Sohrab Amari, "Against David French-ism"

Against David-Frenchism, by Sohrab Amari. First Things 05/29/19:

In March, First Things published a manifesto of sorts signed by several mostly youngish, mostly Roman Catholic writers, who argued that “there is no returning to the pre-Trump conservative consensus that collapsed in 2016,” that “any attempt to revive the failed conservative consensus that preceded Trump would be misguided and harmful to the right.”

Against whom, concretely speaking, was this declaration directed?

I don’t claim to speak for the other signatories. But as one of the principal drafters, I have given the question a great deal of thought, both before and since the document’s publication. And I can now say that for me, “Against the Dead Consensus” drew a line of demarcation with what I call David French-ism, after the National Review writer and Never-Trump stalwart.

Further Discussion

• Response What Sohrab Ahmari Gets Wrong, by David French. National Review 05/30/19:

  What is singularly curious about this, and Ahmari’s essay on the whole, is the extent to which it depends on the creation of two fictional people: a fictional David French far weaker than I think I’ve shown myself to be over many years of fighting for conservative causes, and a fictional version of Donald Trump as an avatar of a philosophy that Trump wouldn’t recognize. It is within the framework of these two fictional people that my approach is allegedly doomed to fail and Trump’s approach has a chance to prevail. ...

• David French and the Revolutionary Style in Conservative Journalism, by Jake Meador. Mere Orthodoxy 07/03/19:

  just as in 2016, when fearful and reactionary conservatives told us to give our support to a man whose life represented the wholesale rejection of divine love, we must be willing to accept a loss of power before we would countenance cynical, consequentialist lines of thought meant to justify some greater good. When our methods of resistance become intelligible to our opponents we have left the path of fidelity. If First Things is going to resist liberalism through laughable misrepresentations of Trump and an increasingly cozy posture to some genuinely scary trends on the American right, then leaving the path of fidelity is precisely what they will end up doing.
  

  “What, then, of political power?” you might ask. Does not the above represent little more than yet another twist on Anabaptist style quietism, a refusal to get one’s hands dirty in the necessary and inevitably messy work of politics?
  

  It does not. Rather, it recognizes that a genuinely Christian political witness is not merely about a certain political content in our ideas, but a particular mode of existing as political beings. To become intelligible to those whose only political standard is the acquisition of power is to give up any political good other than power. It is, then, to give up our quiet confidence that God is at work in the world and that his work will not be advanced by those of us who would eat the king’s food and bow to his idols.

• David French Is Right: Classical Liberalism Is the Best Framework for Protecting Religious Freedom, by Robby Soave. Reason 05/31/19. "In which First Things throws a temper tantrum."
  
• The High Church of the Low Blow: Sohrab Ahmari embraces Trump’s sucker punch politics, by Bret Stephens. New York Times 05/31/19.
  
• Sohrab Ahmari Vs. David French, by Rod Dreher. The American Conservative 05/31/19:

  I don’t have Ahmari’s faith in smashmouth right-wing politics of the Trumpian sort. David French’s fundamental decency as a man and as a Christian is not a fault, but a feature. I don’t get why his decency and honor is a liability. If we lose that for the sake of winning political battles, are we not at grave risk of having sold our souls?

• David French and Sohrab Ahmari: What Are We Debating?, by Ramesh Ponnuru. National Review 05/31/19.
  
• ‘David French–ism’ without David French, by J.J. McCullough. National Review 05/31/19. "French has been unfairly caricatured — but the caricature is worth defending."
  

Thomas G. West: "The Political Theory of the American Founding"

The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom
by Thomas G. West
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (April 3, 2017). 428 pp.

This book provides a complete overview of the American Founders' political theory, covering natural rights, natural law, state of nature, social compact, consent, and the policy implications of these ideas. The book is intended as a response to the current scholarly consensus, which holds that the Founders' political thought is best understood as an amalgam of liberalism, republicanism, and perhaps other traditions. West argues that, on the contrary, the foundational documents overwhelmingly point to natural rights as the lens through which all politics is understood. The book explores in depth how the Founders' supposedly republican policies on citizen character formation do not contradict but instead complement their liberal policies on property and economics. Additionally, the book shows how the Founders' embraced other traditions in their politics, such as common law and Protestantism.

Reviews and Discussion

• Founding philosophy, by Michael Anton. [Review]. The New Criterion June 2018:

  West sets for himself the seemingly modest task of “explaining” the American founders’ political views—first, their political theory per se, and second, how they applied that theory to the practical task of building a new government. The qualifier is necessary because while we think we understand the founding, West shows that we—especially, all too often, those who’ve been specifically trained to explain it to others—do not.

• A Partial Vindication of Thomas West, by James Stoner. Law and Liberty 12/11/17.
  
• The Founders in Full, by Vincent Phillip Munoz. Claremont Review of Books 10/19/17:

  By reintroducing the moral underpinnings of the founders’ natural rights republic, Thomas West has made an extraordinary contribution to our understanding of American political thought. He shows that the founders’ republicanism is a part of their liberalism; that duties and rights, properly understood, are not at odds. In doing so, The Political Theory of the American Founding not only helps us better understand America’s principles, it explains why we ought to cherish them and fight to restore them to their rightful place in our political life.

• Roundtable on The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom by Thomas G. West. Hillsdale College. 09/19/17. [Video]
  
• Making Sense of the Founders: Politics, Natural Rights, and the Laws of Nature by Justin Dyer. Public Discourse> 06/09/17.

  [West argues] that the founders did in fact share a “theoretically coherent understanding” of politics rooted in natural rights philosophy. Other traditions were of course present, but the founders, West insists, embraced these other traditions in their official public documents and pronouncements only to the extent that those traditions could be enlisted as allies of the natural rights philosophy. When natural rights conflicted with elements of the common law, customary practices, or religious tradition, it was the natural rights tradition that won the day. Public documents and the affairs of state—rather than sermons, commentaries, private letters, or other musings—“point to natural rights and the laws of nature as the lens through which politics is understood.”[...]

  The Political Theory of the American Founding does a wonderful job of correcting some of the caricatures of the political thought of eighteenth-century Americans as amoral, areligious, individualistic, or otherwise hostile to public virtue and the moral conditions of freedom. The key, for West, is recognizing that the founders distinguished the purpose of politics (securing rights) from the purpose of life (happiness), and the founders created a society that remained open to the private pursuit of nobility, wisdom, piety, and the higher goods that were supposedly sublimated by the founders into the base pursuit of material gain.
  

  Throughout, West leaves open the question whether the founders’ philosophy is true. I venture a preliminary answer: yes, for the most part, but only because they were buoyed by those other traditions—notably Christianity, the common law, and elements of classical theological natural law—and thereby built better than they knew.

Debating Integralism

• In Defence of Catholic Integralism, by Thomas Pink. The Public Discourse 08/12/18. "States that do not recognize both natural law and the transformation of law and public reason brought about by the raising of religion to a supernatural good will become confessors of false belief opposed to Christianity, and their great power will turn from supporting Christianity to opposing or even repressing it, especially in relation to its moral teaching."
  
• Integralism and Catholic Doctrine, by Robert T. Miller. The Public Discourse 07/15/18. Catholics today are not required to believe in a Catholic confessional state. If anything, they are required to believe that everyone has a right under the natural law to religious freedom, that the state has no authority in religious matters, and that coercion of religious activity by the state is morally wrong. In short, integralism is contrary to Catholic doctrine.
  
• Can States "Confess" Religious Belief? Should They?, by Christopher O. Tollefsen. 06/05/18. The confessing state exceeds the limits of its authority, either by acting to no good effect, or by acting contrary to good effect. Thus, the confessing state seems inappropriate as a matter not simply of prudence, but of principle.
  
• The Catholic Church, the State, and Liberalism, by Joseph G. Trabbic. The Public Discourse 05/02/18. "According to previous papal teaching, a Catholic confessional state is the ideal, even if in most modern situations it’s not a practical possibility, and prudence would steer us away from it. That teaching continues to be normative for Catholics."
  

Richard M. Reinsch II: "Full-Spectrum Reason"

It is in this intellectual-moral-cultural space that the autonomous liberal individualism and the “naked reason,” which are what Deneen is most concerned with, is able to do its damaging work. But as Nathan Schlueter insightfully noted in an essay comparing the thought of Pope Benedict and Leo Strauss, for all of the former’s criticisms of the modern undermining of human reason, and with it our ability to access the metaphysical depth of the human condition, Pope Benedict never turned his back on liberalism or the Enlightenment tout court. There is no "putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age," whose "positive aspects . . . are to be acknowledged unreservedly."

Pope Benedict sought to engage liberalism with a record of Western achievement rooted in the Socratic dialogues of classical philosophy and in the analogy of being found in medieval philosophy, whose import is to show the complex but real connection between the soul of the person and the personal God of the biblical tradition. Liberalism is, ultimately, an attempt to limit power and to bind its necessary use with a promise of fidelity to a fundamental document, a set of claims, a constitution that forms and animates political life. Liberalism protects the relational human person — who has economic, familial, political, and religious dimensions to his being — from rationalist ideology or the claims of sheer bigotry.

This relational person who is open to the full truth of what it means to be a human person is the being that liberalism at its best is designed to protect and to nurture. However, liberalism is also an inheritance, one that incorporates the best achievements in the full record of Western theological, philosophical, political, and legal excellences. We must always engage liberalism with "the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur," as Pope Benedict reminded us at Regensburg. We should have gratitude, respect, and piety for our liberal democratic traditions and shore these up where they are faltering rather than pine for a premodern past. The clock for liberalism did not begin with Hobbes’s Leviathan, and Justice Anthony Kennedy will not tell its final story. But to ensure that will be the task of those fully engaged with the Western corpus of philosophy, theology, law, politics and the living tradition that holds this together and provides for new applications.

Richard M. Reinsch II, In Defense of Full-Spectrum Liberalism 02/19/18.

Patrick J. Deneen: "Why Liberalism Failed"

"Why Liberalism Failed"
by Patrick J. Deneen
Yale University Press (January 2018).

Of the three dominant ideologies of the twentieth century—fascism, communism, and liberalism—only the last remains. This has created a peculiar situation in which liberalism’s proponents tend to forget that it is an ideology and not the natural end-state of human political evolution. As Patrick Deneen argues in this provocative book, liberalism is built on a foundation of contradictions: it trumpets equal rights while fostering incomparable material inequality; its legitimacy rests on consent, yet it discourages civic commitments in favor of privatism; and in its pursuit of individual autonomy, it has given rise to the most far-reaching, comprehensive state system in human history. Here, Deneen offers an astringent warning that the centripetal forces now at work on our political culture are not superficial flaws but inherent features of a system whose success is generating its own failure.

Reviews and Related Articles

• Did Liberalism Fail? [Panel discussion]
• We Still Need Liberalism, by Christian Alejandro Gonzalez. National Review 06/22/18. "Patrick Deneen’s critique of liberalism exhibits an undue nostalgia for the past and ingratitude for the virtues of the present."
  
• An Autopsy: Why Liberalism Failed, by Daniel McCarthy. National Interest 06/14/18.
  
• In Defense of Full-Spectrum Liberalism, by Richard M. Reinsch. National Review 02/18/18.
• Why Liberalism’s Critics Fail, by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey. Modern Age
  
• Against the Deformations of Liberalism, by David Corey. American Affairs
  
• Has Liberalism Failed?, by Patrick Lee Miller. Quillette 02/12/18.
  
• Liberalism's Failure - and It's Success, by David French. National Review 02/05/18: "As a critique of the godless libertinism of the modern West, Deneen’s book is devastating. As a critique of the American Founding, it’s far less convincing."
  
• Patrick Deneen Explains Why Liberalism Failed, by Jerry D. Salyer. Crisis Magazine 11/16/17.
  

"Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents" by Patrick J. Deneen

Conserving America?: Essays on Present Discontents (Dissident American Thought Today)
by Patrick J. Deneen.

St. Augustines Press; 1 edition (November 30, 2016)

"Opinions about America have taken a decisive turn in the early part of the 21st century. Some 70% of Americans believe that the country is moving in the wrong direction, and half the country thinks that its best days are behind it. Most believe that their children will be less prosperous and have fewer opportunities than previous generations. Evident to all is that the political system is broken and social fabric is fraying, particularly as a growing gap between wealthy haves and left-behind have-nots increases, a hostile divide widens between faithful and secular, and deep disagreement persists over America's role in the world. Wealthy Americans continue to build gated enclaves in and around select cities where they congregate, while growing numbers of Christians compare our times to those of the late Roman empire, and ponder a fundamental withdrawal from wider American society into updated forms of Benedictine monastic communities. The signs of the times suggest that much is wrong with America. This collection of thematic essays by Notre Dame political theorist and public intellectual Patrick Deneen addresses the questions, is there something worth conserving in America, and if so, is America capable of conservation? Can a nation founded in a revolutionary moment that led to the founding of the first liberal nation be thought capable of sustaining and passing on virtues and practices that ennoble? Or is America inherently a nation that idolizes the new over the old, license over ordered liberty, and hedonism over self-rule? Can America conserve what is worth keeping for it to remain--or even become--a Republic?"

Extended Debate: Robert R. Reilly and Patrick Deneen

• Did the Founders Build Better or Worse Than They Knew?, by Jeffrey S. What's Wrong With The World 10/29/17.
  
• Fools or Scoundrels? A Response to Patrick Deneen, by Robert R. Reilly. Public Discourse 10/16/17. "To suppose that the Founders set up a republic to vitiate the virtue on which its existence depended requires the belief that they were either stupid (by creating a Hobbesian regime and not noticing) or immoral (by doing it while cleverly lying about what they were doing)." The first in a two-part series.
  
• Christianity and American Founding Principles: A Response to Patrick Deneen and Robert Reilly, by S. Adam Seagrave. Public Discourse 10/3/17. "When it comes to Christianity, the Enlightenment, and the American Founding, Patrick Deneen and Robert Reilly are both right."
  
• Corrupting the Youth? A Response to Reilly, by Patrick J. Deneen. The Public Discourse 09/19/17. "There is no distinctive Catholic political philosophy today, and Robert Reilly’s call to man the battlements of classical liberalism is an attempt to short-circuit the possibility of a real revival of Catholic political thought in America."
  
• For God and Country by Robert Reilley. Claremont Review of Books 07/31/17.
  

* * *

Reviews and Related Discussions

• America, What’s Left of It: A Conversation with Patrick Deneen. Patrick Deneen joins this edition of Liberty Law Talk to discuss his latest book, Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents. Law and Liberty February 2015.
  
• Review: Conserving America? Essays on Present Discontents, by Lee Trepanier. Voegelin View 08/24/17.
  
• Conserving America: On the Recovery of Political Theory, by Brian Jones. The Imaginative Conservative 05/23/17.
  
• Conservatism in America: A long-read Q&A with professor of political thought Patrick Deneen, with James Pethokoukis. American Enterprise Institute. 06/29/17.
  
• On Not Conserving Liberalism, by Mark Mason The University Bookman Winter 2017.
  

Mark Lilla's "The Once and Future Liberal"

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics

by Mark Lilla.

Harper (August 15, 2017). 160 pages.

In The Once and Future Liberal, Mark Lilla offers an impassioned, tough-minded, and stinging look at the failure of American liberalism over the past two generations. Although there have been Democrats in the White House, and some notable policy achievements, for nearly 40 years the vision that Ronald Reagan offered—small government, lower taxes, and self-reliant individualism—has remained the country’s dominant political ideology. And the Democratic Party has offered no convincing competing vision in response.

Instead, as Lilla argues, American liberalism fell under the spell of identity politics, with disastrous consequences. Driven originally by a sincere desire to protect the most vulnerable Americans, the left has now unwittingly balkanized the electorate, encouraged self-absorption rather than solidarity, and invested its energies in social movements rather than in party politics.

With dire consequences. Lilla goes on to show how the left’s identity-focused individualism insidiously conspired with the amoral economic individualism of the Reaganite right to shape an electorate with little sense of a shared future and near-contempt for the idea of the common good. In the contest for the American imagination, liberals have abdicated.

Now they have an opportunity to reset. The left is motivated, and the Republican Party, led by an unpredictable demagogue, is in ideological disarray. To seize this opportunity, Lilla insists, liberals must concentrate their efforts on recapturing our institutions by winning elections. The time for hectoring is over. It is time to reach out and start persuading people from every walk of life and in every region of the country that liberals will stand up for them. We must appeal to – but also help to rebuild – a sense of common feeling among Americans, and a sense of duty to each other.

A fiercely-argued, no-nonsense book, enlivened by Lilla’s acerbic wit and erudition, The Once and Future Liberal is essential reading for our momentous times.

Reviews and Discussion

• Mark Lilla Vs. Identity Politics Interview with Rod Dreher. The American Conservative 08/16/17.
  
• A Chat with Mark Lilla about Those Who Think “History Has Gone Off Course”, by David Skinner. Humanities Winter 2017 | Volume 38, Number 1.
  
• Debating the liberal case against identity politics Vox.com. 08/15/17.
  
• The Enduring Importance of Identity Liberalism, by Lovia Gyarkye. The New Republic 11/22/16.
  
• Liberals’ woes run deep, but the way out is murky, by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Washington Post 08/18/17.
  

Michael Novak 1933-2017, Requiescat in pace

From his daughter, Jana Novak:

As many of you may have heard by now, dad aka Michael Novak, died peacefully early this morning from complications from colon cancer, at his apartment in DC surrounded by family.

• Homily: Funeral Mass of Michael Novak. Father Derek Cross. 02/25/17.
  

Before he died ... Michael Novak was heard to say, repeatedly, to everyone who came to say goodbye, "God loves you and you must love one another, that is all that matters." - Robert Royal

Reflections on Novak’s passing

[This post will be continually updated in the weeks to come]

• The Late Michael Novak, Who Helped Bring Down The Soviet Union, Had Unusual Insights On Business, by Steve Forbes. Forbes 03/28/17.
  
• Michael Novak, Catholic Scholar Who Championed Capitalism, Dies at 83 New York Times
  
• Michael Novak, theologian who made a spiritual case for capitalism, dies at 83 Washington Post 02/17/17.
  
• In Memoriam: Michael Novak, by R.R. Reno. First Things "First Thoughts" 02/22/17.
  
• Remembering Michael Novak, by Hadley Arkes, Michael Pakaluk, and Robert Royal The Catholic Thing 02/20/17.
  
• Michael Novak, R.I.P., by Michael Barone. Washington Examiner 02/20/17.
  
• Michael Novak, noted theologian, philosopher and author, dies at 83 Catholic News Service / National Catholic Reporter 02/20/17.
  
• The Hidden Legacy of Michael Novak (1933-2017), by Carrie Gress. National Catholic Register 02/22/17.
  
• Michael Novak: Catholic, American Patriot, and Lover of Liberty, by Samuel Gregg. The Public Discourse 02/19/17.
  
• In Memoriam: Michael Novak, by Robert Royal. National Catholic Register 02/18/17.
  
• Michael Novak, Rest in Peace, by Jay Richards. Catholic World Report 02/17/17.
  
• How Michael Novak changed my life, and yours, by Fr. Robert Sirico. The Hill 02/19/17.
  
• Michael Novak taught a generation of Catholics that capitalism can be virtuous, by Andreas Widmer. Washington Post 02/18/17.
  
• Why Michael Novak was a true American gentleman, by Andreas Widmer. Crux 02/19/17.
  
• In Memoriam: Michael Novak, 1933-2017 Noah Rothman. Commentary 02/17/17. “Celebrating the memory and work of an intellectual giant.”
  
• Catholic Thinker Michael Novak remembered with gratitude Catholic News Agency 02/17/17.
  
• AEI mourns the loss of Michael Novak Arthur C. Brooks. American Enterprise Institute. 02/17/17.
  
• Catholic University Remembers Michael Novak as Influential Thinker, Prolific Writer, and Beloved Mentor
  
• The Soul of Democratic Capitalism Brian C. Anderson. City Journal 02/17/17.
  
• Remembering Michael Novak, by George Weigel. National Review 02/17/17.
  

Critical Reviews of Matthew Stewart's "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic"

In America's Founding May Not Have Been Christian, but It Sure Wasn't Anti-Christian, Robert Tracy McKenzie, chair of the Department of History at Wheaton College, reviews Matthew Stewart's Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic. (Christianity Today 07/03/14):

... I'll leave it to the philosophers to evaluate whether Stewart has exaggerated the underlying atheism of this cast of characters. (His portrayal of Locke, at least, is sure to arouse controversy.) As a historian, I am more concerned by his utter failure to establish the influence of atheistic belief on America's founding. Historians believe that our most important task is to explain what we see, basing our statements of cause and effect on evidence. Stewart takes a different approach. He concludes that radical philosophy was widespread among common Americans after discovering it in the writings of two individuals, Vermont's backwoods leader Ethan Allen and a Boston physician named Thomas Young. In like manner, he finds that atheistic presuppositions determined the political philosophy of the most prominent Founders by ruthlessly disregarding all competing influences. This is pronouncement, not demonstration.

McKenzie comments further, on his own blog, Faith and American History:

Although Stewart cloaks his argument in a 400-page narrative, the heart of his reasoning boils down to a simple syllogism: The ideas that matter in history are the ones that are true. Religious beliefs are, by definition, false. Ergo (philosophers say ergo a lot), religious beliefs couldn’t have mattered in the American founding. If lots of colonists back in ’76 thought otherwise, that’s because they weren’t as enlightened as the author. Too bad for them.

The thrust of my review was to call attention to Stewart’s a priori assumptions and to remind readers of historians’ quaint belief that historical assertions should be grounded in historical evidence. Stewart is correct to point out that the religious beliefs of many of the leading Founders were unorthodox, David Barton’s wish-dreams to the contrary notwithstanding. But Stewart errs badly in equating the views of the leading Founders with atheism, and he provides almost no evidence at all for his insistence that radical philosophy was widespread among the rank and file of colonial patriots. In short, the emperor has no clothes.

Matthew Stewart, a self-identified atheist, professed in an interview with the Boston Globe that he'd "like the United States to become what it was always meant to be, which is a secular nation — more publicly committed to reason, to improving understanding, and promoting education", sans traditional orthodox religiosity of any kind. Curiously, notes McKenzie,

for a study that is so determined to discredit orthodox Christianity, the author is curiously averse to engaging Christian scholars, whether historians or theologians. When it comes to the religious beliefs of the revolutionary generation, quite a number of Christian historians have anticipated much of Stewart’s findings, albeit with vastly greater nuance and balance, but you’d never know it from his account.

Elsewhere, Baron Swaim (Wall Street Journal) deems that "Mr. Stewart's learning in philosophical radicalism is impressive; what undermines his work is his contempt for everyone but the few radicals he esteems." And Charles W. Cooke (National Review) corrects Stewart's mistaken charge that "the first Tea-Partier was an atheist."

* * *

Update

Mark David Hall has published a rather devastating review of Nature's God for the Spring 2015 issue (pp. 285-291) Christian Scholars Review entitled "A Failed Attempt at Partisan Scholarship", which is reposted to the blog American Creation. He concludes:

... Stewart regularly makes sweeping statements that leave the impression America’s founders were radical deists who wanted to create a godless republic, but he occasionally offers the qualification that many Americans were traditional Christians and that intellectual traditions not antithetically opposed to Christianity may have had some influence as well (e.g. 32, 352). But these qualifications are too few, faint, and far between. By focusing on a handful of founders with radical religious views, some important—Franklin, Jefferson, and Paine—and others relatively unimportant—Allen and Young—he grossly distorts the founders’ religious views and political commitments. Even brief consideration of a wider range of founders reveals a very different picture._*

[...]

Nature’s God suffers from a number of serious flaws. Stewart virtually ignores the vast literature on the role of religion in the American founding and he utterly fails to engage scholars whose works challenge his thesis. He misuses and misconstrues primary sources and largely ignores founders (key and otherwise) who do not fit his thesis. Alan Ryan, in a friendly blurb, describes the book as “partisan scholarship.” It seems to me that Ryan is half right. Readers interested in a polemical account of religion in the American founding almost completely ungrounded in history may enjoy this book, but anyone interested in a serious treatment of religion in the era should look elsewhere.

See, for instance, the approximately thirty-three founders and traditions profiled in Dreisbach, Morrison, and Hall, eds., The Founders on God and Government (Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), Dreisbach, Morrison, and Hall, The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life, and Dreisbach and Hall, eds, Faith and the Founders of the American Republic (Oxford, 2014).

(Read the whole thing).

'First Things' vs. 'Communio', "Murrayites" and "MacIntyrians"; The Paradox of the "Catholic Libertarian" and Another Kind of Illiberal Catholicism -- A roundup of relevant reading in 2014

• A Catholic Showdown Worth Watching, by Patrick J. Deneen. American Conservative 02/06/14, on the ongoing debate between the school of John Courtney Murray (as expounded by First Things' George Weigel, Michael Novak and the late Richard J. Neuhaus) and the "Communio" school of Alasdair Macintyre, David Schindler, William T. Cavanaugh, and John Medaille.
  
  

• Opus Publicum on The Other Illiberal Catholicism. 07/04/14:

  Deneen’s portrait of illiberal Catholicism is helpful, but incomplete. Though hardly uniform in thought and orientation, the illiberal (or “radical”) Catholics Deneen mentions tend to take their bearings from the post-Second Vatican Council theology that developed in the pages of Communio and, to a more limited extent, the re-castings of St. Thomas Aquinas that occurred in various pockets of the Catholic intellectual world over the course of the 20th Century. For several reasons, these Catholic thinkers share some affinities with non-Catholics who are skeptical of liberalism, such as the Oxbridge “Radical Orthodoxy” school, though the former maintain a tighter hold on the Catholic Church’s magisterium. But beyond those mentioned by Deneen in The American Conservative is a brigade of illiberal Catholics with roots that run far deeper than intellectual trends which began to form during the latter half of the last century. These illiberal Catholics take their first bearings from the great socio-ecclesial encyclicals of the 19th and early 20th Centuries: Gregory XVI’s Mirari Vos; Blessed Pius IX’s Quanta Cura and Syllabus Errorum; Leo XIII’s Immortale Dei and Rerum Novarum; St. Pius X’s Quanta Cura and E Supremi Apostolatus; and Pius XI’s Quas Primas and Quadragesimo Anno. Rather than looking toward (post)modern academic currents for additional intellectual ammunition, these illiberal Catholics seek grounding in the timeless wisdom of the Angelic Doctor and the tradition which emerged from his teachings.

  
  

• Integralism - a wide-ranging essay initially responding to Zmirak's charges of "illiberal Catholicism", but touching as well on on David Schindler's Critique of Liberalism; the question of religious liberty; the natura pura debate (contra Henri de Lubac); "On the Difference Between Just Being and Being Good: Why Rights Are Not the First Principles of Political Life"; and the "Integralist thesis."
  
  

• [An] Illiberal Catholic Manifesto - being a sermon elivered by Dom Gérard, Abbot of Le Barroux, In Chartres Cathedral, Pentecost, 1985.
  
  
  

• Mark DeForrest (The Imaginative Conservative) asks: Can Catholicism and Libertarianism Co-Exist? (07/06/14) and concludes:

  There is space within Catholicism to take libertarian arguments seriously, not to agree with them in every instance, but to look at them as a helpful perspective and corrective approach to understanding the dangers of government overreach at the expense of individual initiative and responsibility. By so doing, thinkers who work within the framework of Catholic social teaching can both better understand the libertarian critique of government power as well as aspects of Catholic social thought that have been eclipsed in recent decades. Just as Catholicism had nothing to fear from Aristotle or the Greek philosophers, it has nothing to fear from Friedrich Hayek and other libertarian thinkers and from the true if incomplete insights that they bring to questions involving the use of government power.

  However, Opus Publicum explains why Catholic libertarianism still gets it wrong ("their instincts are usually in the right place, but that’s no excuse for the conscious discharge of authentically Catholic social principles").
  
  
  

• Michael Novak on On Being and Staying Catholic in the Modern World, an address delivered June 7, 2014 to the graduating class of St. Michael the Archangel High School in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
  
  

• George Weigel pens a tribute to his friend in "American and Catholic": Michael Novak's achievement City Journal Winter 2014.
  
  

• A City Upon a Hill: Augustine, John Winthrop and the Soul of the American Experiment Today, by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap. Address at the St. Anselm Institute, University of Virginia in Charlottesville on February 18, 2014:

  MacIntyre is not exactly a sunny source of hope when it comes to liberal democracy. And I don’t think we should give up – at least not yet – on the possibilities for good that still reside in our system of public life. ...

  
  

• Neoconservatism and Conceptual Clarity Opus Publicum 07/28/14:

  Last week Artur Rosman published a very informative interview with Patrick Deneen at Ethika Politika entitled “The Neo-Conservative Imagination.” In it, Deneen discusses, among other things, the disconnect that exists within what he calls “neoconservative Catholics,” specifically their orthodox view on sexuality morality and their heterodox view on Catholic Social Teaching (CST). While I have no disagreement with him that there is a disconnect, I think the interview — and a lot of critical writing on what I will broadly call economic liberalism within Catholicism — could have taken more care to be conceptually clear. Let me see if I can sort it out. ...

  
  

• Acton and Lee: A Conversation on Liberty, by Stephen Klugewicz and Veronica Mueller
  The Imaginative Conservative (08/02/14):

  It is interesting to note that Lord Acton corresponded with General Robert E. Lee after the conclusion of the American Civil War. Sympathetic to the Confederate cause, Lord Acton considered America’s Constitution as imperfect and “saw in State Rights the only availing check upon the absolutism of the sovereign will.” In his letter of November 4, 1866, Lord Acton told General Lee that “secession filled me with hope, not as the destruction but as the redemption of Democracy,” and expressed his belief that General Lee had been “fighting the battles of our liberty, our progress, and our civilization.”

  
  

• Recovering the Catholic Doctrine of Private Property, Part I: On Property Rights, Subjective and Objective, Human and Natural; Part II: A Critical Examination of Catholic Social Teaching on the Question of Private Property, by W. Bradford Littlejohn. Calvinist International 08/13/14.
  
  

• Ghosts of Colson & Neuhaus, by Rod Dreher. The American Conservative 10/01/14:

  I spent all day yesterday with a good group at the office of First Things magazine in New York City. It was a seminar put together by editor Rusty Reno to discuss the future of religion in the public square in what everybody agrees is a meaningfully different era from the one in which the ministries of the late Richard John Neuhaus and Chuck Colson rose to prominence. It was hard to be in that room today and not feel the presence of those two men, if only because their passing came at the end of a hopeful era for socially conservative Christians. ...

  
  

• Thomas Storck on the question: What Authority Does Catholic Social Teaching Have? Ethika Politika. 09/29/14.
  
  

• George Weigel: (HT: Truths Still Held? John Courtney Murray’s “American Proposition,” Fifty Years Later (Thank you: Rick Garnett, Mirror of Justice). 10/13/14.
  
  

• Conservatives, America, and Natural Law, by Samuel Gregg. Public Discourse 10/22/14. On the debate between the "Murrayites" and the "MacIntyrians"; What's wrong with "The Benedict Option", and Natural Law and the American Founding:

  For conservatives, a retreat into self-imposed isolation isn’t a responsible option. We need more conservatives publicly witnessing that humans are wired to know and freely choose truth, and that this has implications for the political order.

  
  
  

• Revisiting Pope Leo XIII and Reclaiming Catholic Social Doctrine, by Gregory J. Sullivan. Catholic World Report 12/01/14. A review of Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching, by Anthony Esolen. (Sophia Institute Press, Oct. 2014).
  

• What’s Really at Stake in the Catholic Showdown?, by Thomas Storck. Ethika Politika 12/04/14:

  What exactly is that controversy? In a nutshell, it is over whether the liberal capitalist socio-political order is really compatible with a Catholic view of the state, of society, and even of the human person; whether the condemnations of liberalism made by so many popes and Catholic writers are suddenly out-of-date, passé, made obsolete by the triumph of the new world order represented by the Lockean polity that was fully realized in the United States; and whether, in fact, Catholics can perceive that just as communism posed a deadly threat to a Christian social order and to the very life of the Church, so the bourgeois liberalism of the capitalist world represents a threat of another sort, but in the end one that is just as dangerous.