We’ve just posted the annual Mattone Center Year-End Review for 2024-2025. Among the highlights: a new YouTube channel and animated video series on landmark cases in religious freedom; more Legal Spirits podcasts, the first ever Center Directors Summit, and many more. You can read all about them at the link. Thanks to all our supporters!
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.
I’m a little late getting to this, but a few months ago, the Australian Journal of Law and Religion and Emory’s Canopy Forum jointly published a valuable symposium on the rise of the Nones, with a lead article by Jeremy Patrick (University of South Queensland) that responds to some of my writings on the topic. Jeremy and I come to different judgments about whether Nones should qualify as a religion for legal purposes. Jeremy is persuaded they should; I am skeptical. But it’s always nice to receive careful criticism of one’s work, and I’m grateful to Jeremy and to the symposium’s organizers. You can read Jeremy’s essay, titled “A Brief Rejoinder to Movsesian on ‘The New Thoreaus,'” here.
And, continuing the wedding vendor theme from the last post, my draft paper on the wedding vendor cases, “Status, Conduct, Belief, and Message,” is now available for downloading on the SSRN site. The paper will appear in a forthcoming symposium edition of the Chicago-Kent Law Review. Comments welcome! Here’s the abstract:
This essay explores the constitutional and cultural tensions underlying the “wedding vendor cases,” in which small business owners decline from religious conviction to provide services for same-sex weddings. Litigants often invoke conceptual distinctions among status, conduct, belief, and message, but these distinctions are too indeterminate to resolve the cases in a principled way. The ultimate question is whether LGBT rights should override religious and expressive freedoms in the marketplace. In two recent wedding vendor cases, Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission and 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, the Court has avoided addressing this fundamental question directly. Instead, the Court has issued narrow rulings based on specific facts and party stipulations, thereby limiting the broader implications of its decisions. While this strategy sacrifices doctrinal clarity and leaves lower courts grappling with uncertainty, it also helps avoid exacerbating cultural polarization on an intensely divisive issue. In the current political climate, incremental case-by-case adjudication—a sort of “passive virtues” approach—may represent a prudent judicial strategy, even if it leaves both sides of the cultural divide dissatisfied.
I was delighted to join my friend and former colleague, Marc DeGirolami, and my friend and Marc’s current colleague, Kevin Walsh, as a guest last week on their excellent podcast, Sub Deo. We discussed the Supreme Court’s recent wedding vendor cases, Masterpiece Cakeshop and 303 Creative. I have a draft on the subject on the SSRN site and thought I’d heard everything about the cases, but Marc and Kevin came up with new and profound questions for me to think about. It was great fun and I thank Marc and Kevin for the opportunity to kick around some ideas. The link is here:
A great benefit of my sabbatical several years ago at Princeton’s James Madison Program was having an office next door to Professor John Wilsey. I always enjoyed and learned a great deal from our hallway conversations. Now lots of other people can benefit, too, since John, a church historian at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is out with a new book, Religious Freedom: A Conservative Primer (Eerdmans). Looks very interesting. Here’s the publisher’s description:
In this timely book, historian John D. Wilsey addresses urgent questions about religious freedom in America. How have conservatives historically understood the meaning of religious freedom? How do Americans who identify as conservative now think about religious freedom in this era? What are the differences between the historical and contemporary views, and how do those differences shape fights about religious freedom today?
Writing for fellow Americans concerned about threats to religious liberty, Wilsey draws on US history to explain why rather than weaponizing religious freedom in the context of the culture wars, today’s conservatives need to rally around religious freedom to promote peace between church and state. With wisdom and acuity, Wilsey charts a path forward for thinking about and maintaining a uniquely American tradition: the harmony between liberty and religion that each generation has received as an inheritance from the generations preceding theirs.
I’ve enjoyed Zondervan’s “Critical Points” series, which publishes brief and accessible introductions to contested questions in Christian thought. Here is a new volume in the series, Natural Law: Five Views, edited by Ryan Anderson and Andrew Walker. The book brings together scholars of natural law from the Protestant and Catholic traditions, which seem to be working in parallel. Here’s the publisher’s description:
The story of “natural law” – the idea that God has written a law on the human heart so that ethical norms derive from human nature – in twentieth-century Protestant ethics is one of rejection and resurgence. For half a century, luminaries like Karl Barth, Carl F. H. Henry, and Cornelius Van Til cast a shadow over natural law moral reflection because of its putative link to natural theology, autonomous reason, associations with Catholic theology, and ethical witness devoid of special revelation. However, over the past twenty years, Protestant theologians have renewed their interest in the subject, often animated by debates on Christian involvement in the public arena and on matters of life, death, and gender and sexuality. Much of this engagement has happened within Reformed circles and has largely been conducted without reference to Roman Catholic construals of the natural law. Conversely, Catholic developments in natural-law thinking have paid little attention to the surge of interest on the Protestant side. As a result, Protestant and Catholic natural proponents – and even those skeptical of the natural law – are not in conversation with one another.
The lack of dialog between the various schools of natural law has left a historic tradition within Christian moral thought underdeveloped in contemporary Protestant theology. By bringing together a variety of perspectives in much-needed conversation, this book helps readers to understand the various construals of natural law within the broader strands of Christian and classical traditions and clarifies its unique importance for Christian moral witness in a secular culture.
A video of our panel this month in the Catholic Charter School case, Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond, set for argument at SCOTUS in a couple of weeks, is now available on the Mattone Center’s YouTube channel. Thanks again for Professors Michael Helfand (Pepperdine) and Michael Moreland (Villanova) for participating. Link is below:
The panel on religious exemptions from the Chicago-Kent Law Review symposium in which I participated with Stephanie Barclay and Laura Underkuffler is now available on YouTube. Thanks again to the organizers for inviting me. The symposium will appear in print later this year. Meanwhile, keep an eye out for the appearance of the Justice Souter bobblehead at 29:05!