Catholics and the State - Recommended Blogging

Joe Hargrave, blogger at (Non Nobis and fellow co-blogger at The American Catholic, has been exploring many topics with which this website has occupied itself. Readers may be interested in the following posts (and the ensuing conversations with readers):

• Tea Time with Pope Leo XIII - whether or not, and to what extent, it is legitimate to resist the government?
• A Distributist Manifesto - "There is a great deal of confusion about what Distributism is, what it means, what its place is in Catholic social thought, and even over who started it. This essay will attempt to address some of these confusions..."
• Exploring Americanism and the Catholic Counter-Culture What are we to make of Leo XIII's condemnation of "Americanism"?
• Of Christians, Catholics and Tea Parties (Part II) (The American Catholic)
• Of Christians, Catholics and Tea Parties (Part I) (The American Catholic)
• Culture, Religion & The Nation-State (The American Catholic)
• America: More Propositional Than Some Think

What makes America exceptional? What kind of liberty is worth preserving?

For the reasons already stated, today’s liberals, such as Obama and his supporters in our cultural and intellectual elites, are not fully honest about their radical autonomism. For they either can’t or won’t acknowledge its internal incoherence and its disastrous consequences, which we see all around us in the breakdown of the family and the erosion of individual liberty at the hands of the state. But conservatives aren’t being fully honest either. The conservative “movement” in America has long been an uneasy alliance of classical liberals and religious conservatives, and it has never tried to resolve that tension. It is united only in its opposition to what has come, since the New-Deal era, to be called liberalism. But without a way of at least addressing the tension creatively, conservatives are doomed to fighting a long retreat, a rear-guard action against liberalism that never really takes on that enemy at its core.

And that, in the last analysis, is why I’m uneasy about calling myself a conservative. Until conservatives can agree on the kind and meaning of the liberty that makes America exceptional, they won’t be able to agree on what’s worth conserving, and hence on an alternative to an ever-advancing but profoundly corrosive liberalism.

Michael Liccione, "What's Exceptional about Conservatism?" (Sacramentum Vitae May 9, 2010.