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Books > Humanities > Philosophy
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 Previously unpublished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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