Religion and Public Reasons: Volume V

The essays in Religion and Public Reasons seek to argue for, and illustrate, a central element of John Finnis's theory of natural law: that the main tenets of personal and political morality, and of a good legal order, are taught both by reason (arguments accessible to everyone) and by authentic divine revelation (teachings accessible to all who have a reasonable faith in its witnesses). The author's main books each include arguments for rejecting atheism and agnosticism; several papers here take up these arguments and indicate ways in which they open onto the reasonable grounds for accepting that more about God's nature, and about the meaning of Creation (including ongoing natural evolution), is disclosed by the revelation carried far forward among the Jewish people, and given definitive form by the Jews and Greeks who assembled in the universal Church, as witnesses of Christ, to carry forward that revelation into our present. Several papers argue that "public reason" properly includes such a religion, and that Humeian, Nietzschean, Deweyian, Rawlsian or other atheistical or deistic understandings of a reasonable secularism are badly mistaken. Many substantial papers record the author's position in controversies within Catholicism since the 1960s: on social justice, contraception and abortion; nuclear deterrence; Newman on conscience before pope; Maritain's hopes for a new Christendom and von Balthasar's for a hell empty of human persons; and on "proportionalism" and Lonerganian "historical consciousness" as moral-theological methods. Previously unpublished papers include several University and college sermons, and a substantial introduction.INTRODUCTION RELIGION IN PUBLIC REASON AND LAW ; 1. Darwin, Dewey, Religion, and the Public Domain ; 2. Talking about God in a Pluralist Society ; 3. Secularism's Practical Meaning ; 4. Secularism and Hope ; 5. Religion and State ; 6. Political Neutrality and Religious Arguments ; 7. Catholic Positions in Liberal Debates ; BASES FOR ACCEPTING REVELATION ; 8. Historical Consciousness and Theological Foundations ; 9. Faith, Morals, and Thomas More ; 10. On Creation and Ethics ; 11. St Cuthbert's Faith and the Bishop of Durham's Unbelief ; 12. Philosophy and God's Nature: Second Thoughts ; 13. Do Universities Corrupt the Young? ; 14. This World and the Next ; 15. Three and One ; CONSCIENCE & FAITH ; 16. Conscience in Newman's Letter to the Duke of Norfolk ; 17. Grace and Humility ; CONTROVERSIES ; 18. Christianity and World Order ; 19. Natural Law and "Unnatural Acts" ; 20. On Retranslating Humanae Vitae ; 21. Morality and the Second Vatican Council ; 22. The "Consistent Ethic of Life" ; 23. Nuclear Deterrence and the End of Christendom ; 24. Proportionalist Relativism ; 25. Theology and "the Four Principles" by with Anthony Fisher ; 26. Secularism and "The Culture of Death" ; 27. Hell and Hope