The Maurin Academy for Regenerative Studies is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization for alternative public education. Inspired by Peter Maurin’s call for ongoing public discussions towards integrating Cult (i.e., theology), Culture (i.e., arts and sciences), and Cultivation (i.e., food, farming, ecology), we strive to synthesize theological, philosophical, and ecological insights to generate a renewed, healthier future. This necessarily includes the incorporation of heterodox economic, political, social, ethical, and religious ideas. Our aim is realized through hosting seminars, lectures, podcasts, and workshops.
Full Mission Statement:
The Maurin Academy for Regenerative Studies is a 21st century agronomic university. We draw inspiration (though not uncritical) from the life and work of Peter Maurin, a social activist and co-founder (along with Dorothy Day) of The Catholic Worker movement, as well as from various intellectual and practical engagements with other currents of thought. Maurin envisioned ‘agronomic universities’ as places where people could practice agriculture and learn about life, culture, science, and religion together. The idea of an agronomic university is deeply related to Maurin’s more popular notion of Houses of Hospitality, places that “bring the scholars to the workers or the workers to the scholars” and “show what idealism looks like when it is practiced.” These tenets of Maurin’s praxis are at the core of the Maurin Academy’s mission. Fundamentally, we strive to critically assess, extend, and practically develop these foundational ideas in dialogue with the issues that afflict our world today.
As a 21st century agronomic university, the goals of The Maurin Academy are to “keep trained minds from being academic” while “keep[ing] untrained minds from being superficial”, to “learn from scholars what is wrong with things as they are”, and, most importantly, learn “how a path can be made from things as they are to things as they should be.” We strive to synthesize theological, philosophical, and ecological insights in order to generate a renewed and healthier future without losing sight of the concrete dilemmas of everyday life. This necessarily includes the exploration of presumed heterodox economic, political, social, ethical, and religious ideas. The Maurin Academy is not limited to a single set of ideas. We are not strict followers of Maurin, though we find various aspects of his thought compelling. Our co-founders and affiliates stem from a variety of backgrounds: Some of us are more religious than others, and some are not religious at all; some are more in tune with a Marxian analysis of political economy, some with Catholic social teaching, others with classical political theory or neo-agrarianism. Despite the diversity in our backgrounds, we are brought together by a shared set of concerns and values.
First, the co-founders of The Maurin Academy are united by their paramount concern for the environment, specifically as this relates to humanity. We hold that questions about climate change, ecological destruction, the Anthropocene, and so forth only matter when they’re placed in the context of a broader question about human beings living well together. We agree that climate change is better understood as a violently present reality than as an object speculation. We are all already navigating the myriad difficulties imposed by a warming planet and large-scale climatological shifts. Realizing a livable future requires direct engagement with physical, political, and economic realities.
“The notion that man must dominate nature emerges directly from the domination of man by man.”
~Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism
“[W]e should be united in showing mercy to the earth as our common home and cherishing the world in which we live as a place for sharing and communion. […] When we mistreat nature, we also mistreat human beings.”
~Pope Francis, Laudato Si
“If a farmer fails to understand what health is, his farm becomes unhealthy; it produces unhealthy food, which damages the health of the community.”
~Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America
Second, we all adopt a thoroughgoing critique of capitalism and liberal modernity. We recognize that contemporary social relations are predominantly governed by the abstraction of value and we work to build webs of social relations that are not mediated by labor and money. We are deeply critical of the idea that persons are autonomous, completely rational individuals capable of reforming our institutions according to our own free will. Instead, we recognize the materiality of social structures and the sacrifices that are often required to incite social change. We reject ideas of inevitable social progression, understanding them to be historically invalid and politically stagnant. Waiting for revolution is a flawed and failed strategy. We do not reject technology per se but are concerned about the role of technology in modernity and critique the modernist faith in technological progress.
“Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends. Any other assessment of the situation is mere idealism.”
~Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
“Material life and social reproduction in capitalism are universally mediated by the market, so that all individuals must in one way or another enter into market relations in order to gain access to the means of life. This unique system of market dependence means that the dictates of the capitalist market – its imperatives of competition, accumulation, profit-maximization, and increasing labor-productivity – regulate not only all economic transactions but social relations in general.”
~Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism
“The left and the right are joined by the common project to increase personal freedoms – even if the result is the atomization of our lives that makes impossible any account of our lives as having a narrative unity. Ironically, societies committed to securing the freedom of the individual end up making that same individual subject to impersonal bureaucratic procedures.”
~Stanley Hauerwas, ‘The Good Life’
Third, we all agree that contemporary society suffers from a protracted crisis of meaning. Traditional sources of meaning—community, family, religion, value systems, place (from the neighborhood to the planet), responsibility to humanity as a species—have been hollowed-out or evaporated. As a result, people living today experience acute psychic and spiritual alienation. Alienated persons search for new ways to make sense of their lives and are highly susceptible to involvement in ideological movements.
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
~Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party
“[C]apitalism is a form of enchantment–perhaps better, a misenchantment, a parody or perversion of our longing for a sacramental way of being in the world.”
~Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon
“Modern anxiety . . . arises from man’s deep-seated consciousness that he lacks either a ‘real’ or a symbolic place in reality. In spite of his actual position on earth he is a being without security.”
~Romano Guardini, The End of the Modern World
Lastly, we hold that the three aforementioned points are interlocking and interactive. We agree that industrial agriculture is not only a main cause of climate change, but of an unacceptably fragile food system that contributes to the deterioration of the physical and mental health of many people. We agree that our current social and political formations are wreaking havoc on the primary social units of family and community. These social upheavals and environmental wreckage left in the wake of capitalist modernity contribute to an unmooring of self-identity, spiritual impoverishment, and psychological disturbance. Building a more ecologically sustainable society requires confronting capitalism, liberalism, and the ethical void they engender.
The Maurin Academy is committed to taking real steps towards a more ecologically sustainable existence and creating more meaningful ways of life. Stirred by Maurin’s call that we should be worker-scholars rooted as much in place and practice as philosophy and politics, The Maurin Academy strives to be ‘deep in the dirt/deep in the stacks.’ This dual grounding directs our educational initiatives along Maurin’s framework of the “Three Cs” [link]: Cult (i.e., theology), Culture (i.e., arts and sciences), and Cultivation (i.e., food, farming, ecology). It is further realized in our involvement in the JPII Catholic Worker Farm, which is headed by two of our co-founders.