Good morning, and welcome to Valor Convocation for the 2025–26 school year. It’s my pleasure to welcome you, and I hope you had a very enjoyable and restful break—those of you who were not working through the summer—not only a time of renewal, but a time of deepening of friendships and the intellectual life, and all of the pursuits that make our life full.

We gather today as one unified faculty, and the importance of this convocation lies in that reality: we are one Valor faculty—teachers and school leaders together—regardless of what campus or what school. Yes, we teach at particular schools. The particularity of those schools is very important. And the unity of Valor does not diminish or abolish those beautiful particularities; it’s the very diversity of those schools that come together in this unified vision.

Everything emerges, though, ultimately from the origin—the source—the Founding Valor Vision. That is our source of unity. We begin the year reflecting on that, but we return throughout the year, again and again, to that life-giving source. It directs our work.

So we should recall today our purpose at Valor: to educate the whole person, in authentic community, for a full human life. And this year, that education will reach over 5,000 people in Austin and San Antonio if you consider not only our students but our faculty—5,000 students! What a great task we have this year.

It is, at one time, a burden because of the heaviness and the weight, but it’s also a glory and an honor to be engaged in this work together as one unified whole. And today, we gather together to do what the faculty does.

We might think, “Well, what the faculty does is teach class.” And yes, of course, that’s true, and there’s a priority to that insofar as one is an individual member of a faculty. But as a faculty community, the paradigmatic act is the faculty seminar. We read, we reflect, we listen, we reason together as friends. We deepen one another’s understanding. Together, we come to a greater understanding of the truth.

Together, as a faculty, we renew our commitment to what is noble and true and good and beautiful—in our schools, in our lives, and in this world. That’s the paradigmatic act; it’s the fundamental act of the faculty community. It’s not an extrinsic add-on or an imposition in addition to teaching duties. It’s what the meaning and identity of Valor faculty as a community is.

We will go forth after our Convocation Day to our particular school communities and continue to live this life in faculty seminars, doing the incredible work of teaching our students—the students who are entrusted to us. That work of human formation is the work entrusted to Valor by the State of Texas and by the parents who bring their children to our schools.

And that work of human formation is also a work of transformation. Because Valor, this year, will be transformed. It will not be transformed from something that it currently is into something completely different—that’s not what I mean by transformation. Our transformation will be precisely becoming more and more deeply who and what we are. It’s about fulfilling and realizing the Valor identity more each year.

We’ve watched this happen over the years, and it’s beautiful to see. Valor hasn’t veered off course; it’s been confirmed more and more on its course—and that’s thanks to all the people in this room.

In addition to the great work that we will leave this convocation to join in at individual schools, we will also have the Institute working to transform lives. And this year, the Valor Institute will have a transformation itself, as it takes on a name that more deeply reflects its meaning and identity: the Valor Institute for Studies in Person and Community.

Of course, you can see the resonance with our purpose statement—with the person, the human, the whole person, and authentic community. We’ll be working on that through over 20 major events and programs that the Institute offers this year.

The Fall and Winter Symposium speakers are already lined up. The Fall Symposium is Wilfred McClay, a history professor from Hillsdale College and the author of our ninth-grade history text. Our Winter Symposium is D. C. Schindler, a prolific author and the son of a professor who was a mentor of mine—a great influence on my own thinking—who passed away just a couple of years ago.

We also have over 15 academic retreats, exploring authors such as Aristotle (as always), Shakespeare, Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, Alexis de Tocqueville, William Wordsworth, and John Keats—texts such as The Decameron, King Lear, Light in August, and Democracy in America. Themed retreats include Technology and Contemplation, and visiting professors include Glen Arbery, former president of Wyoming Catholic College; Tim O’Malley, professor at the University of Notre Dame; Farrell O’Gorman, professor of literature at Belmont Abbey College; and our own Adam Seagrave, who’s with us today as our convocation speaker.

Throughout the year, the work of the convocation that we begin today with the Declaration of Independence will continue as we explore, through our faculty seminars, what exactly the American Constitutional order is.

Here, I’d like to read the passage from the email we sent to all of you in your invitation to this event. It’s from Federalist Paper No. 1, written by Alexander Hamilton:

“It seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

This is a primary point of reflection for us today as we gather and think about what political community is fitting for the human person.

We always speak here about the meaning of the person—what is an adequate anthropology? What’s an adequate account of the human person? What type of education would fulfill the human person? What types of communities do we want to order to help human persons flourish?

All of those questions are also engaged when we ask the question: What is a good society? What is the just city? The polisreigns supreme when we’re talking about community. So this year, we turn our attention to the political—and the political precisely in the sense of what type of order, what type of constitution, is proper for the human person.

Whether it’s the best regime or whether it’s a very good regime—these are questions we engage with our students when they read Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Politics, as well as many other works that more tangentially touch on these political questions. They also, of course, read the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, and this year, so will we.

This reflection of Hamilton—and his pointing out to us the centrality of reflection and choice—brings us, as usual, back to Aristotle. Because Aristotle, when he’s saying what makes a human being a human being, says “Man is the logos-bearing animal.”

It’s the logos that makes man what he is. And that logos, referring here to speech, reason, and understanding, is very rich. It’s a very rich term, and it has all sorts of interconnections between those words. Because if you think about speech and reason and understanding, you’ll see that the interpersonal is brought out as soon as you begin thinking about what logosis.

It has to do with the expression of reality and the expression of truth to another—and it would be hard to imagine a situation where one could exercise logos and keep that understanding hermetically sealed from others. So, the logos for us, and for Hamilton, is a necessary basis for political order.

If you think about it, what are the alternatives? Hamilton suggests force. If you’re not going to have a political order shaped by logos, then you’re going to be left with power—who is the most powerful, who can compel the other to do their will.

This entails a political order where civic virtues are established and flourish precisely in the realms of speech, reason, and understanding.

So we not only, at Valor, teach in a perennial tradition—we also teach in a particular time and place. We’re looking at a specific constitution this year, but we’re also thinking, as members of this polis, the United States: Where are we in regard to these civic virtues?

Where are we in regard to the dignity of the spoken word—the respect implicit in interpersonal communication—the respect, ultimately, for reality that must be reflected in what we say—the charity that’s part of how we say it? Where are we now?

Joseph Pieper, in his book Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power, has a quotation that I thought would be very fitting for us to think about this morning. He says:

“The general public can be reduced to a state where people not only are unable to find the truth, but also become unable even to search for the truth, because they are satisfied with deception and trickery—satisfied with a fictitious reality created by design through the abuse of the truth.”

It’s a very disturbing and unsettling quotation, because if we look around, it would be hard to get a more accurate description of many citizens’ use and abuse of the logos.

This is one of the reasons why we’re dedicating an entire year to our own deepening of understanding in the American constitutional order and the civic virtues required to live it out well.

So Valor takes a stand. We’ve watched many academic institutions over these past years capitulate. Commencement address speakers are not wise men or wise women, but politically charged participants in the social media craze. That’s not appropriate for an academic institution—an institution of higher learning.

We’ve seen it happen even at institutions that we otherwise admire and hold in deep respect. At Valor, we won’t do that.

But we will hold the following: first, it is our responsibility as citizens to deepen our own understanding of the constitutional order in which we live and exercise our political charge. But even more than deepening our understanding, we also go forward to protect and promote this constitutional order.

Many of us in this room have critiques of some of the political ideas associated with the American founding—even those in The Federalist. And that’s fine. But as an organization, it’s time to rally behind our constitutional order, especially for the sake of our students who are being raised in our great nation and need to protect the political order that they are inheriting.

That’s first.

Second, we’ve spoken before about how, at Valor, we are guardians of metaphysical wonder, and we can never stop being that. We fight for and protect the wonder and innocence at the heart of all our students and in our own hearts.

We also must be guardians of the logos—insistent, in our own lives, on truthful speech. We do not participate in speech that is not truthful, and we do not participate in or promote unjust speech.

Truthful and just give us our fundamental orientation in regard to our use of language:

• Truthful, because we are subordinate to something higher than ourselves. We recognize an order that is not of our own devising. We are subordinate to reality. We discover and recognize and come to know reality and use speech to say true things—that’s what speech is for.

• And secondly, just speech—that is, what is owed to the other. Justice is the fundamental virtue of society, of community, of politics.

And we can go farther than that. We can go farther than insisting on truth and insisting on justice. We can also build cultures motivated by charity, because ultimately, what is owed to the human person is love.

That’s why we speak so frequently about a culture of encouragement, respect, and civility. And here, we come home to what Valor is ultimately about. Whether we’re reflecting on the nature of American politics or reflecting on a beautiful poem or a great work of literature, at the end of the day, this formation—for ourselves and for our students—is a formation always striving for a higher and better manifestation of our culture of life, truth, and love.

Thank you.