Hi, I’m Tom. I’m Chief Engagement Officer at Americans United for Life, a global human rights leader advancing the human right to life in culture, law, and policy. I’m also a Research Fellow at Discovery Institute’s Center on Human Exceptionalism.
I’m committed to advocating for the human person, the common good, and humane moral ecologies. I tend to be a generalist, but specific interests include culture, aesthetics, history, human dignity, and bioethics.
It seems to me that the American dream of liberty and self-governance is only ever as sturdy as our shared concern for the common good and a constitutional way of life, and these require both moral and philosophical reasoning. There tends to be lots of talk about human dignity and human rights, but practically no one talks about human responsibilities and duties, for instance. Since every generation has to relearn how to be more humane than coarse, I’m interested in more comprehensive thinking about these topics. When I think about what it means to be humane, I think on these questions: Who are we? Why are we here? And how will we live? All of this is probably just a contemporary (and less succinct) take on Franklin’s belief that “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom,” but in any event these ideas root most of what I write and do.
I’m an eighth-generation Pennsylvanian and Sons of the American Revolution life member. I’m also a member of the Knights of Columbus. I serve as a board president for the Mount Nittany Conservancy, and wrote Conserving Mount Nittany: A Dynamic Environmentalism to share the story of Central Pennsylvania’s most remarkable mountain and foster a stronger spirit of place. As a Penn State Alumni Association life member, I helped to create the Robert K. Zimmerman Endowment for Student Broadcasting and Michael D. Walsh Student Broadcasters Trustee Scholarship to support public spirit and free speech. I’m a reader and runner.
I live in Washington, DC with my wife.