On October 14, 2026, Project Director Mary Eberstadt addressed the Napa Institute’s 2026 Faith & Business Conference, held at the Metropolitan Club in New York City around the theme “Renewing America’s Cities.” In the speech she formally announced the Center for Cultural Restoration, which RUNY is part of, and described Remembering Upstate New York as one of its original projects — a pilot that could be replicated in every state. The full text follows.
Also on the Center for Cultural Restoration blog.
Mary Eberstadt · Napa Institute, New York City · October 14, 2026
Good afternoon and thank you for that warm welcome. Thanks especially to Tim Busch and the Napa Institute, and to Mitch Boersma of the Leonine Forum for inviting me to take part in this vital conversation.
This is the fifth time I’ve been privileged to address a distinguished group brought together by the Napa Institute. It’s wonderful to be here among friends and fellow spiritual travelers. And it’s fitting, especially, because tonight we will be honoring Berni and Rob Neal, whom I first met at a Napa conference at the Catholic University of America several years ago.
There, Rob said something that I’ve thought of often in the time since. He said: everyone is aware of what’s declining out there, but where is the hope?
Rob, today I’m here to thank you for putting that question in my head, and to offer some modest answers.
The theme of today’s conference, restoring American cities, is aligned with what I believe to be the common denominator of all my work: the restoration of culture. Today I would like to say a few words about what I’ve learned during the past thirty-plus years of writing on this subject, and then move from theory to practice, as the Marxists used to say. In what follows, I’ll summarize a little of my work and then go on to give real-life examples of some projects and initiatives it has led to in the name of restoration.
What have the past three decades taught?
Point one: there is no revival of faith without revival of the family. This was the meaning of my 2013 book, How the West Really Lost God. The family is only as strong as the faith, and vice versa. Each needs the other for health and reproduction.
Point two: there is no revival of the family without the revival of a non-insane sexual order. The world after the sexual revolution will not be repaired by reform, but by counter-revolution, including spiritual counter-revolution. This is one meaning of my books called Adam and Eve after the Pill. It is also the underlying theme of a novel from 2010 called The Loser Letters, about what happens to the most vulnerable among us in a postrevolutionary age without faith.
Point three: the revival of the family, the revival of the faith, and the revival of love for one’s own, including one’s own country, are linked. In 2020, analyzing the riots that broke out across America after George Floyd’s death, I concluded with this:
“What is happening to America is an excruciatingly painful truth: life without father, Father, and filial piety toward country are not the socially neutral options that contemporary liberalism holds them to be. The sinkhole into which all three have collapsed is now a public hazard. The threefold crisis of paternity is depriving many young people—especially young men—of reasons to live as rational and productive citizens.”
As that summary goes to show, a lot of my work has concerned, and does concern, the state of our culture: the collapse of the family, the retreat of faith, and the loss of any shared story about who we are. This analytical work, by me and by many others, has been necessary. You can’t cure an ailment without the necessary differential diagnosis.
Yet today we can see something else that’s also true: diagnosis has become a substitute for treatment. There is now a whole industry devoted to describing what has gone wrong with the West. It has produced shelves of books, an endless supply of conferences -- and little forward motion.
That is the truth behind Rob Neal’s observation of several years ago.
My friends at Napa and elsewhere: I submit that what we need more than anything else right now is exactly that forward motion. America needs institutions willing to rebuild what has been lost, in real places and among real people, through work that restores memory, renews faith, and creates beauty.
To move from talk, into talk and action, I have recently founded a new organization, the Center for Cultural Restoration. It will build on and continue my body of work, diagnosing what’s wrong in our culture; and it will also, if God allows, use the insights gained from that work to effect real and enduring change in different arenas in the years to come. Working with me are outstanding, faithful writers and editors of national stature: Andrew Doran, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and Luma Simms.
Let me share some of the thinking behind this new creation. We in this room would agree that there’s critical work to be done around three pillars: restoration of family and faith, in a time of multiple attacks on both; the restoration of actual, as opposed to ideologically driven, history, especially American history; and the restoration of art and literature in an age when the ugly and the degenerate have become normalized.
Some among us on the tradition-minded wing speak as if these pillars amount to lost artifacts, never to be recovered. But we should not acquiesce in such pessimism. History, faith and art are foundational pieces that can be returned anew to the American community. And they reinforce one another. Recovering a place’s history restores pride and patriotism. Recovering beauty through art elevates hearts and minds. The renewal of faith makes souls and communities stronger.
How does this lofty rhetoric play out on the ground? Let’s consider four examples.
First, let’s look at how to restore the family. What does it take to build up the most elemental of human institutions? There are many answers and options to be had. Here is mine.
In December 2008, a first of its kind conference on “The Social Costs of Pornography” was held at the Witherspoon Institute in Princeton, in large part because of forward-looking philanthropist Sean Fieler. That conference had a major impact, including on my own thinking. It resulted in two critical books, also the first of their kind, summarizing evidence from doctors, therapists, neuroscientists, and other experts.
All of that evidence pointed to a truth that was countercultural outside religious circles: Pornography is poison. It alters brains, kills romance, and leads to intense loneliness. It creates addicts and destroys families. All of this record, to repeat, has been well-documented since that landmark conference, and thereafter.
The data have long been in. But what should we do about them? Here are thoughts I shared to a gathering of women just a couple of weeks ago:
“If I could reduce years of meditating on this subject to one single action memo aimed at bettering the human condition, it would read like this. We need to re-stigmatize pornography. We -- meaning not only those of us present but also people across the West -- need to understand that pornography today is like tobacco was yesterday: ubiquitous and toxic and in need of social reform. It is the enemy of romance. It is a major factor in marital break-up. It licenses perversion. And pornography is also a major factor in today’s cratering rates of marriage and babies…
We need something like a movement and manifesto Against the Acceptance of Pornography. It should include secular as well as religious people and as many of the walking wounded as can be rallied -- as well as the heads of faithful Christian universities and colleges, and celebrities, and therapists, and anyone else committed enough to sign on.”
Now, if anyone present here today doubts how important such a reform movement is to the restoration of a healthy culture, look no further than a story that has been front-page news since I spoke those words just last month.
That’s the story echoing around the world from my alma mater, Cornell University. It is centered on a female student accusing several fraternity members of rape. I will spare you the nauseating details. But to read any of them is to understand something that’s been lost in the lurid retellings. These students, all of them, are so steeped in pornography that they are literally not in their right minds. Even without the drugs and alcohol that also saturate this horrifying picture, these young souls have been twisted already by a substance less obvious, but just as impairing. And they are mere representatives of many millions of young people like them.
This story is one more, I hope foundational, proof that we need a national movement against pornography, along the lines of Mothers against Drunk Driving. We also need therapists who can deprogram kids like these. We need to understand that internet pornography IS a cult. And the crippling of that cult by any means necessary is a critical step – I believe the most critical step – toward a restoration of a romantic and sexual order that is sane, not lunatic.
And we need someone to lead that movement. It is my hope that reiterating this message in every forum possible will someday touch the heart of that future leader, who will become to this reform movement what Florence Nightingale was to the nursing profession; what Dorothea Dix became to the reform of institutions for the mentally ill. All of us should put that future leader in prayers.
Second: Now let’s look at another, very different, practical proposal, on a very different subject. How to restore American pride and patriotism? Polls show that love of country diminishing with every generation. What to do about that?
After many years in Washington DC, watching the national scene, I have concluded that we cannot restore American morale from the top down. We need to do it from the ground up. The key to renewing patriotism isn’t going to be found in the White House. It’s found far closer to home. It resides in rebuilding communities and regions that are our first loves outside the family.
Let me describe one of the Center for Cultural Restoration’s original projects, already underway, aimed at exactly the renewal of American pride. I believe this program could be a pilot, a template that could be replicated in every region or state in the US.
As some of you know, I grew up in rural, Rust Belt America – specifically, in numerous hamlets and villages scattered across central New York. In seeking to give back to that place where my roots are, I have developed with a small, dedicated team an original project called Remembering Upstate New York (RUNY).
It’s a multidimensional effort to recover, celebrate, and teach anew the history and culture of one of the most consequential and forgotten places in America. Between the Hudson and Lake Erie lie the battlefields that won the Revolution, the canal that opened the West, the revivals that gave the country abolition and the suffragette movement, the immigrant parishes and mills that taught generations how to belong, and later, the deindustrialization known as the Rust Belt.
Almost none of this extraordinary history is taught anymore to the people who live there now. And many Americans outside this zone regard it as one more lost part of Appalachia.
But that verdict cannot survive a reading of the work that RUNY is doing to make Americans proud of the place – including and especially the Americans who live there. In our first year, with a team of just three, we have published essays recovering this history in First Things, National Review, Commentary, and Tablet. We’ve researched across Western, Central, and northern New York. I’ve spoken at Cornell University, Houghton University, and civic halls; and we’ve won early support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and private foundations.
Over the next two years we’ll complete a collected volume of essays, produce a monograph on the region’s Catholic history, give talks and book symposia, and otherwise bring important stories back to the places where they happened.
Our reception across the state has been warm and enthusiastic. It has also reverberated beyond. I have spoken about this project with Texans, with Virginians, and with others who wonder if they might develop a RUNY of their own, for the restoration of pride in their own state.
The answer should be, yes. Every state has an Upstate. We have the pilot for reviving a sense of Providence in all these places.
Our template could also be implemented in cities, including some of the worst off. Nothing about the fallen condition of some of today’s cities is inevitable, any more than current conditions in the Rust Belt are beyond redemption. Kathryn Lopez is at work right now on the history of the saints of New York State whose efforts ennobled the towns and cities they shaped.
And saints aside, the restoration of cities has been seen before – in the reform movements that swept Victorian London free of gin, for example, or in the transformation of Buffalo in the late 1800s from one of the wickedest cities in America to one of the most prosperous and reform-minded.
Here’s a thought worth planting. There is a huge diaspora in America of people who grew up in one place and came to live elsewhere. Surely within that diaspora there are many people who can think creatively about how to give back to the places that first nurtured and taught them. This, too, is forward-looking work.
Third, here’s another familiar and pressing question: how to restore beauty in an age ruled by postmodern nihilism in the arts?
In this case, too, we all know the diagnosis: For decades, tradition-minded writers have complained about the ugliness of contemporary art and literature. And no wonder. Entire magazines and institutes have been dedicated to lamenting the contemporary state of art and literature, and millions of philanthropic dollars poured into the same criticism.
But here, again, it is time to take action. Almost no one has answered the problem the only way that finally works: by making better art.
And this, too, is something the Center for Cultural Restoration is taking on. My team and I are undertaking a major foray into literary fiction. It begins with my two forthcoming novels, The Washington Zoo, a comic novel of life in the nation’s capital; and another work of fiction I’m engaged in called Trailer Boy, a young-adult novel set in rural upstate New York during the opioid epidemic. Both works may extend into stage and screen, as my novel The Loser Letters did before them. And others on the team are engaged in similar work. Andrew Doran has just published Pale Dread, a satire set in the State Department, to rave reviews on Amazon and elsewhere.
Literary restoration is essential to the restoration of culture. The trouble with the ugly, dehumanizing art that surrounds us today is this. We become the kind of people we encounter in our stories. Decadent stories produce decadent people. Virtuous and beautiful stories produce the opposite.
And if anyone would like an example of what is meant by “decadence,” look no further than the following example.
In July 2026, the New York Times Book Review, once the gold standard for hopeful authors and readers everywhere, ran a lengthy essay under this headline: “Our Insatiable Appetite for Stories about Cannibalism.” Subtitle: “Why do the characters in so many novels insist on eating each other?”
This was not a joke. It was not Halloween. I have to admit, despite decades of chronicling some of the more debased signs of the times, this one came as a surprise. But, as the author of the piece explained:
“Lately, cannibalism has become a popular and potent trope in contemporary fiction, where it has cropped up as a metaphor for contentious issues: misogyny, social inequality, our cultural obsession with body image, rampant consumerism and the ways social media drives overconsumption and, in turn, consumes us.”
Here’s another quote: “American culture is not super welcoming to the idea of women being angry, and right now, a lot of women are very, very angry,” one writer said. “I was interested in what it means to be a woman and have to do something so ugly, like eat another person.”
In the interests of not destroying your appetites right before lunch, I’ll stop here. But this piece -- coolly platforming degradation in what was once the most important review in the country – is a dye marker, illuminating corruption of the arts.
Friends at Napa and elsewhere, admittedly we face a low bar here. But surely some in the tradition-minded wing can make better art than this.
The other reason why it’s imperative to emphasize the restoration of good fiction is this: in an age of the internet and AI, there is a premium as never before on original storytelling dedicated to goodness, beauty, and redemption. The point is not to replace woke art with conservative art, but to replace bad art with good art. Here, as elsewhere, we need to play cultural offense, not defense.
Finally, a fourth question dear to everyone in this room: how to restore the faith?
The extraordinary growth of classical academies, of homeschooling, of new associations like Thomistic Circles, and other vibrant signs of revival unseen even a decade ago all speak to a deep truth: though many Americans may have abandoned God, God hasn’t abandoned America. The real religious story in the United States today isn’t the triumph of atheism. It’s the near-miraculous vibrancy of Christianity in strongholds established by the faithful at home, at school, and even on campuses.
In another example of trying to put my actions where my words have led, I have recently joined the Board of the University of St. Thomas in Houston, TX, where a dedicated band of leaders is seeking to strengthen that institution’s Catholic identity.
For years, watching and working with Mitch and Fr. Charles and the late Fr. Arne at the Leonine Forum, among many others, I have learned what Catholic institution building looks like. Thanks to the CIC team, the Leonine Forum turned out to be a pilot that has been replicated in cities around the country – and can be replicated into more.
Inspired by all this, I am at work with the team on another project that would further restoration on another level, helping Catholic campuses to be more Catholic. We are just at the beginning of developing a several-point plan to be shared with administrators and boards of faithful institutions, beginning in the state of Texas. This is a fledgling effort. But it is both dear to our hearts and a vital part of the American restoration to come. Stay tuned.
To summarize these examples of moving from theory to action, we need to be building – and building is possible.
America and its people will be restored not by handwringing, understandable though it may be, but by unique strategic projects of the kind I’ve been describing. The new Center for Cultural Restoration will engage them in conjunction with faithful allies, like the Leonine Forum and Napa and the Faith and Reason Institute and more, who are our institutional brothers in this transformative work.
In summary, switching back to the medical metaphor: After years spent on the diagnosis of America and the West, a diagnosis that is still ongoing, I now also look forward to projects that will ameliorate the patient’s condition.
What’s essential to our morale is the knowledge that cultural restoration is humanitarian work. It gives voice to the voiceless victims of momentous failed experiments -- like the experiment of the sexual revolution, or of socialism, or other social metamorphoses that have delivered immiseration rather than liberation. We offer our positive work for the good of every American, but especially to the people whom the wider culture has written off: those who are lost, those who feel abandoned, those whose roots are being trampled.
Some of these people will never read a report from a think tank. But they will respond to leadership and creativity and energy: whether it is celebrating history, telling a good story, or presenting the faith in new forms for new generations.
In sum, it’s our conviction that the time for cultural lamentation is over, and the time for creative defiance is upon us. We look forward to standing shoulder to shoulder with you in the exciting work present and to come.
To Rob Neal: It took a few years – writers procrastinate -- but I hope you’ll accept all the foregoing as one answer to your question.
