Mark and I are pleased to announce the sixth session of our CLR Reading Society, an opportunity open to all St. John’s Law Students to discuss works of fiction and non-fiction raising law and religion themes.

Our choice for this gathering is somewhat unusual, as it combines a work of science-fiction/fantasy and another of moral philosophy: the first story in Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s A Canticle for Leibowitz and selected chapters of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. A Canticle concerns a world ravaged by a series of environmental disasters, in which human knowledge and scientific achievement have not only been destroyed but are also blamed for the devastation by the Know-Nothing political power that survives. An order of obscure monks in the desert wasteland attempts to preserve and revive knowledge, but all its members have to go on are fragments of the past, disconnected from the theoretical structures of meaning and understanding within which they made sense. Miller’s tale about what recovery of learning in the ruins of such a civilization would look like was taken up by MacIntyre in After Virtue as the opening chapter’s inspiration for reflecting on the nature of moral and political disagreement today.

St. John’s Law students interested in the CLR Reading Society should contact Professor DeGirolami, marc.degirolami@stjohns.edu, or Professor Movsesian, movsesim@stjohns.edu. Books (both of them, for this session) are provided for free to students and all are welcome. We will meet on the evening of Tuesday, April 11, to discuss these works, so students who would like to join us and require books should write to us as soon as possible. Further details are forthcoming.