In mid-September 2011, as part of AEI’s Program on American Citizenship, we celebrated Constitution Day. In conjunction with that remembrance, we thought it appropriate to honor our longtime colleague and friend Walter Berns with a panel dedicated to discussing his scholarship on the Constitution and the American regime it supports.

American Enterprise Institute (AEI) president Arthur C. Brooks has announced that AEI scholar Leon R. Kass, M.D., is the recipient of AEI’s 2012 Irving Kristol Award. Dr. Kass will receive the award and deliver the Irving Kristol Lecture at AEI’s annual dinner on Wednesday, May 2, 2012, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

In one of a series of events and conversations about the meaning of the American calendar, Amy A. Kass (Hudson Institute) and Leon R. Kass (AEI) seek to restore America's fading national memory with a celebration of the holiday by its original and proper name: Washington's Birthday.

At this event, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will give opening remarks, and Leon R. Kass (Madden-Jewett Chair, AEI), Jeremy A. Rabkin (Professor, George Mason University School of Law), and Christopher Demuth (D.C. Searle Senior Fellow, AEI) will provide further insight into the work of Walter Berns.

American identity, character, and civic life are shaped by many things, but decisive among them are our national memories—of our long history, our triumphs and tragedies, our national aspirations and achievements. Crucial to the national memory are the words our forebears wrote, to show us who we are and what we might yet become.

This anthology uses the soul-shaping power of story, speech, and song to help Americans appreciate more fully who they are as citizens of the United States.

I am deeply moved and honored more than I can say by this award from my esteemed colleagues and friends at AEI, and especially because of its association with the name and memory of Irving Kristol, a man for all seasons. Irving Kristol was my teacher, editor, mentor, patron, and...

The deepest questions of life are illuminated not by mechanistic and materialist explanations but through humane studies in the great philosophical tradition of the West.