WASHINGTON – As the United States celebrates its 250th anniversary, the Center for Ethics and Public Policy (EPPC) is also celebrating an auspicious anniversary this year: it is the 50th anniversary.
Several hundred supporters of this distinctive worldwide think tank, which explicitly emphasizes public policy questions within the context of the country’s historic Judeo-Christian ethical framework, celebrated this milestone at a ceremony at the Caves on April 30. National Building Museum.
This incident was headlined by a New York Times columnist Ross DouthatA Catholic, as the keynote speaker. In an interview with EWTN News just before the event, Douthat credited the EPPC for both its success and flexibility in “maintaining a place for serious religious conservatism in American political discourse.”
Douthat compared the influence of EPPC scholars and the American experience to that of Western Europe, which he said “suffers seriously from a suffocating secular-liberal, social and cultural liberal consensus in which religious arguments find no purchase and in which moral norms are all fundamentally utilitarian, in which abortion and increasingly euthanasia are taken for granted.”
On my part, EPPC Chairman Ryan AndersonHe is also a Catholic, telling EWTN News that the think tank is part of the “secret sauce” of a country whose founders, such as President John AdamsHe firmly believed that “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is completely inadequate for the government of any other.”
Citing the American Declaration of Independence during his speech at the Assembly, Anderson said that the EPPC “supports the proposition that all men are created equal, that we are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
Current EPPC Chairman Ryan Anderson (far right) is pictured here with former EPPC Chairman (left to right) George Weigel, Elliott Abrams and Ed Whalen. | Credit: Photo courtesy of EPPC/Rui Barros Photography
Anderson said, “Our guiding lights 50 years ago are the same as today: the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the natural law tradition, Western civilization in general, and the American constitutional system in particular.”
Anderson noted that as the country celebrates its 250th anniversary and the EPPC its 50th, “the EPPC is needed now more than ever to bear witness to the truth about the human person.”
He said the EPPC conducts its work in an “intentionally ecumenical manner” as a community of Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic scholars, “developing and deploying Jewish and Christian traditions to contemporary questions of law, culture, and politics.”
As they do in the country at large, Catholic scholars and related initiatives play a major role in the work of the EPPC. the organization runs ongoing programs in areas including bioethics, technology and human flourishing, and Catholic studies, and runs the Catholic Women’s Forum, the Person and Identity Project, and the Life and Family Initiative, among others.
In addition to Anderson, Catholic scholars who are holding leadership roles in the EPPC include the organization’s two former presidents, George Weigel and Ed Whelan, as well as Mary Hassan, Stephen White, O. Carter Sneed, Noel Mering, Aaron Kheriaty, Theresa Farnan, Mary Fiorito, Francis Mair, Jennifer Bryson, and Claire Morrell.
