About

The Wethersfield Institute was founded in 1984 by Chauncey Devereux Stillman. The Institute is a non-profit organization dedicated to the faithful retrieval and creative renewal of the Catholic cultural and intellectual tradition for the life of the Church in the third millennium. Our motto, "That nothing may be lost," reflects our commitment to gathering up all that Christ has given His Bride, the Church, that she (which is to say, we) may be more intimately united with Him. The Church, both Bride and Mystical Body of Christ, the two having become one flesh, the mortal having been given the opportunity for perfection and divinization in communion with Christ, is the heart of Christian Culture where we work out our salvation together through prayer, study, making, and doing; through liturgy, music, art (broadly conceived as making things well), and love and service of neighbor. The Wethersfield Institute, inspired by thinkers like Christopher Dawson and under the spiritual patronage of St. Philip Neri, seeks not only to understand Catholic culture (and the Catholic intellectual tradition), but also to cultivate, revivify, and improve all these elements of Catholic culture to the extent we can.

When Chauncey Stillman launched the Homeland Foundation in the 1930s, prior to his conversion to Catholicism, he had the ambitious goal to “make, institute, conduct, and carry out every manner and kind of scientific, agricultural, horticultural, or biological experiment, research, study, and investigation, and in any other way to assist in improving and developing country life, and to experiment, research, study and investigate with regard to the most satisfying means of economic and social life in rural communities.” The Wethersfield Institute, inspired by this quixotic ambition, aspires likewise to do all we can, within our abilities and means, to understand, augment, and cultivate Catholic culture that we members of the Mystical Body of Christ may more readily become saints.

Major areas of interest:

• Catholic Culture: What is it and how do we sustain and improve it? What is the good life and what role does (Catholic) culture play in it?

• Truth, goodness, and beauty: what are they and how may we make them our own?

• Arts of the Beautiful, including liturgical music, painting, architecture, literature, and poetry. How can we best make beautiful things and how can we support those who make beautiful things?

• Liturgy and Prayer

• The thought and method of Christopher Dawson, the great Catholic historian and sociologist. We hope and expect that we can improve our lives today by understanding the dynamics of history: what happened, why did it happen, and to what extent can we intentionally shape what is to come?

• Agrarianism – as means to grounded, well ordered, holy living for farmers and others living a rural way of life.

• The building arts – also as means to grounded and holy living (for the artist, the maker), but also as the means to making beautiful buildings that ennoble life (for their occupants) and productive homes that permit the integration of ennobling work into the homestead.​