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The Barbara Denton Program

For American Renewal

Our Work

Scholar-Fellows: At the heart of our work is the support we extend to Denton Program Scholar-Fellows. Scholar-Fellows are high school, community college, undergraduate, and graduate students and junior academics from across the country who receive sustained mentoring and career development. In addition, we offer networking opportunities, internships, and high-caliber intellectual events for a wide array of students so to prepare them for impactful careers in public service, academia, the clergy, or in private enterprise. 

Distinguished Speaker Series: We host prominent thinkers, leaders, and academics using venues throughout the nation. This includes our annual Denton Program Dinner Forum held each year in the private banquet space of the wonderful Momma Maria’s restaurant in downtown Trappe, MD. 

Engaging Educational Field Trips: We facilitate educational trips that encourage thoughtful reflection and deepen appreciation of republican self-government and American and Western civilization. 

Publications and Research: We produce research projects that address relevant topics and showcase the intellectual contributions of members of the Barbara Denton Program community, with the goal of having our members present at major conferences and publish leading works growing from their involvement in the Denton Program.

Special Program Focal Points: In addition to the areas referenced above, we have developed special program focal points, including:

  1. Beauty and a Free Society: This focal area explores and inspires appreciation for the contributions of beauty to a free and flourishing society. Freedom allows for artistic excellence. One can think of the initial shock when Impressionism first emerged, or the initial responses to the magnificent La Tour de Eiffel: both occasioned upon first arrival a passion to cancel. Yet freedom also is deeply enriched by a profound admiration for the great works of past masters of music, art, literature, and theatre. We work with the great museums, symphonies, libraries, and theatres in the United States and worldwide to expose students and citizens to the treasures of Western artistic accomplishments.
  2. Science, Values, and Sustainable Liberty: This focal area works to address declining confidence in science and the scientific method. Within its proper sphere, science is one of the great treasures of the Western mind. Yet, science can only flourish in a free society. At the same time, attention must also be placed on the values that allow science to advance human wellbeing and not descend into a naked tool at war with the dignity of the human person.
  3. Constitutional Colloquies: This focal area addresses key principles, concepts, and debates in American and global constitutional studies through colloquies that bring together the best minds in the field.
  4.  Writers’ Retreats and Reflective Summits for Leaders and Professionals: We arrange opportunities for students, scholars, and professionals to engage in sustained reflection of important questions and to conduct writing and research in environments uncluttered by workaday concerns.
  5. Character Wellness and Personal Resilience: Much attention today is placed on vaguely defined “personal wellness.” This can involve psychotherapies with unproven or even negative track records, or superficial concerns about bodily appearance. What has received much less attention is character wellness: a whole-person approach to wellbeing that focuses on sustaining ethical decision making, ensuring spiritual depth and artistic appreciation, promoting personal self-confidence, and instilling resiliency amidst life’s inevitable difficulties. These traits are conducive not only to personal thriving but to the thriving of a free people under the discipline of the rule of law. This focal area addresses resiliency in individuals of all ages—a character-trait much in need today. Indeed, amidst a loneliness epidemic, we see longtime friends severing ties due to the inability to tolerate political differences; amidst declining confidence in higher education, we see students self-censor for fear of social backlash; and amidst a tsunami of social media messaging, we see individuals lose their sense of self-directed purpose and openness to spiritual truth and the transcendent order. To address these critical challenges, the Barbara Denton Program’s Character Wellness and Personal Resilience work engages in a range of activities, from summer workshops for graduating high schoolers to prepare for the challenges of a higher educational landscape still too often hostile to conservative and/or traditionally religious voices; to programs for adults using methods including even yoga, suitably reformed; to safe gun ownership and responsible firearm usage in ranges and hunting grounds enhances personal self-control and purposive self-directedness.

Civic Engagement: Denton Program Civic Leaders are individuals with demonstrated experience in or promise for leadership positions in contemporary society. Our Denton Program Civic Leaders both are enriched by their affiliation with the Denton Program and serve to mentor others affiliated with our work.  Through this and related activities, the Denton Program works in a non-partisan way with elected officials of all parties or none, appointed officials, retired leaders, and those aspiring to public service to provide non-political briefings on the enduring principles of constitutional self-government and cultural flourishing.    

Community Partnerships: We collaborate with higher education institutions, public and private high schools and middle schools, non-profit foundations, and local organizations and initiatives to foster intellectual achievement and civic involvement, including such organizations as the Sons of the American Revolution, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the VFW, and the American Legion. We also partner with area houses of worship.