bradley, New York, Random House/Vintage Books, 1945, p. 316.
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Excerpt from Brownson, Orestes; The American Republic in Collected Works, vol. XVIII; chapter XV, “Destiny, political and religious”; pp. 208-220; 1866. Also available gratis on-line as e-text, or from Intercollegiate Studies Institute Books, Wilmington, 2003.
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Cullen, Jim; “The Anti-Catholic Origins of the American Dream” published as chapter two in Restless in the Promised Land: Catholics and the American dream; Sheed and Ward; Franklin, WI; 2001; 24 pp.
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[+errata]
Suggestion for further reading: from de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, vol. I 1835, vol. II 1840. Suggested film: The New World, dir. Terrence Malick, 2005.