Recent Additions

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”

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”

by Adrian Vermeule

A few analytic notes on ralliement — a notion stemming originally from Leo XIII’s 1892 encyclical Au Milieu des Sollicitudes, which urged French Catholics to rally to the Third French Republic in order to transform it from within. The idea has become more general, suggesting that Catholics would do well to rally to and work within a liberal-democratic political order. I have two conceptual distinctions to sketch, merely in the hope of clarifying the terms of the conversation. Continue reading “Ralliement: Two Distinctions”

by Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

On recent uses of the term “integralism”

In July of last year, Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa published an  essay in La Civiltà Cattolica criticizing the cooperation of conservative Evangelicals and Catholics in American politics. Among conservative American  Christians, Spadaro and Figueroa argue, religion ceases to be the force for reconciliation and peace that it ought to be, and becomes an instrument of division, forcing a sectarian agenda on society by main force. One of the many things that puzzled readers in the essay was the use of the term “integralism” as a Catholic analogue to Evangelical “fundamentalism.” Integralism is not a term that is used much in an American context. Integralism in the strict sense in which we use it at The Josias, has never played much of a role in American political life, which has always been committed to the Enlightenment ideal of religious liberty. Spadaro and Figueroa never explain very clearly what they mean by “integralism.” A blog-post from September by Keith Michael Estrada, however, points us to an author who does give a very detailed account of integralism that in some ways fits the usage of Spadaro and Figueroa: Hans Urs von Balthasar. Continue reading “Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Critique of Integralism”