Dear Friends and Supporters of the Dawson Society,
We are writing to provide you with a much-delayed update on the status of the Dawson Society.
The year 2024 marks twelve years since the Christopher Dawson Society for Philosophy and Culture was founded. Over the past few months, work has been underway behind the scenes to prepare a “relaunch” of the Society which will, God willing, lay the foundation for the next decade.
Since launching our first public event in 2013, the Society has hosted numerous Speaker’s Forum evenings along with concerts, lecture series, and a 2018 conference on the theme “1968: Five decades on”. Alongside these live events the Society has maintained a web presence through social media channels as well as our own website and has published the proceedings of the 2018 conference in a book entitled 1968 Culture and Counterculture: A Catholic Critique (2020, Wipf & Stock).
With the exception of the launch of our book in 2021, hosted in between various states of lock-down, the Society’s most recent event was held in February of 2020 and, as I am sure you can appreciate, the onset of Covid-19 in weeks following that event effectively cancelled all events we had scheduled for that year. Covid and lockdown insecurity significantly hampered our planning for events, as did changing family and work commitments.
This interruption to the Society’s operations has naturally led to the Board reassessing how the Society should best operate moving forward. When the Dawson Society was first conceived in 2012, the founding members were all unmarried, childless, and living in Perth. Ten plus years later, children, family responsibilities, and new cities (and towns) of residence have intervened to make the commitment to monthly events much less tenable.
Yet the events of the last ten years have also left us firmly committed to the vision of the Dawson Society as published in the Society’s “Manifesto” in 2013. In that document we called for cultural and religious renewal for Australian society which we diagnosed as “bereft of mission, at loss for identity, or of any sense of the meaning of life”. The events of the last ten years and have not changed our perception of a spiritual void at the heart of our society. Nor have the events of the last ten years changed the urgency of the Society’s mission which remains “sponsor and encourage a revitalisation of lay Catholic thought and intellectual engagement within the realms of philosophy, theology and culture.” It is ever our hope that the Dawson Society might provide a forum in which all people committed to the primacy of truth might seek renewal for our society and culture.
We are excited therefore to announce the “relaunch” of the Dawson Society from its Covid induced hibernation. Family commitments for the Board and founders necessitate that the Society’s activities have much more of an online focus than they did previously. To this end we have invested in a newly designed webpage which will host an audio library of previous events, a blog, and news of any upcoming events. We have a number of articles and essays awaiting publication online and are always interested in any contributions from readers who share our vision.
We are also pleased to announce a monthly newsletter, Essays in no particular order, which can be subscribed to via our Substack (https://dawsonsociety.substack.com/). The format and contents of the newsletter are still being finalised, but its purpose will be to maintain engagement with our friends and supporters as well as to advertise new content on our webpage and upcoming events.
While we hope that these online activities might provide a platform to engage with the wider community, we will not be abandoning live events. On the contrary, as the world moves more online, we believe all the more in the need for physical events in which people can mingle and socialise. While the frequency of these events might be less than they were in the past, we nevertheless are well underway in the planning of a number of exciting projects which will be announced in the coming months. Our goal is to host fewer but more “in depth” events in the coming years and we look forward to seeing many of you back at a Dawson Society event soon.
We hope that we can count on your support both material and spiritual as we commence our “relaunch” and our inboxes are always open for your comments and feedback.
Yours in Christ,
Tom Gourlay and Daniel Matthys
on behalf of the Board of the Christopher Dawson Society for Philosophy and Culture (Inc.)
