Recent Additions

Posted on

“According to Truth”

One of the most curious features of life under political liberalism—for present purposes, the doctrine that the central task of politics is to promote individual autonomy and to secure its preconditions—is that all politics and political conversation happens at one step removed, one meta-level up. Instead of pursuing substantive excellence and justice, we have circuitous conversations about statistical properties like “diversity”; instead of deciding what ought to be permitted, what condemned, we debate “civility”; instead of discerning truth, we quarrel over “religious liberty”; instead of protecting the most vulnerable, we conceal our vices and crimes under the rubric of “choice,” in both market and non-market spheres (although to be fair there are almost no non-market spheres left any more). When we ask about Truth, liberalism answers “What is ‘Truth’? Your truth is not someone else’s truth, and it is no more legitimate to make your truth into public policy than it would be to force your taste in ice cream upon everyone else. All this is solely of private concern.”

Continue reading ““According to Truth””

Posted on

Paul VI: Credo of the People of God

Introductory Note

June 30, 2018, marks the fiftieth anniversary of Blessed Paul VI’s proclamation of the Credo of the People of God. This event will likely be overshadowed by two other major events pertaining to Paul VI. One is, of course, the fiftieth anniversary of Paul’s prophetic encyclical letter On the Regulation of Birth, known around the world by its incipit, Humanae vitae. The encyclical, which cut through the error and confusion of its age and ours like lightning, remains a central point in the ongoing struggle against modernism and liberalism in the Church. The other event is the likely canonization of Paul by Pope Francis sometime this fall. However, it would be a shame to let the fiftieth anniversary of the Credo of the People of God pass unremarked.

Paul’s Credo of the People of God was, according to Paul himself, an act by the successor of Peter to confirm his brethren in the faith of Peter. Confronted with the explosion of heresy in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, especially the infamous Dutch Catechism, Paul declared a Year of Faith, which culminated in the proclamation of the Credo of the People of God. Seen in this context, it is clear that Paul, exercising solemnly his office as Supreme Pontiff, sought to combat the errors of the age with his profession of faith. Additionally, in preparing and proclaiming a profession of faith, Paul was making good a significant failure of the Second Vatican Council. Continue reading “Paul VI: Credo of the People of God”

Posted on

The Josias Podcast, Episode IX: Before Church and State

How ought we to think of our common life as human beings created in the image of God? Do our modern habits of thought prevent us from understanding what was going on in the Middle Ages? And more importantly: can the Middle Ages help us to escape the errors embedded in our common life today and thus open a path towards unfeigned peace? What is sovereignty? Is it necessary for peace? How do nature and grace relate, and what follows from that for the relation of temporal and spiritual power? Pater Edmund is joined by Alan Fimister and Andrew Willard Jones to discuss the later’s book Before Church and State.

Bibliography

  • Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX (Steubenville: Emmaus Academic, 2017).
  • Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011).
  • R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, vol. 2 of The Penguin History of the Church (London: Penguin, 1970).
  • Adrian Vermeule, “Some Questions about Sovereignty for Andrew Willard Jones,” Mirror of Justice (blog), June 10, 2018.
  • Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist, “An Integralist Manifesto,” review of Andrew Willard Jones, Before Church and State (q.v.), First Things (October 2017).

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com. We’d love the feedback.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

P.S. Podcast production is not free—if you would like to help us out or show your support for The Josias, we now have a Patreon page where you can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be awesome. Click here for more.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Blubrry | Email | RSS

Posted on

Integralism, MacIntyre, and Final Ends: Towards a Secular Account of Christian Politics

By Felix de St. Vincent and Brett Favras

Here, Felix de St. Vincent and Brett Favras  argue that—contrary the recent claim that Alasdair MacIntyre is “anti-integralist”—MacIntyre’s thought, if not itself integralist, at least points in that direction. Provocative as always, they offer an excellent exposition of MacIntyre’s own thought and respond to certain, perhaps simplistic, readings of his works.

Regardless of where MacIntyre himself is ultimately placed, MacIntyre’s thought has undeniable value for integralist thinkers for two chief reasons. First, although the relation of church and state is historically the defining feature of integralism, no less defining is integralism’s insistence on the primacy of the common good. Today, indeed, the few thinkers who accept any notion of the common good tend to view it as something instrumental and private. Not so Alasdair MacIntyre. Second, MacIntyre correctly rejects the confusion of nature and grace that was so prominent in 20th century Theology. A correct understanding of this distinction is, as Pater Edmund has argued, vital to a proper account of an integralist dyarchy.

To these two may be added a third reason his thought is a useful admonition (or perhaps corrective in some cases) for integralists: MacIntyre warns that we must be careful not to replace one leviathan with another. MacIntyre’s sees that justice exists in multiple coordinate but separate spheres, each with its own proper end. An integralist state that subsumed family and subsidiarity would not be a just order but yet another tyranny. ——The Editors.

The philosophical work of Alasdair MacIntyre is a touchstone for post-liberal political theory, especially in the English-speaking world, and especially for Christians. Most prominently, his work inspires the Benedict Option movement, although he has repudiated this development. There has been less of a concerted effort to link MacIntyre to the revival of Catholic integralism. Nevertheless, some affinities are obvious: MacIntyre is a Thomist, a critic of the liberal separation of politics from concern with a shared conception of human ends.[1]

Continue reading “Integralism, MacIntyre, and Final Ends: Towards a Secular Account of Christian Politics”

Posted on

The Josias Podcast, Episode VIII: Basic Concepts – Virtue

A freewheeling discussion in which our editors have a very TAC moment  discussing the connection of the music of the spheres and the virtues, and then set out to discuss Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics, but somehow talk more about Plato. Important topics are covered such as, how much virtue does it take to refrain from throwing a baby from an upper-story window? Is there any sense in which Bertrand Russell has virtue? All this, and so much more!

The editors had so much fun that the time slipped by without even getting to the supernatural virtues or the post-enlightenment revolt against virtue.

Bibliography

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com. We’d love the feedback.

Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

P.S. Podcast production is not free—if you would like to help us out or show your support for The Josias, we now have a Patreon page where you can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be awesome. Click here for more.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Blubrry | Email | RSS

Posted on

Liberalism’s Fear

By Adrian Vermeule

In honor of Prof. Ryszard Legutko and his book, The Demon in Democracy,  the Consul-General of Poland, Maciej Golubiewski, convened an event on May 9, 2018, to address the following topic: “Democratic Reformers or Illiberal Backsliders? Poland and the challenges of sovereign politics in the West.” Professor Vermeule has kindly agreed to allow us to publish the illuminating remarks that he delivered at this event. One need not think democracy is the best form of government to realize that it is not, in and of itself, liberal. Liberalism, however, needs democracy, or more precisely it needs the “periodic ceremony” of democracy.
–The Editors

I want to thank the Consul-General for arranging this event. It’s always a pleasure to have a chance to honor Prof. Legutko, whose book helped to awaken so many of us from our modernist slumbers, into the light of a new dogmatism.

The title of the panel is “Democratic Reformers or Illiberal Backsliders?” And my answer is “Both.” Let me start with a puzzle. I know, or know of, a number of U.S. and U.K. academics, journalists, and other intelligentsia who spend their careers in a state that can only be described as professional hysteria, particularly directed at Poland, Hungary, and Brexit. In this state of hysteria, the meanings of words are redefined. The Polish election, although free and fair, represents a threat to “democracy”; the passage of legislation according to constitutional procedures, such as the Polish parliamentary law on the judiciary, becomes a threat to the “rule of law”; and so forth. What is the root cause of this extraordinary reaction?

Continue reading “Liberalism’s Fear”

Posted on

Politics and the Church

by Scott Hahn

The following is an excerpt from Scott Hahn’s new book  The First Society. Posted here with the kind permission of the author.

The Western world has spent much of the last few centuries trying to find or form a replacement for the unifying catholicity of the Catholic Church. But the project has always been doomed to failure. No purely human idea or institution can replace the sacramental solidarity of the Church. Continue reading “Politics and the Church”

Posted on

Hard Liberalism, Soft Liberalism, and the American Founding

by Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist

1. Hard Liberalism: Patrick Deneen on Thomas Hobbes

In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen identifies a double principle underlying the liberal conception of liberty: 1) an anthropological individualism and a voluntarist understanding of choice, and 2) a view of human beings as separate from and opposed to nature.[1] The two principles are intimately connected. Both are bound up with the Enlightenment’s rejection of the objectivity of the good, expressed with unrivalled clarity by the protoliberal Hobbes: “Good, and Evill, are names that signifie our Appetites, and Aversions.”[2] Choice is therefore “voluntarist” in the sense that it is not elicited by the objective goodness of things, but is rather the arbitrary fixing of the will on some object. Such an anthropology is individualistic, since there is no common end uniting different human beings. Human life, under this conception, is indeed radically irrational: there is no final goal, and therefore no reason to do one thing rather than another: Continue reading “Hard Liberalism, Soft Liberalism, and the American Founding”

Posted on

The Josias Podcast, Episode VII: Atonement and Salvation

That Christ died for our sins is at the heart of of the Christian faith: “For I delivered unto you first of all, which I also received: how that Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures” (1 Cor 15:3). But what does it mean that He died for our sins? How did Christ’s death save and redeem us? Prof. Michael Waldstein and Professor Timothy Kelly join the editors to contemplate the mysteries of salvation.

The theme of today’s episode is closely linked to our project at The Josias, as we write in our About page, “A truly Catholic account of politics cannot be understood except with reference to the whole perennial wisdom of practical and speculative philosophy, and to the integral tradition of Sacred Theology.” Today we contemplate the “vertiginous heights” of Sacred Theology.

Bibliography

If you have questions or comments, please send them to editors(at)thejosias.com. We’d love the feedback.

P.S. Podcast production is not free—if you would like to help us out or show your support for The Josias, we now have a Patreon page where you can set up a one-time or recurring donation in any amount. Even $1 a month would be awesome. Click here for more.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | Blubrry | Email | RSS

Posted on

Christianity, Just War, and Just Punishment

by Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

Can Christians take part in war? The Christian life is participation in the life of Christ. Christ gives us this participation through the free gift of grace. He is both the sanctifier, the divine workman, who works grace within us, and the plan, the exemplar cause and model, according to which He conforms us in His work of sanctification. He conforms us to His Eternal Sonship, by giving us the beginning, the inchoatio, of eternal life through the infused virtues. And He also conforms us to the works and virtues of His earthly life. He conforms us especially to His patience and mildness under suffering. He was led like a lamb to the slaughter and opened not His mouth. He Himself lived the precepts that He gives in the Sermon on the Mount; He turned the other cheek and suffered injustice without defending Himself. And we are called to do the same: Continue reading “Christianity, Just War, and Just Punishment”