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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Michael Baxter's long review provides an outline of David Schindler's useful first book; concentrates on its treatment of John Courtney Murray; gives a free pass to its lengthy ontological and theological speculations; and calls attention to its impracticality. Like Baxter, I share de Lubac's view of grace and nature (mediated to me by three Jesuits, Henry Bouillard, Juan Alfaro, and Bernard Lonergan), although I draw from it practical applications quite different from those of Schindler and Baxter. Further, I agree with the main thrust of Baxter's criticism: just where one wants to test Schindler's grand hypotheses about how grace ought to work in a “civilization of love,” particularly with regard to politics and economics, Schindler has almost nothing practical to say, and such few gestures as he offers seem lamely indistinguishable from those he criticizes, for example Murray (on the First Amendment) and Richard John Neuhaus (on the public square). His reading of my own work, too, is excessively polemical.
1. From Parchment to Power: How James Madison Used the Bill of Rights to Save the Constitution (Washington, DC: AEI Press, 1997).Google Scholar
2. It is not by accident that contemporary abuses of religious liberty date from the centralization of government subsequent to the New Deal.
3. The Library of Congress unveiled priceless documents to this effect in its new exhibit of June 1998, called “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic.” The interpretive text written as the exhibit's catalogue by historian James H. Hutson is a primary document in its own right.
4. “I could wish to have every good thing done from the purest principles and the noblest views. Consider, therefore, that the Christian character, particularly the self–denial of the gospel, should extend to your whole deportment…. This certainly implies not only abstaining from acts of gross intemperance and excess, but a humility of carriage, a restraint and moderation in all your desires. The same thing, as it is suitable to your Christian profession, is also necessary to make you truly independent in yourselves, and to feed the source of liberality and charity to others, or to the public… [T]he frugal and moderate person, who guides his affairs with discretion, is able to assist in public counsels by a free and unbiased judgment, to supply the wants of his poor brethren, and sometimes, by his estate and substance to give important aid to a sinking country.” (“The Dominion of Providence over the Passions of Men,” Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, ed. Sandoz, Ellis, [Indianapolis: Liberty, 1991], p. 557.)Google Scholar
5. Incidentally, the distinction between the actual practices of liberal institutions and liberal doctrines which Baxter finds in a 1994 essay by Joseph Komonchak appears as the structural backbone of my earlier book, Freedom with Justice: Catholic Social Thought and Liberal Institutions (1984).Google Scholar