Dear Friends,

 

What is culture? How does culture shape us and how can we shape culture? These are questions central to the work of the Wethersfield Institute. We are particularly concerned with the flourishing of Catholic culture. The great Catholic historian and sociologist Christopher Dawson—whose thought is central to the Wethersfield Institute project—provides a seemingly simple definition, “A culture is a common way of life—a particular adjustment of man to his natural surroundings and his economic needs” (The Age of the Gods). “[C]ulture is the form of society. The society without culture is a formless society—a crowd or a collection of individuals brought together by the needs of the moment—while the stronger a culture is, the more completely does it inform and transform the diverse human material of which it is composed” (Religion and Culture).

 

Dawson identifies three material factors and one formal or spiritual factor that influence cultures. “The unity of a culture rests not only on a community of place—the common environment, a community of work—the common function, and a community of blood—the common race, it springs also, and above all, from a community of thought. . . . Even a common language, which is essential for any kind of social life, can only be evolved by centuries of co-operative rational effort. Here ages of thinking and acting in common have produced a terminology, a system of classification and even a scale of values which in turn impose themselves on the minds of all who come under its influence... . There is also a common conception of reality, a view of life...” (Progress and Religion).

 

By “thought,” Dawson means much more than simply theoretical reason. Thought intentionally transforms the material conditions of life as an artist transforms his material into the work of art. Thought—seeking truth, goodness, and beauty within its given material conditions and building on its past discoveries and cultural achievement, i.e., tradition—creates, develops, and is embodied in institutions, laws, agriculture, technology, the many arts, and religion.

 

Dawson shows that culture is fundamentally religious and that the natural religious attitude of man is the source of abundant cultural riches, including philosophy and science. He notes, “[I]t is easy for a modern man living in a highly secularized society to conceive this common view of life as a purely secular thing which has no necessary connection with religious beliefs. But in the past, it was not so. From the beginning man has already regarded his life and the life of society as intimately dependent on forces that lie outside his own control—on superhuman powers which rule both the world and the life of man. . . . Therefore from the beginning the social way of life which is culture has been deliberately ordered and directed in accordance with the higher laws of life which are religion. . . . The complete secularization of social life is a relatively modern and anomalous phenomenon. Throughout the greater part of mankind’s history, in all ages and states of society, religion has been the great central unifying force in culture. It has been the guardian of tradition, the preserver of the moral law, the educator and the teacher of wisdom.” He goes further, “Religion is the key of history. We cannot understand the inner form of a society unless we understand its religion. We cannot understand its cultural achievements unless we understand the religious beliefs that lie behind them. In all ages the first creative works of a culture are due to a religious inspiration and dedicated to a religious end.” (Religion and Culture).

 

While history shows that man is naturally religious, it is obvious that he can lose his awareness of the transcendent source of being and even come to deny the divine. Christian culture currently survives as a minority culture within the larger contemporary secular, “scientific” Western culture. Indeed, Western culture—in the Middle Ages, thoroughly Catholic—has become so fragmented that many of its denizens hate even the “secular values” of traditional Western culture and promote an inherently unstable—because lacking a proper common good or goal (telos)—“multi-culturalism” that promotes foreign cultures at the expense of the native culture and community.

 

How we became secularized and divided is too large a topic for this already too long letter, but at the risk of losing you, I provide another important passage from Dawson—written 77 years ago, but as apt today as then—indicating that the divide is unnecessary:

 

The whole history of culture shows that man has a natural tendency to seek a religious foundation for his social way of life and that when culture loses its spiritual basis it becomes unstable. Nothing has occurred to alter these facts. . . .

 

Nor is there any necessary reason why a synthesis should not be possible between a scientific world civilization and a universal and transcendent religion. On the contrary, there is a natural affinity between the scientific ideal of the organization and rationalization of the material world by human intelligence, and the religious ideal of the ordering of human life to a spiritual end by a higher law which has its source in the Divine Reason.

 

It is almost an historical accident that man’s achievement of control over his material environment by science should have coincided with his abandonment of the principle of spiritual order so that man’s new powers have been made the servants of economic acquisitiveness and political passion.

 

The recovery of moral control and the return to spiritual order have now become the indispensable conditions of human survival. But they can be achieved only by a profound change in the spirit of modern civilization. This does not mean a new religion or a new culture but a movement of spiritual reintegration which would restore that vital relation between religion and culture which has existed at every age and on every level of human development” (Religion and Culture).

 

So what are we to do? How do we reintegrate our culture, our common way of life, the form of our society so that the powerful technology that is the fruit of science (which is a fruit of Western—Catholic—religion and philosophy) will be guided by and put at the service of our common and, ultimately, transcendent end? This is what the Wethersfield Institute seeks to discover and help achieve. We aspire to promote the faithful retrieval and creative renewal of the Catholic cultural and intellectual tradition. More than simply understanding that tradition, however, we seek to augment and cultivate Catholic culture by building community, supporting the making of beautiful and edifying things, patronizing the development of and praying beautiful liturgies, and doing and supporting good and noble work. As a small organization with limited resources, we love to work in partnership with other organizations. Some of our current and future programs (and partners) include:

​

• The Stillman Lectures have a different theme each year (e.g., liturgy, faith, art, science). The 2025 Stillman lectures were on the Councils of the Catholic Church. The 2026-27 Stillman Lectures will be on The Rites of the Catholic Church. In partnership with the scholars who architect each respective series: Matthew Levering (2025), Laura Ieraci & Fr. Andrew Summerson (2026-27).

• The Church and the Land: A Practical Symposium. An annual practical symposium on matters agrarian and on the nobility of farming as a way of life. In collaboration with St Irenaeus Institute, The Catholic Land Movement, the Institute for Human Stewardship, and the Catholic Ecology Center.

• Ecce! Developing a Liturgical Formation Program for Priests and Parishes in partnership with Adoremus.

• The Music and Liturgy Project (including composer competitions and sacred music commissions). Commissioning liturgical music to commemorate the upcoming 2000th anniversaries of significant events in the life of Christ and the Church, e.g., the wedding at Cana, the baptism of the Lord. In the course of developing competitions and commissioning works of composers directly, we hope to develop an ecosystem that will encourage and support young composers as well as established composers.

• The Dawson Seminar. Co-sponsoring a seminar on the thought of Christopher Dawson at the University of St. Thomas (MN), the home of the Christopher Dawson Collection (the personal papers and library of Dawson), sponsored by UST’s Center for Catholic Studies and Catholic International University. The hope is for this to become an annual event to promote the thought of Christopher Dawson who was the first scholar to hold the Stillman Chair of Catholic Studies at Harvard.

• Publishing: Proceedings of Wethersfield Institute Colloquia; Stillman Lectures; Other special essay collections, e.g., Christian Marriage: A Historical Study and Land and Liberty (a re-publication of Free America essays. Free America was a magazine founded and co-edited by our founder, Chauncey Stillman, focused on Agrarianism)

• A Productive Home competition. Design homes that include the capacity for productive, economic (oikos nomos) activities.

• Develop a more dynamic website with articles and blogs that study and discuss issues central to the Institute, e.g., Catholic Culture; truth, goodness, and beauty; Arts of the Beautiful, including liturgical music, painting, architecture, literature, and poetry; Liturgy and Prayer; Christopher Dawson's thought; Agrarianism; the building arts.

   

To help us accomplish these tasks, we ask you to prayerfully consider partnering with us by supporting us with a financial gift. Thank you for your generosity. 

​

Before closing this letter, I provide another example of Dawsonian insight that can give us hope when we think the conversion of society as a whole is beyond hope.

 

We cannot measure spiritual achievement by cultural achievement, since the two processes lie on different planes; but though the former transcends the latter it may also find in it its means of expression and outward manifestation. But there is always a time lag in this process. The spiritual achievement of today finds its social expression in the cultural achievements of tomorrow, while today’s culture is inspired by the spiritual achievement of yesterday or the day before.

 

If we take the case of the first introduction of the Christian faith in Europe, we see how complex and profound is the process that we are attempting to understand. When St. Paul sailed from Troy in obedience to a dream and came to Philippi in Macedonia, he did more to change the course of history and the future of European culture than the great battle which had decided the fate of the Roman Empire on the same spot more than ninety years before. Yet nothing that he did was notable or even visible from the standpoint of contemporary culture. He incurred the hostility of the mob, he was sent to prison and he made at least three converts: a business woman from Asia Minor, a slave girl who was a professional fortuneteller, and his jailer. These were the first European Christians—the forerunners of uncounted millions who have regarded the Christian faith as the standard of their European way of life" (The Historic Reality of Christian Culture).

 

Let us start with ourselves, through the grace of God, striving for holiness. Let us build strong Catholic families, communities, and sub-cultures. Then, perhaps, the Lord will bless us with great conversions and a full-scale transformation of culture. Merry Christmas! And thank you for your support!

 

Sincerely yours in Christ,

Todd Inman

Director, Development and Programming

Wethersfield Institute​