Welcome to the Tikva podcast and great Jewish essays and ideas.

I'm your host, Alan Rubinstein, and we're recording today on the University of Chicago campus at the Hillel on campus,

and in front of a live audience of students, many of whom have participated

in educational programs run by the Tikva Fund. Tikva runs learning programs that tackle big questions

in Jewish and Zionist thought and history, in politics and statesmanship, and economics and

public policy. We have programs for high school students, for college and graduate students,

and for young professionals. I hope members of our listening audience will visit our website,

tikfafund.org, and explore what we have on the schedule for this summer as applications

are open now. Our guest tonight is Professor Danielle Mark, who is an up-and-coming academic,

and already at a young age and

accomplished public servant.

He's a member of the Political Science Faculty at Villanova University and this year a

visiting fellow at Notre Dame.

Since 2014, he's also served as a member of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on International

Religious Freedom, which monitors the universal right of freedom

of religion abroad and makes policy recommendations to the President, Secretary of State, and Congress.

Professor Mark now serves as a chairman of that commission.

As the capstone of this impressive array of accomplishments, he's a lead faculty person

at the TIFA Scholars Program for high school students

held each summer at Yale University. Welcome, Daniel. Danielle and I will discuss an essay by a man that we

both admire and who due to his untimely death roughly six months ago we both sorely miss. Peter Lawler was

one of a kind, wise and witty, a careful and creative thinker who never failed to impress those he taught with his passion for ideas.

...