On Thursday, September 22nd, over 400 students, staff, and faculty attended Discourse in Democracy’s annual “Constitution Day” lecture. This year’s speaker, Dr. Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Tocqueville Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, presented a lecture on “Religious Freedom, Natural Rights, and Our Forgotten Principles of Constitutional Liberty.” The lecture explored the Founding Fathers’ understanding of natural rights and religious liberty. Dr. Muñoz contends that the principles which informed the Founders’ thinking are largely absent from the understandings of religious liberty championed by both contemporary progressives and conservatives. He further argued that a return to their vision of freedom, natural rights, and liberty might help to bridge today’s partisan divisions.
In addition to the lecture, Dr. Munoz hosted a seminar for two dozen political science majors focusing on whether human beings possess natural rights. Liam Trepan, a political science student who attended the seminar, described it as “an excellent discussion of natural rights and why we inherently treat humans differently than we treat animals.” MA student Kyle Turner said he enjoyed how the seminar lead by Dr. Munoz “challenged conceptions of justice through the lenses of natural law.” Additionally, Turner “thoroughly enjoyed” the opportunity to read and discuss the selected readings by Dr. Munoz entitled “What is an Establishment of Religion?” and “Defending American Classical Liberalism.”
The department’s Constitution Day activities were made possible by a generous grant from the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles and History. Constitution Day and Citizenship Day is an American federal observance recognizing the adoption of the United States Constitution and those who have become United States citizens by birth or naturalization.
