Civility, Courage & Conviction

Experience the Episode

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Monday, April 21, 2025 12:00 pm

Join us for a discussion with Jed Atkins, director and dean of the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, about civility, courage, conviction, and the challenges of civic discourse.

Learn more at the Virtues & Vocations website. Register to receive emails about Virtues & Vocations below.

Meet the Speaker: Jed Atkins

Jed Atkins came to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in March 2024 to become the inaugural director and dean of the School of Civic Life and Leadership. Previously, he was at Duke University, where he had been a member of the faculty since 2009. There he was director of Duke’s Civil Discourse Project, which sponsored scholarly activities that promote engaged discourse with the goal of creating intellectually diverse communities, and also faculty director of the Transformative Ideas Program for sophomores, which includes an initiative on civic life and thought. He also chaired the classical studies department and was an associate professor of philosophy and political science.

Atkins is a scholar of Greek and Roman political and moral philosophy, the history of political thought, and contemporary debates on tolerance, civility and civil discourse. He is the author of Roman Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason: The Republic and Laws (Cambridge University Press 2013) and editor (with Thomas Bénatouïl) of the Cambridge Companion to Cicero’s Philosophy. His next book, The Christian Origins of Tolerance, will be published in October 2024 by Oxford University Press.

He earned his M. Phil. in Political Thought and Intellectual History and Ph.D. in Classics, both from the University of Cambridge, and his A.B. in government and classics from Bowdoin College.

Liberal Education, Intellectual Play, and the Virtues of Civil Discourse

Learning to engage in reasoned, free, and civil conversations about important political, moral, and religious ideas requires practice, and students are not arriving at universities with the knowledge, experience, or habits of heart and mind required to have such conversations. Increasingly, universities must provide the institutional support necessary for students to engage fully in the search for truth and the discovery of knowledge that constitute its primary purposes.

To read the full article, visit the Institute for Social Concerns website.

The Christian Origins of Tolerance by Jed Atkins

Tolerance is usually regarded as a quintessential liberal value. This position is supported by a standard liberal history that views religious toleration as emerging from the post-Reformation wars of religion as the solution to the problem of religious violence. Requiring the separation of church from state, tolerance was secured by giving the state the sole authority to punish religious violence and to protect the individual freedoms of conscience and religion. Commitment to tolerance is independent of judgements about justice and the common good. This standard liberal history exerts a powerful hold on the modern imagination: it undergirds several important recent accounts of liberal tolerance and virtually every major study of tolerance in the ancient world. Nevertheless, this familiar narrative distorts our understanding of tolerance’s premodern origins and impoverishes present-day debates when many members of Christianity and Islam, the two largest global religions, have reservations about liberal tolerance.

For more information, visit the Oxford University Press website.