Religion and Public Reasons: Collected Essays Volume V

Description

The essays in Religion and Public Reasons seek to argue for, and illustrate, a central element of John Finnis's theory of natural law: that the main tenets of personal and political morality, and of a good legal order, are taught both by reason (arguments accessible to everyone) and by authentic divine revelation (teachings accessible to all who have a reasonable faith in its witnesses). The author's main books each include arguments for rejecting atheism and agnosticism; several papers here take up these arguments and indicate ways in which they open onto the reasonable grounds for accepting that more about God's nature, and about the meaning of Creation (including ongoing natural evolution), is disclosed by the revelation carried far forward among the Jewish people, and given definitive form by the Jews and Greeks who assembled in the universal Church, as witnesses of Christ, to carry forward that revelation into our present. Several papers argue that "public reason" properly includes such a religion, and that Humeian, Nietzschean, Deweyian, Rawlsian or other atheistical or deistic understandings of a reasonable secularism are badly mistaken. Many substantial papers record the author's position in controversies within Catholicism since the 1960s: on social justice, contraception and abortion; nuclear deterrence; Newman on conscience before pope; Maritain's hopes for a new Christendom and von Balthasar's for a hell empty of human persons; and on "proportionalism" and Lonerganian "historical consciousness" as moral-theological methods. Previously unpublished papers include several University and college sermons, and a substantial introduction.

Get the book

Amazon.com

Search the book

eBay.com

Search the book

Other editions

• 

  Religion and Public Reasons: Collected Essays

  • 2011-04-07
  • 421 pages
  • Paperback
  • Oxford University Press

Similar books

• 

  Private Consciences and Public Reasons

  By Kent Greenawalt

  This book addresses one crucial set of problems raised by this division: What bases should officials and citizens employ in reaching political decisions and justifying their positions?

• 

  Contemporary Political Philosophy and Religion: Between Public Reason and Pluralism

  By Paolo Monti, Camil Ungureanu

  Key features of this book include: Analyses of different political traditions: liberalism, republicanism, deliberative democracy, feminism, postmodernism, multiculturalism, and interculturalism; Critical discussions of key contemporary ...

• 

  Religion and Public Reasons

  By John Finnis

  Religion and Public Reasons

• 

  Why Politics Needs Religion: The Place of Religious Arguments in the Public Square

  By Brendan Sweetman

  For a very brief but informative overview of the history of humanism, see Edwin H. Wilson, “Humanism's Moral Dimensions,” in The Humanist Alternative, ed. Paul Kurtz (New York: Prometheus, 1973), pp. 15-19. Wilson believes that ...

• 

  Religion and Public Reason: A Comparison of the Positions of John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur

  By Maureen Junker-Kenny

  This book compares three approaches to public reason and to the public space accorded to religions: the liberal platform of an overlapping consensus proposed by John Rawls, Jürgen Habermas’s discourse ethical reformulation of Kant’s ...

• 

  Religion in the Public Square: The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate

  By Robert Audi, Nicholas Wolterstorff

  Albert G. Mosley , Ohio University Nicholas Capaldi , University of Tulsa Religion in the Public Square : The Place of Religious Convictions in Political Debate Robert Audi , University of Nebraska Nicholas Wolterstorff ...

• 

  Why Do Religious Forms Matter?: Reflections on Materialism, Toleration, and Public Reason

  By Pooyan Tamimi Arab

  In Why Do Religious Forms Matter?, Pooyan Tamimi Arab reflects on the Early Modern roots and contemporary relevance of a materialist perspective on the politics of religious diversity.

• 

  Human Rights and Common Good: Collected Essays

  By John Finnis

  In the first major treatise on war by a philosophical theologian (as opposed to a canonist), Alexander of Hales (c. 1240) identifies six preconditions for a just war. The person declaring war must have (1) the right affectus (state of ...

• 

  Why Tolerate Religion?: Updated Edition

  By Brian Leiter

  Why it's wrong to single out religious liberty for special legal protections This provocative book addresses one of the most enduring puzzles in political philosophy and constitutional theory—why is religion singled out for preferential ...

• 

  Rawls and Religion

  By Tom Bailey, Valentina Gentile

  Rawls and Religion makes a unique and important contribution to contemporary debates over liberalism and its response to the proliferation of religions in contemporary political life.