A new book edited by Ryan Anderson and myself is now available. It’s A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism? and is a collection of essays from the journal, The Review of Politics, founded here at Notre Dame in 1939. Together, the articles tell the story of the conversation between liberalism and Catholicism — sometimes one of rapprochement, sometimes one of tension — in 20th and 21st century America. In the journal’s early years, it featured articles by European emigrés like Jacques Maritain, who admired the American experiment in liberal democracy and sought to ground a defense of it in Catholic principles. Do not miss the 1950 piece by Heinrich Rommen, which is one of the strongest Catholic defenses of religious liberty prior to the Church’s declaration, Dignitatis Humanae, in 1965. Later essays in the 1990s and 2000s by David Schindler, Michael Baxter, and William Cavanaugh raise skeptical arguments against American liberalism.
The volume features an essay by philosopher John Finnis that Anderson and I commissioned for this occasion in which Finnis responds to Ernest Fortin’s 1982 critique of Finnis’ 1980 classic, Natural Law and Natural Rights.
Anderson and I have an introductory essay that explores the conversation between Catholicism and American liberalism through the pieces.
These are only a few samples from this new collection.
Here is the book description from University of Notre Dame Press:
This volume is the third in the “Perspectives from The Review of Politics” series, following The Crisis of Modern Times, edited by A. James McAdams (2007), and War, Peace, and International Political Realism, edited by Keir Lieber (2009). In A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism?, editors Daniel Philpott and Ryan Anderson c1hronicle the relationship between the Catholic Church and American liberalism as told through twenty-seven essays selected from the history of the Review of Politics, dating back to the journal’s founding in 1939. The primary subject addressed in these essays is the development of a Catholic political liberalism in response to the democratic environment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Works by Jacques Maritain, Heinrich Rommen, and Yves R. Simon forge the case for the compatibility of Catholicism and American liberal institutions, including the civic right of religious freedom. The conversation continues through recent decades, when a number of Catholic philosophers called into question the partnership between Christianity and American liberalism and were debated by others who rejoined with a strenuous defense of the partnership. The book also covers a wide range of other topics, including democracy, free market economics, the common good, human rights, international politics, and the thought of John Henry Newman, John Courtney Murray, and Alasdair MacIntyre, as well as some of the most prominent Catholic thinkers of the last century, among them John Finnis, Michael Novak, and William T. Cavanaugh. This book will be of special interest to students and scholars of political science, journalists and policymakers, church leaders, and everyday Catholics trying to make sense of Christianity in modern society.
“The pages of the Review of Politics since its founding in 1939 can be read as a chronicle of this partnership between the Catholic Church and liberal institutions—its development, its heyday, its encounter of travails, its ongoing virtues, and its persistent flaws. Indeed, the partnership has been fraught with controversy over its true extent, its robustness, and its desirability.” — from the introduction, A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism?