In their zeal to identify visible and quantifiable reasons for historical change, historians often neglect hidden and intangible ones. But it is impossible to understand a great deal of what is going on in the contemporary world, particularly in the contemporary West, without reference to the persistent problem of guilt Listen to Audio
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Download Audio as MP3 and the ways we manage it, or fail to do so. The weight of guilt and the compulsion to displace it onto others remain ever-more powerful motivating forces even in the minds of those who deny guilt’s moral and metaphysical bases. The resulting confusion in our social and political lives has deeply damaging moral and psychological effects, which we ignore at our peril. On April 12, Wilfred M. McClay of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga will deliver the April Bradley Lecture at AEI.

Wilfred M. McClay has been SunTrust Bank Chair of Excellence in Humanities at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he is also professor of history, since 1999. During the 2009–2010 academic year, he has served as the William E. Simon Distinguished Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University’s School of Public Policy. He has also taught at the University of Rome, Georgetown University, Tulane University, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of Dallas, and he is senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and senior fellow of the Trinity Forum. He has served since 2002 as a member of the National Council on the Humanities, the advisory board for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is author of The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (University of North Carolina Press, 1994), which won the Merle Curti Award of the Organization of American Historians. Among his other books are The Student's Guide to U.S. History (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000), Religion Returns to the Public Square: Faith and Policy in Modern America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), and Figures in the Carpet: Finding the Human Person in the American Past (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2007).