Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

On Legal Conservatism

Here is a new book that traces the history of American legal conservatism before its “arrival” in the 1980s. I’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks, but I look forward to reading this worthwhile new book: Conservatives and the Constitution: Imagining Constitutional Restoration in the Heyday of American Liberalism (Cambridge University Press), by Ken I. Kersch.

“Since the 1980s, a ritualized opposition in legal thought between a conservative ‘originalism’ and a liberal ‘living constitutionalism’ has obscured the aggressively contested tradition committed to, and mobilization of arguments for, constitutional restoration and redemption within the broader postwar American conservative movement. Conservatives and the Constitution is the first history of the political and intellectual trajectory of this foundational tradition and mobilization. By looking at the deep stories told either by identity groups or about what conservatives took to be flashpoint topics in the postwar period, Ken I. Kersch seeks to capture the developmental and integrative nature of postwar constitutional conservatism, challenging conservatives and liberals alike to more clearly see and understand both themselves and their presumed political and constitutional opposition. Conservatives and the Constitution makes a unique contribution to our understanding of modern American conservatism, and to the constitutional thought that has, in critical ways, informed and defined it.”

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Anti-Populism

Yesterday we posted a new book sympathetic to the new populism in American politics. Today, we post an unsympathetic new book that sees something unjustified and illegitimately entitled about the new populism, ascribing its rise to certain lacunae in progressive politics. The book is The New Populism: Democracy Stares into the Abyss (Penguin Random House), by Marco Revelli, an Italian academic and writer for the self-described communist paper, Il Manifesto.

“The word ‘populism’ has come to cover all manner of sins. Yet despite the prevalence of its use, it is often difficult to understand what connects its various supposed expressions. From Syriza to Trump and from Podemos to Brexit, the electoral earthquakes of recent years have often been grouped under this term. But what actually defines ‘populism’? Is it an ideology, a form of organisation, or a mentality? 

Marco Revelli seeks to answer this question by getting to grips with the historical dynamics of so-called ‘populist’ movements. While in the early days of democracy, populism sought to represent classes and social layers who asserted their political role for the first time, in today’s post-democratic climate, it instead expresses the grievances of those who had until recently felt that they were included.

Having lost their power, the disinherited embrace not a political alternative to -isms like liberalism or socialism, but a populist mood of discontent. The new populism is the ‘formless form’ that protest and grievance assume in the era of financialisation, in the era where the atomised masses lack voice or organisation. For Revelli, this new populism [is] the child of an age in which the Left has been hollowed out and lost its capacity to offer an alternative.”

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Populist-Traditionalism in American Politics

Several new books have been documenting a new wave of politics in America: populist, low-middle class, traditionalist, “back row,” and other similar descriptions–a politics that blends together different features of the conventional left-right spectrum. Religious freedom seems to be part of the political equation for those who subscribe to it. Here is another book in this genre: The New American Revolution: The Making of a Populist Movement (Simon & Schuster), by Kayleigh McEnany.

“Kayleigh McEnany spent months traveling throughout the United States, conducting interviews with citizens whose powerful and moving stories were forgotten or intentionally ignored by our leaders. Through candid, one-on-one conversations, they discussed their deeply personal stories and the issues that are most important to them, such as illegal immigration, safety from terrorist attacks, and religious freedom.

The New American Revolution chronicles both the losses of these grassroots voters, as well as their ultimate victory in November 2016. Kayleigh also includes interviews with key figures within President Trump’s administration—including Ivanka Trump, Secretary Ben Carson, Jared Kushner, and many more—and their experiences on the road leading up to President Trump’s historic win. Kayleigh’s journey takes her from a family cabin in Ohio to the empty factories in Flint, Michigan, from sunny Florida to a Texas BBQ joint—and, of course, ends up at the White House.

The collective grievance of the American electorate reveals a deep divide between leaders and citizens. During a time of stark political division, Kayleigh discovers a personal unity and common thread of humanity that binds us nevertheless. Through faith in God and unimaginable strength, these forgotten men and women have overcome, even when their leaders turned their heads. An insightful book about the triumph of this powerful movement, The New American Revolution is a potent testament to the importance of their message.”

Posted on by Daniel Vitagliano

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

The Christian Cultural Age

A new book by the popular historian Tom Holland documents the depth of the cultural transformations brought on by Christianity, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World (Basic Books).

“Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable. It was this that rendered it so suitable a punishment for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion-an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus-had been a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history.

Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. Our morals and ethics are not universal. Instead, they are the fruits of a very distinctive civilization. Concepts such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in a Christian seedbed. From Babylon to the Beatles, Saint Michael to #MeToo, Dominion tells the story of how Christianity transformed the world.”

Posted on by amnania

Around the Web

Here are some important law-and-religion news stories from around the web:

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

The New Medievalism

In the 1990s, many scholars in international law and politics championed a “new medievalism,” an order of multiple, overlapping political units to challenge the traditional nation-state. The new medievalism in world politics was always an exaggeration, and it certainly seems so today. Just consider what’s happening in Europe. But medievalism may have greater purchase in other aspects of contemporary life. Remi Brague (University of Paris – emeritus), who participated in one of our early Tradition Project meetings, this month releases a new book arguing for a reevaluation of medieval thought, Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age. It’s Brague’s first book in English and looks quite interesting. Here’s the description from the publisher, the Notre Dame Press:

In his first book composed in English, Rémi Brague maintains that there is a fundamental problem with modernity: we no longer consider the created world and humanity as intrinsically valuable. Curing Mad Truths, based on a number of Brague’s lectures to English-speaking audiences, explores the idea that humanity must return to the Middle Ages. Not the Middle Ages of purported backwardness and barbarism, but rather a Middle Ages that understood creation—including human beings—as the product of an intelligent and benevolent God. The positive developments that have come about due to the modern project, be they health, knowledge, freedom, or peace, are not grounded in a rational project because human existence itself is no longer the good that it once was. Brague turns to our intellectual forebears of the medieval world to present a reasoned argument as to why humanity and civilizations are goods worth promoting and preserving.

Curing Mad Truths will be of interest to a learned audience of philosophers, historians, and medievalists.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

An Orthodox Reading of Romans

“Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God.” These words open the thirteenth chapter of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, one of the earliest Christian reflections on the proper relation of church and state. Last fall, St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press released a new commentary on Romans, Romans: An Orthodox Commentary, by Patrick Henry Reardon, senior editor at Touchstone Magazine and an Orthodox priest. Here’s the publisher’s description:

God seems to have chosen the Apostle Paul to demonstrate—arguably more than in any other person in Christian history—how the life “in Christ” arrives at insight through experience. If this is the case of Paul more than any other person in Christian history, the reason may be simply that Paul’s words are the Word of God. His epistles stand forever as the divinely chosen model of how the Christian arrives at truth through experience. Unlike so many theologians of later times, Paul did not inherit a Christian worldview. His vocation, rather, was to create such a thing from his own experience. For this reason, Paul’s thought ever remains the Church’s cutting blade, the biting edge of her apologetics and evangelism.

To affirm, as everyone does, that Romans is unique in the Pauline corpus should serve to indicate the necessity of caution in using it as a guide to the other epistles. But in recent centuries the Christological and ecclesiological core of Paul’s thought has been displaced by a preoccupation with religious and moral psychology; all the epistles were interpreted through a Romans lens. This is a false turn, which runs the risk of reducing salvation itself to a sub-division of religious anthropology. To misinterpret Paul is to misunderstand the Gospel itself. Fr Patrick Henry Reardon guards against this error and offers a fuller and more balanced picture of the Letter to the Romans, reading it in the context of the entire Pauline corpus and relying upon the best ancient sources, the Apostle’s earliest disciples and defenders, those Christians in the churches that Paul had a hand in founding. These churches, closely associated with the composition and copying of the epistles rightly enjoyed a recognized authority in the determination of early Christian doctrine.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

An Eastern Aquinas?

Yesterday, we posted a new book from Baylor’s Frank Beckwith on the relevance of Aquinas for Evangelical Christians. Here’s another book out this month from Catholic University Press, Thomas Aquinas and the Greek Fathers, a collection of essays on Aquinas’s debt to the Greek Church Fathers. The editors are Michael Dauphinais (Ave Maria), Andrew Hofer ( Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception), and Roger Nutt (Ave Maria). The publisher’s description follows.

Scholars have often been quick to acknowledge Thomas Aquinas’s distinctive retrieval of Aristotle’s Greek philosophical heritage. Often lagging, however, has been a proper appreciation of both his originality and indebtedness in appropriating the great theological insights of the Greek Fathers of the Church. In a similar way to his integration of the Aristotelian philosophical corpus, Aquinas successfully interwove the often newly received and translated Greek patristic sources into a thirteenth-century theological framework, one dominated by the Latin Fathers. His use of the Greek Fathers definitively shaped his exposition of sacra doctrina in the fundamental areas of God and creation, Trinitarian theology, the moral life, and Christ and the Sacraments.

For the sake of filling this lacuna and of piquing scholarly interest in Aquinas’s relation to the Fathers of the Christian East, the Aquinas Center for Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University and the Thomistic Institute of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at the Dominican House of Studies co-sponsored an international gathering of scholars that took place at Ave Maria University under the title Thomas Aquinas and the Greek Fathers. Sensitive to the commonalities and the differences between Aquinas and the Greek Fathers, the essays in this volume have sprung from the theme of this conference and offer a harvest of some of the conference’s fruits. At long last, scholars have a rich volume of diverse, penetrating essays that both underscore Aquinas’s unique standing among the Latin scholastics in relationship to the Greek Fathers and point the way toward avenues of further study.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A Protestant Aquinas?

The importance of Thomism for Catholic legal theory goes without saying. This week, we highlight two new books that explore the relevance of Aquinas for other Christian communions. In a book to be released by Baylor University Press next month, Never Doubt Thomas: The Catholic Aquinas as Evangelical and Protestant, our friend Frank Beckwith (Baylor) argues that Aquinas is an important resource for Evangelicals. Here’s the description of the book from the publisher’s website:

Theologian, philosopher, teacher. There are few religious figures more Catholic than Saint Thomas Aquinas, a man credited with helping to shape Catholicism of the second millennium. In Never Doubt Thomas, Francis J. Beckwith employs his own spiritual journey from Catholicism to Evangelicalism and then back to Catholicism to reveal the signal importance of Aquinas not only for Catholics but also for Protestants.

Beckwith begins by outlining Aquinas’ history and philosophy, noting misconceptions and inaccurate caricatures of Thomist traditions. He explores the legitimacy of a “Protestant” Aquinas by examining Aquinas’ views on natural law and natural theology in light of several Protestant critiques. Not only did Aquinas’ presentation of natural law assume some of the very inadequacies Protestant critics have leveled against it, Aquinas did not, as is often supposed, believe that one must first prove God’s existence through human reasoning before having faith in God. Rather, Aquinas held that one may know God through reason and employ it to understand more fully the truths of faith. Beckwith also uses Aquinas’ preambles of faith—what a person can know about God before fully believing in Him—to argue for a pluralist Aquinas, explaining how followers of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam can all worship the same God, yet adhere to different faiths. 

Beckwith turns to Aquinas’ doctrine of creation to question theories of Intelligent Design, before, finally, coming to the heart of the matter: in what sense can Aquinas be considered an Evangelical? Aquinas’ views on justification are often depicted by some Evangelicals as discontinuous with those articulated in the Council of Trent. Beckwith counters this assessment, revealing not only that Aquinas’ doctrine fully aligns with the tenets laid out by the Council, but also that this doctrine is more Evangelical than critics care to admit.

Beckwith’s careful reading makes it hard to doubt that Thomas Aquinas is a theologian, philosopher, and teacher for the universal church—Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical.