Date/Time
Date(s) - November 25, 2025
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
Categories No Categories
Abstract: Democracy is wobbling in a number of countries at once. This is no accident, because no democracy is an island: countries share a complex social environment that, depending on its content, can “select for” either democracy or authoritarianism. One reason why the environment has lately come to favour authoritarianism is the rise and reassertion of the authoritarian giants, China and Russia. Dr. Owen will discuss the effects of these countries and their policies on world politics, recent developments in the United States, and finally why Christians today ought to cherish constitutional democracy and work for a world that enables its flourishing.
Biography: John M. Owen IV (A.B., Duke; M.P.A., Princeton; A.M., Ph.D., Harvard) is Taylor Professor of Politics, and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, at the University of Virginia. Owen is author of The Ecology of Nations (2023), winner of the 2025 Grawemeyer Award in World Order. His other books include The Clash of Ideas in World Politics (2010), and Liberal Peace, Liberal War (1997). He is co-editor of Religion, the Enlightenment, and the New Global Order (2011). Owen has published essays in First Things, Providence, Christian Scholars’ Review, Foreign Affairs, The Hedgehog Review, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. He has held fellowships at Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Oxford, the Free University and WZB (Berlin), and the University of British Columbia. In 2015, he received a Humboldt Research Prize (Germany). He has served on the boards of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers and the Center for Christian Study in Charlottesville, Virginia.