Kresta in the Afternoon – July 17, 2020 – Hour 2

+  Defending the Founding Fathers (full hour)

  • Description: The Founding of the American Republic is on trial. Critics say that America’s founding principles are responsible for the country's moral and social decline because they were based on radical individual autonomy. Robert Reilly however, declares that the Founding is in fact: not guilty. He joins us tracing the ideas that made the United States, and its ordered liberty, possible.
  • Segment Guests:
    • Robert Reilly
      Robert R. Reilly is Director of the Westminster Institute and the author of several books, most recently America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding. In his twenty-five years of government service, he served as Special Assistant to the President and as Director of the Voice of America, and he was also Senior Advisor for Information Strategy to the Secretary of Defense, and taught at National Defense University. His other books include Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything, Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music, and The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis.
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    • America on Trial: A Defense of the Founding

      The Founding of the American Republic is on trial. Critics say it was a poison pill with a time-release formula; we are its victims. Its principles are responsible for the country's moral and social disintegration because they were based on the Enlightenment falsehood of radical individual autonomy. In this well-researched book, Robert Reilly declares: not guilty. To prove his case, he traces the lineage of the ideas that made the United States, and its ordered liberty, possible. These concepts were extraordinary when they first burst upon the ancient world: the Judaic oneness of God, who creates ex nihilo and imprints his image on man; the Greek rational order of the world based upon the Reason behind it; and the Christian arrival of that Reason (Logos) incarnate in Christ. These may seem a long way from the American Founding, but Reilly argues that they are, in fact, its bedrock. Combined, they mandated the exercise of both freedom and reason. These concepts were further developed by thinkers in the Middle Ages, who formulated the basic principles of constitutional rule. Why were they later rejected by those claiming the right to absolute rule, then reclaimed by the American Founders, only to be rejected again today? Reilly reveals the underlying drama: the conflict of might makes right versus right makes might. America's decline, he claims, is not to be discovered in the Founding principles, but in their disavowal. (learn more)

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