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unpublished papers include several University and college sermons, and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.
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Collected Essays Volume V
Product details
ISBN
9780191616211
Published
2020
Publisher
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Author