Any readers in the Vancouver area?

I will give a lecture on April 9

My fellow Archedeliacs,

I will be speaking on “Hospitality and the Political” on April 9 at the Houston Centre for Humanity and the Common Good, which is at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Here is a taste of what is on offer:

We live under an authoritative opinion or attitude, often called “humanitarianism.” It is authoritative in the sense that it provides the basic scaffold of meaning for prestige opinion in the West, in its encounter with non-Western peoples. This attitude, one of unqualified welcome to “the other,” appears to grow out of the Christian inheritance, yet is distinct from it.

In this lecture, Matthew Crawford will critique humanitarianism as resting on a thinned-out and abstract anthropology of “mankind.” Adherents to this humanitarian anthropology yearn for a post-political condition, one of unfractured unity among all peoples. It is a position that takes itself to be uniquely empathetic. Yet this crusade for unity induces a peculiar disability of moral perception.

Crawford will make a contrary case for understanding man as “the political animal,” who becomes what he properly is only through formation among a particular people. He will also sketch the need for a Christian humanism that would do justice to this fact.

Here is a link to the event page.

https://houstoncentre.org/events

• Thursday, April 9, 2026

• 5:30 PM — 8:30 PM

• University Golf Club at the University of British Columbia

Everyone is welcome to attend. If you do, please come and introduce yourself!

— Matt