May 1, 2025 - LAW AND RELIGION FORUM

This is a bit outside my wheelhouse, but I did want to note that next month Notre Dame Press will release an English translation of French scholar Pierre Manent’s recent book, Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition. Many observers have noted an uptick in Christianity in France (and the US), especially among young men. How much of this is a genuine spiritual movement and how much a cultural “Team Christianity” isn’t yet clear, and of course some would deny there is a difference between the two, anyway. Whatever explains the uptick, it’s hard to imagine a French Christianity without Pascal–which makes the Manent book important reading for this moment. The publisher’s description follows:

Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference is the first English translation of Pierre Manent’s penetrating engagement with the seventeenth century polymath and apologist for the Christian faith, Blaise Pascal.

Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was the first Christian apologist to address modern human beings on their own terms and present a defense of the Christian religion that still resonates today. A major publishing and intellectual event in France when it first appeared in 2022, Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference is Pierre Manent’s investigation of Pascal’s exploration of Christianity in the wake of a sharp atheistic turn at the dawn of the modern state and modern science. Comprehensive in scope and profound in treatment, this engagement with all of Pascal’s writings, including his famous Pensées, appeals to the reader’s head and heart. Manent emphasizes the joy that comes from engaging the truth of faith, and he argues that we are diminished by forgetting the unique and distinctive contributions of Christianity.

More than brilliant exegesis, Manent enlists Pascal in a much greater endeavor: to make what he calls “the Christian proposition” concerning God and man intelligible to Europeans who have made it their business to ignore the religion that founded Europe and the larger Western world.

Princeton’s Robert George is one of the world’s leading scholars of natural law. This is not a subject that keeps one out of controversy nowadays, but George has a unique ability to engage the public debate thoughtfully from a conservative perspective while retaining the respect of interlocutors on the other side. This summer, Encounter Books will release a new collection of essays from him on current issues, Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth: Law and Morality in Our Cultural Moment. Definitely worth reading. Here is the publisher’s description:

In Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth acclaimed political philosopher and legal scholar Robert P. George tackles some of the most vexing issues dividing Americans today. He argues that the “Age of Faith” of the Medieval period and the “Age of Reason” of the European Enlightenments have been followed by a modern “Age of Feeling,” in which people derive their beliefs not from faith or reason — or faith and reason — but from emotion, which becomes the central source of truth. And so, many have embraced a fierce moral absolutism on the basis of beliefs that are the products of nothing more than subjective inclinations and experiences.

This collection of essays challenges the “Age of Feeling” by appealing to reason in the pursuit of sound moral understanding on crucial and contentious topics including human dignity, the definition of marriage, philosophy of law, constitutional law, the nature of civil liberties, free markets, and others.

Robert George has taught generations of students at Princeton University and Harvard Law School, and he has long proclaimed that a teacher’s sacred mission is to form his students to be determined truth seekers and courageous truth speakers. In Seeking Truth and Speaking Truth he shows us how.