We are celebrating the 15th year of the Campus Theme program. The goal of the program is to create opportunities for faculty, students, staff, and the community to engage in intellectually stimulating and healthy conversations about topics or issues that matter to us all. Through the Campus Theme, we ponder the big questions, promote deeper understanding, and broaden our intellectual horizons. This year’s theme: Identity.

As it enters the second decade of the twenty-first century, the United States faces a myriad of challenges, many of which go to the core of American democracy’s identity. These challenges concern the balance between holding fast to custom and tradition on the one hand and innovating in response to new circumstances on the other. The philosophy of John Dewey, who characterized democracy as not just a system of formal political institutions but also as a way of life requiring the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, furnishes a resource for thinking through this issue. Though Dewey’s short 1934 book A Common Faith is on its surface a proposal for a post-Christian spirituality that he wants to inaugurate, it also can be productively read as an account of some of the habits of character he regards as necessary for life in a modern democracy. This SOU Campus Theme presentation will examine some of Dewey’s strategies for promoting these habits of character and consider their relevance for contemporary life.

Alec Arellano is a political theorist specializing in Ancient Greek political thought, contemporary American political thought, and liberalism and its critics. He teaches courses on Constitutional law and society, American politics, and political theory in the Department of Politics at Occidental College. He received his PhD in 2019 from The University of Texas at Austin. His scholarship has been published in top journals in political science, and his current research examines Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey's views regarding the conditions under which critical, independent thought can be a salutary force for democratic politics.