Pomp, Circumstance, and Unsolicited Advice: Commencement Addresses and University Lectures

by George Weigel

The Catholic Church invented what we know as the “university,” including the cultural tradition of free and open debate on disputed questions. Catholic colleges and universities thus stand poised to help reform institutions of higher learning at a moment of crisis in academic life throughout the western world.

In his commencement addresses to colleges and universities large and small, George Weigel challenges graduates to understand an academic degree as a summons to become the trustee of a great tradition. In his lectures to university audiences, Weigel addresses a host of issues in the contemporary Church and its interaction with the world with depth and insight.

Written in the vivid, often bracing style characteristic of one of contemporary Catholicism’s leading intellectuals, these addresses and lectures exemplify what Pope St. John Paul II called the Catholic “diakonia of the truth.”  

258 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 27, 2025

About the author

American author and political and social activist. Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Weigel was the Founding President of the James Madison Foundation.

Each summer, Weigel and several other Catholic intellectuals from the United States, Poland, and across Europe conduct the Tertio Millennio Seminar on the Free Society in Krakow, in which they and an assortment of students from the United States, Poland, and several other emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe discuss Christianity within the context of liberal democracy and capitalism, with the papal encyclical Centesimus Annus being the focal point.

He is a member of the advisory council of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation.