March 18, 2026
Online at 7pm EDT
With Daniel K. Gardner, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and Stephen Posner
Across China’s long intellectual history, the classics have not only been texts to study, but practices to live—resources for cultivating character, clarifying responsibility, and shaping public life. In a moment of rapid modernization and ecological strain, renewed attention to classical traditions raises a timely question: how might practices of self-cultivation support social reform—and what are the limits of that hope?
In this Forum, Daniel K. Gardner (Dwight W. Morrow Professor Emeritus of History and Environment, Smith College) draws on decades of scholarship on Confucian and Neo-Confucian traditions—especially the interpretive legacy of Zhu Xi—to explore how “reading” can function as a formative discipline: training attention, moral discernment, and a sense of obligation to the common good.
In conversation with Stephen Posner and Mary Evelyn Tucker, we’ll explore:
- What does it mean, in the Confucian tradition, to read for self-transformation rather than information?
- How did thinkers like Zhu Xi connect inner cultivation to education, institutions, and reform?
- How might classical practices illuminate (or complicate) contemporary aspirations such as Ecological Civilization—especially where “tradition” is invoked in modern public discourse?
- What can modern leaders, educators, and communities responsibly take from the classics without romanticizing or instrumentalizing them?
This Forum is designed for participants interested in the deeper cultural foundations of civilizational change—where ethics, learning, and governance intersect, and where transformation begins with how we form persons and publics.
This event is part of “Roots of Renewal: Ecological Civilization in China and the Confluence of Tradition and Modernity: A Garrison Institute Webinar Series on Ecological Civilization.”
Co-sponsored by the Pathways to Planetary Health initiative at the Garrison Institute and the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology.