Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

On the Intellectual and Moral Virtues

Dean John Garvey, longtime President of Catholic University of America as well as a noted First Amendment scholar, is retiring this year from his position at CUA. He has this new book, The Virtues (Catholic University of America Press), collecting essays and speeches over the years that reflect on the practical and intellectual virtues. Something particularly interesting is Garvey’s Aristotelian emphasis on habit, and the importance of habituation to the virtues.

An ancient question asks what role moral formation ought to play in education. It leads to such questions as, do intellectual and moral formation belong together? Is it possible to form the mind and neglect the heart? Is it wise? These perennial questions take on new significance today, when education — especially, higher education — has become a defining feature in the lives of young people.

Throughout his more than 40 years in academia, John Garvey has reflected on the relationship between intellectual and moral formation, especially in Catholic higher education. For 12 years as the President of The Catholic University of America, he made the cultivation of moral virtue a central theme on campus, highlighting its significance across all aspects of University culture, from University policy to campus architecture.

During his two decades of presiding at commencement exercises, first as Dean of Boston College Law School and then as President of The Catholic University of America, Garvey made a single virtue the centerpiece of his remarks each year. The Virtues is the fruit of those addresses. More reflective than analytical, its purpose is to invite conversation about what it means to live well.

Following Catholic tradition, The Virtues places the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love at the center of the moral life, and the cardinal virtues — justice, temperance, fortitude, and prudence — with them. Alongside these major virtues, Garvey considers a collection of “little virtues,” habits that assist and accompany us in small but important ways on the path to goodness.

Though he treats each virtue individually, a common thread unites his reflections. “The intellectual life depends on the moral life,” Garvey writes. “Without virtue we cannot sustain the practices necessary for advanced learning. In fact, without virtue, it’s hard to see what the purpose of the university is. Learning begins with love (for the truth). If we don’t have that, it’s hard to know why we would bother with education at all.” The Virtues invites its readers, especially students, to appreciate that the cultivation of virtue is indispensable to success, academic or otherwise, and more importantly, essential to their ultimate aim, a life well lived.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New Biography of Jefferson

The figure of Thomas Jefferson looms large in American law and religion. A man of immense public achievement and great personal failings, at once candid and disingenuous, familiar and remote, his approach to church and state was influential and controversial in his own time and in ours–especially at the Supreme Court, which has occasionally treated Jefferson’s separationism as the correct theory of the Establishment Clause. A new biography from Yale, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh, focuses on Jefferson’s spiritual inner life. The author is historian Thomas Kidd (Baylor). Here’s the publisher’s description:

Thomas Jefferson was arguably the most brilliant and inspiring political writer in American history. But the ethical realities of his personal life and political career did not live up to his soaring rhetoric. Indeed, three tensions defined Jefferson’s moral life: democracy versus slavery, republican virtue versus dissolute consumption, and veneration for Jesus versus skepticism about Christianity.

In this book Thomas S. Kidd tells the story of Jefferson’s ethical life through the lens of these tensions, including an unapologetic focus on the issue where Jefferson’s idealistic philosophy and lived reality clashed most obviously: his sexual relationship with his enslaved woman Sally Hemings. In doing so, he offers a unique perspective on one of American history’s most studied figures.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Modernity’s Religious Inheritance

From the eminent philosopher, Michael Rosen, comes this fascinating looking intellectual history of religion’s profound and enduring influence on modernity–focusing especially on the 18th and 19th centuries, post-Kantian German Idealism, and the idea of “historical immortality.” The book is The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History (Harvard UP 2022).

Once in the West, our lives were bounded by religion. Then we were guided out of the darkness of faith, we are often told, by the cold light of science and reason. To be modern was to reject the religious for the secular and rational. In a bold retelling of philosophical history, Michael Rosen explains the limits of this story, showing that many modern and apparently secular ways of seeing the world were in fact profoundly shaped by religion.

The key thinkers, Rosen argues, were the German Idealists, as they sought to reconcile reason and religion. It was central to Kant’s philosophy that, if God is both just and assigns us to heaven or hell for eternity, we must know what is required of us and be able to choose freely. In trying to live moral lives, Kant argued, we are engaged in a collective enterprise as members of a “Church invisible” working together to achieve justice in history. As later Idealists moved away from Kant’s ideas about personal immortality, this idea of “historical immortality” took center stage. Through social projects that outlive us we maintain a kind of presence after death. Conceptions of historical immortality moved not just into the universalistic ideologies of liberalism and revolutionary socialism but into nationalist and racist doctrines that opposed them. But how, after global wars and genocide, can we retain faith in any conception of shared moral progress and, if not, what is to become of the idea of historical immortality? That is our present predicament.

A seamless blend of philosophy and intellectual history, The Shadow of God is a profound exploration of secular modernity’s theistic inheritance.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment (New Edition)

Last month, Oxford released a new, fifth edition of Religion and the American Constitutional Experiment. Our friend Rick Garnett (Notre Dame) joins our friends John Witte (Emory) and Joel Nichols (St. Thomas) on this edition, which is current through 2021 and covers the COVID-19 epidemic, among other recent developments. Here’s the publisher’s description:

This accessible and authoritative introduction tells the American story of religious liberty from its colonial beginnings to the latest Supreme Court cases. The authors analyze closely the formation of the First Amendment religion clauses and describe the unique and enduring principles of the American experiment in religious freedom – liberty of conscience, free exercise of religion, religious equality, religious pluralism, separation of church and state, and no establishment of religion. Successive chapters map all of the 240+ Supreme Court cases on religious freedom – covering the free exercise of religion; the roles of government and religion in education; the place of religion in public life; and the interaction of religious organizations and the state. The concluding reflections argue that protecting religious freedom is critical for democratic order and constitutional rule of law, even if it needs judicious balancing with other fundamental rights and state interests.

Clear, comprehensive, multidisciplinary, and balanced, this classic volume is an ideal classroom text. This new 5th edition addresses fully the new hot-button issues and cases on religious freedom versus sexual liberty; religious worship in the time of COVID; freedom of conscience and exemption claims; state aid to religion; religious monuments and ceremonies in public life; and the rights and limits of religious groups.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Religious Freedom at the Founding

Here’s a new book right in the heartland of our projects at the Center by longtime Center friend and contributor Professor Vincent Phillip Muñoz, Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meaning of the First Amendment Religion Clauses (Chicago Press forthcoming). I had the pleasure of reading a good chunk of this manuscript, and it is excellent on both the historical and theoretical sides of things. The work is deeply informed by Phillip’s prior work on the idea of natural rights at the founding and of their proper scope. It is probably fair to say that the scope of natural rights on Phillip’s account, at least for some of the significant rights we discuss today, is generally (not always) significantly narrower than what we tend to believe today. Tough and chewy, but small and digestible, might be a possible description (the blurb below says “minimalist”). That view of natural rights certainly has a powerful impact on the claims in this worthwhile book.

The Founders understood religious liberty to be an inalienable natural right. Vincent Phillip Muñoz explains what this means for church-state constitutional law, uncovering what we can and cannot determine about the original meanings of the First Amendment’s Religion Clauses and constructing a natural rights jurisprudence of religious liberty.  

Drawing on early state constitutions, declarations of religious freedom, Founding-era debates, and the First Amendment’s drafting record, Muñoz demonstrates that adherence to the Founders’ political philosophy would lead neither to consistently conservative nor consistently liberal results. Rather, adopting the Founders’ understanding would lead to a minimalist church-state jurisprudence that, in most cases, would return authority from the judiciary to the American people. Thorough and convincing, Religious Liberty and the American Founding is key reading for those seeking to understand the Founders’ political philosophy of religious freedom and the First Amendment Religion Clauses.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

A New History of the Transcendentalists

The 19th century Transcendentalists cast a long shadow in American religious culture. Their insistence that the individual is the sole measure of religious truth has greatly affected our law as well, notwithstanding Chief Justice Burger’s famous dismissal of Henry David Thoreau in Wisconsin v. Yoder. And you might say Transcendentalism is having a moment today, with the rise of the Nones, a movement that represents a mainstreaming of many ideas bruited about in Concord parlors in the 1830s and 40s.

A new history from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, The Transcendentalists and their World, by Robert Gross (University of Connecticut) situates the Transcendentalists in their hometown, showing the ways that their daily interactions influenced their ideas. Looks very interesting. Here is the publisher’s description:

In the year of the nation’s bicentennial, Robert A. Gross published The Minutemen and Their World, a paradigm-shaping study of Concord, Massachusetts, during the American Revolution. It won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and became a perennial bestseller. Forty years later, in this highly anticipated work, Gross returns to Concord and explores the meaning of an equally crucial moment in the American story: the rise of Transcendentalism.

The Transcendentalists and Their World offers a fresh view of the thinkers whose outsize impact on philosophy and literature would spread from tiny Concord to all corners of the earth. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called this New England town home, and Thoreau drew on its life extensively in his classic Walden. But Concord from the 1820s through the 1840s was no pastoral place fit for poets and philosophers.

The Transcendentalists and their neighbors lived through a transformative epoch of American life. A place of two thousand–plus souls in the antebellum era, Concord was a community in ferment, whose small, ordered society founded by Puritans and defended by Minutemen was dramatically unsettled through the expansive forces of capitalism and democracy and tightly integrated into the wider world. These changes challenged a world of inherited institutions and involuntary associations with a new premium on autonomy and choice. They exposed people to cosmopolitan currents of thought and endowed them with unparalleled opportunities. They fostered uncertainties, raised new hopes, stirred dreams of perfection, and created an audience for new ideas of individual freedom and democratic equality deeply resonant today.

The Transcendentalists and Their World is both an intimate journey into the life of a community and a searching cultural study of major American writers as they plumbed the depths of the universe for spiritual truths and surveyed the rapidly changing contours of their own neighborhoods. It shows us familiar figures in American literature alongside their neighbors at every level of the social order, and it reveals how this common life in Concord entered powerfully into their works. No American community of the nineteenth century has been recovered so richly and with so acute an awareness of its place in the larger American story.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami

Free Speech Today as a “Problem” for “Democracy”

Here’s an interesting collection of essays, Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of Our Democracy (OUP forthcoming), edited by Columbia President Lee C. Bollinger and University of Chicago Law Professor Geoffrey R. Stone. It frames debates about free speech today, particularly on social media, as reflecting a “problem” for American democracy–the problem of “bad speech”–in need of urgent reform and new solutions. Contributors include Hillary Clinton, Senators Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Mark Warner, together with a host of legal academics who are highly critical of the contemporary, speech-protective American legal regime. It’s a fascinating collection and choice of contributors purely as a matter of academic sociology, reflecting the prevailing skepticism among many experts about American First Amendment protections as well as what is felt to be an outsized cultural commitment to free speech that damages the more fundamental commitments thought by many scholars to be truly constitutive of the American polity. The title of one essay, in particular, was striking in the table of contents: Dean Erwin Chemerinsky’s chapter (co-authored with his son, it appears), “The Golden Era of Free Speech.” For many skeptics, a highly speech-protective regime was once very attractive and even necessary to dismantle the then-existing cultural superstructure, but is far less so today. I discussed the matter of free speech as posing a civic problem in this piece a few years ago–“the problem of how to allocate a resource in civically responsible ways, so as to limit freedom’s hurtful potential and to make citizens worthy of the freedoms they are granted. Only a somewhat virtuous society can sustain a regime of political liberty without collapsing, as a society, altogether.” It was a problem that was largely forgotten in the 20th century, but it has now been remembered.

One of the most fiercely debated issues of this era is what to do about “bad” speech-hate speech, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, and incitement of violence-on the internet, and in particular speech on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. In Social Media, Freedom of Speech, and the Future of our Democracy, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone have gathered an eminent cast of contributors–including Hillary Clinton, Amy Klobuchar, Sheldon Whitehouse, Mark Warner, Newt Minow, Tim Wu, Cass Sunstein, Jack Balkin, Emily Bazelon, and others–to explore the various dimensions of this problem in the American context. They stress how difficult it is to develop remedies given that some of these forms of “bad” speech are ordinarily protected by the First Amendment. Bollinger and Stone argue that it is important to remember that the last time we encountered major new communications technology-television and radio-we established a federal agency to provide oversight and to issue regulations to protect and promote “the public interest.” Featuring a variety of perspectives from some of America’s leading experts on this hotly contested issue, this volume offers new insights for the future of free speech in the social media era.

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Of Montaigne and Liberal Tolerance

Following on Marc’s recent posts on skepticism and knowledge, here is an interesting-looking new book from Notre Dame Press: What Happened to Civility: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project, by philosopher Ann Hartle (Emory). As Donald Frame once observed, Montaigne expressed skepticism about customs and culture (“Que sais-je?”), but never about the ultimate authority of the Church and its teachings about eternal life. In fact, accepting certain background assumptions about eternal truths may have allowed Montaigne space to tolerate diverse opinions about wordly things. In her new book, Hartle suggests that what she calls Montaigne’s project of “civility” depends on taking “sacred tradition” for granted. Perhaps, as a practical matter, liberal tolerance requires that a society accept certain assumptions without debate, so that doubt can be expressed on other subjects. What do I know? It’s worth thinking about.

Here is the publisher’s description:

What is civility, and why has it disappeared? Ann Hartle analyzes the origins of the modern project and the Essays of Michel de Montaigne to discuss why civility is failing in our own time.

In this bold book, Ann Hartle, one of the most important interpreters of sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, explores the modern notion of civility—the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the Western world—and asks, why has it disappeared? Concerned with the deepening cultural divisions in our postmodern, post-Christian world, she traces their roots back to the Reformation and Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne’s philosophical project of drawing on ancient philosophy and Christianity to create a new social bond to reform the mores of his culture is perhaps the first act of self-conscious civility. After tracing Montaigne’s thought, Hartle returns to our modern society and argues that this framing of civility is a human, philosophical invention and that civility fails precisely because it is a human, philosophical invention. She concludes with a defense of the central importance of sacred tradition for civility and the need to protect and maintain that social bond by supporting nonpoliticized, nonideological, free institutions, including and especially universities and churches. What Happened to Civility is written for readers concerned about the deterioration of civility in our public life and the defense of freedom of religion. The book will also interest philosophers who seek a deeper understanding of modernity and its meaning, political scientists interested in the meaning of liberalism and the causes of its failure, and scholars working on Montaigne’s Essays.

Posted on by Marc O. DeGirolami · 1 Comment

After Science and Religion

The relationship between science and religion is complex, often since at least the Enlightenment at least represented as one of conflict or tension, but also by some (perhaps in response) as one of fundamental synthesis or unity. Certainly, the tension has been in evidence relatively recently in some of the most prominent law and religion contests of our own day.

A new volume edited by Professors Peter Harrison and John Milbank collects a variety of interesting looking essays on the subject: After Science and Religion: Fresh Perspectives from Philosophy and Theology (CUP 2022).

“The popular field of ‘science and religion’ is a lively and well-established area. It is however a domain which has long been characterised by certain traits. In the first place, it tends towards an adversarial dialectic in which the separate disciplines, now conjoined, are forever locked in a kind of mortal combat. Secondly, ‘science and religion’ has a tendency towards disentanglement, where ‘science’ does one sort of thing and ‘religion’ another. And thirdly, the duo are frequently pushed towards some sort of attempted synthesis, wherein their aims either coincide or else are brought more closely together. In attempting something fresh, and different, this volume tries to move beyond tried and tested tropes. Bringing philosophy and theology to the fore in a way rarely attempted before, the book shows how fruitful new conversations between science and religion can at last move beyond the increasingly tired options of either conflict or dialogue.”

Posted on by Mark Movsesian

Why Religion is Good for Democracy

We hear a lot these days about how religion threatens American democracy. The view almost amounts to a consensus in some parts of the academy. But that was not always the case. For most of American history, observers have thought that religion, and religious communities especially, help promote democracy. That was Tocqueville’s view, obviously, and he wrote the most insightful description of American society ever.

A new book from Princeton, Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy, by leading sociologist Robert Wuthnow, picks up the theme. Anything from Wuthnow is worth reading, and this new book looks like no exception. Here’s the description from the publishers website:

Does religion benefit democracy? Robert Wuthnow says yes. In Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy, Wuthnow makes his case by moving beyond the focus on unifying values or narratives about culture wars and elections. Rather, he demonstrates that the beneficial contributions of religion are best understood through the lens of religious diversity. The religious composition of the United States comprises many groups, organizations, and individuals that vigorously, and sometimes aggressively, contend for what they believe to be good and true. Unwelcome as this contention can be, it is rarely extremist, violent, or autocratic. Instead, it brings alternative and innovative perspectives to the table, forcing debates about what it means to be a democracy.

Wuthnow shows how American religious diversity works by closely investigating religious advocacy spanning the past century: during the Great Depression, World War II, the civil rights movement, the debates about welfare reform, the recent struggles for immigrant rights and economic equality, and responses to the coronavirus pandemic. The engagement of religious groups in advocacy and counteradvocacy has sharpened arguments about authoritarianism, liberty of conscience, freedom of assembly, human dignity, citizens’ rights, equality, and public health. Wuthnow hones in on key principles of democratic governance and provides a hopeful yet realistic appraisal of what religion can and cannot achieve.

At a time when many observers believe American democracy to be in dire need of revitalization, Why Religion Is Good for American Democracy illustrates how religious groups have contributed to this end and how they might continue to do so despite the many challenges faced by the nation.