Writing Mastery: $1000 Essay Contest

Here’s a great transcript opportunity for your rising classical scholar to validate his mastery of speaking skills (classical trivium skill number three).  Every fall, The Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) sponsors a national essay contest for high school students.  A $1,000 scholarship will be awarded to the first place winner.  My daughter, Meredith won 4th place three years ago.  Incorporate this essay into your high school history and writing curriculum like we did.  Essays are due March 18, 2012.  This year’s topic is:

Religious Freedom and American Culture: The Place of Religious Minorities

Here are the excerpted details from the ISI high school scholarship webpage:

ESSAY CONTEST:
Religious pluralism and the accommodation of religious minorities are celebrated hallmarks of the American political order. Precisely what accounts for the successful and peaceable American experience with religious pluralism, however, remains a matter of controversy and debate. Advocates of what Richard John Neuhaus famously described as the “Naked Public Square” suggest that strict separation, even exclusion, of religiously informed convictions from public life accounts for that outcome. Others propose, to the contrary, that the American constitutional order provides “articles of peace” (in John Courtney Murray’s formulation) that carve out room for diverse religious convictions in public life—and that this receptivity to faith has been essential to the exceptional American experience with religious freedom.

As President Thomas Jefferson’s correspondence with the Baptists of Danbury, CT, reminds us, disputes about American religious freedom, and religious minorities, are as old as the country itself. Perhaps no American of the Founding generation embodies those tensions more clearly than Charles Carroll of Carrollton. An illegitimate son, publicly unrecognized by his father, Carroll became one of the better educated and wealthiest of the Founding Fathers. The only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll’s stewardship of his great wealth, as well as his participation in founding-era politics were informed by his Catholic faith.

In the interest of examining the tradition of religious freedom, this contest invites essayists to explore the place of religious minorities in American society and the conditions for their influential participation in public life.

FOCUS AND FORMAT OF THE ESSAY:
Essayists are asked to make reference to the life of Charles Carroll of Carrollton and consider the applicability of his experience to religious minorities, especially suspect religious minorities, in America today. What accounts for the American experience of maintaining both religious diversity and relative social harmony? How do the experiences of religious minorities in the founding era of the American Republic help us to think about the place of religious minorities in America today?

Participation in the competition is free and includes a complimentary copy of Dr. Bradley Birzer’s book, American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll.

Essays are to be between 1,200 and 1,500 words long. Essays will be judged on the basis of scholarship, imagination, and quality of writing.

All essays must be emailed or postmarked by Friday, March 18, 2012.

CONTEST SCHOLARSHIP AWARDS:

EVERY ENTRANT WINS: A free copy of American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll will be sent to every entrant.