Over the years the Supreme Court of the United States, and other courts, have been subjects of controversy, disagreement, praise, and condemnation. Many of the expressed misgivings regarding the expansion of judicial power have been born out by the decisions reflected not only in the verdicts of the Supreme Court of the United States, but also in other judicial forums of American society. The effect of these decisions has resulted in an attack on the American civil society that compels the nation to follow courses of development that, were they to be legitimate, would have emanated from the political institutions of the country, not from the legal institutions. The Most Dangerous Branch is a collection of essays that provide support for these contentions and hope to prompt citizens to demand greater responsibility by the courts and their adherence to their proper role in a system under the rule of law.

The purpose of this valuable book is to consider recent cultural trends in bioethics from a Catholic perspective. The first section describes modern cultural notions of health and human suffering. It examines the meaning of suffering in the contemporary world and relates this discussion to the ethical issues surrounding abortion, euthanasia, and the competing conceptions of health. The second section discusses the philosophical origins of the culture war through an examination of the problematic bases of various forms of moral relativism and its inability to guide moral action. The third section contextualizes this abstract discussion in the current political and legal debate on biotechnology, marriage, and the family. Bioethics is intended for a lay audience interested in understanding bioethical issues from a Catholic perspective.

For much of the second half of the twentieth century, America's courts--state and federal--have injected themselves into what many critics consider to be fundamentally moral or political disputes. By constitutionalizing these disputes, many feel that the courts have reduced the ability of Americans to engage in traditional, political modes of settling differences over issues that excite particular passion. While legal discourse is well suited to choosing decisive winners and losers, political discourse is perhaps more conducive to reasonable compromise and accommodation. In Courts and the Culture Wars Bradley C. S. Watson has brought together some of America's most distinguished names in constitutional theory and practice to consider the impact of judicial engagement in the moral, religious, and cultural realms--including such issues as school prayer, abortion, gay rights, and expressive speech.

For much of the second half of the twentieth century, America's courts--state and federal--have injected themselves into what many critics consider to be fundamentally moral or political disputes. By constitutionalizing these disputes, many feel that the courts have reduced the ability of Americans to engage in traditional, political modes of settling differences over issues that excite particular passion. While legal discourse is well suited to choosing decisive winners and losers, political discourse is perhaps more conducive to reasonable compromise and accommodation. In Courts and the Culture Wars Bradley C. S. Watson has brought together some of America's most distinguished names in constitutional theory and practice to consider the impact of judicial engagement in the moral, religious, and cultural realms--including such issues as school prayer, abortion, gay rights, and expressive speech.

Where Did I Come From? Where Am I Going? How Do I Get There? is a complete course on Catholicism, featuring concise, reader-friendly, relevant prose. Straight answers are tailored for today's generation. Topics addressed include: Can I know anything? Can I know what God is like? How am I really in the image and likeness of God? What about my conscience? Am I a gift to others? What about my freedom? Is any sexual activity OK before marriage? Do we have to keep Grandma on a feeding tube forever? This book adapts a wildly successful high-school curriculum developed by Charles E. Rice, who taught for years at an Indiana high school in addition to his storied career at Notre Dame Law School. This classroom-tested curriculum has had life-changing effects. Rice's students, who took the course in the late 1970s and early 1980s, credit this course for keeping them Catholic, while their peers turned to Zen, politics, or drugs in their search for ultimate meaning. Rice, with the valuable assistance of co-author and philosopher Theresa Farnan, updates this curriculum by incorporating the Catechism and the personalist philosophy of John Paul II into the timeless wisdom of the Church. Today's young Catholics admire the faith more than ever, but need clear answers about what it is and who they are. The straight answers found in this book are a sure antidote to the confusion of the culture of death. The revised second edition contains expanded material from Pope Benedict XVI, the Catechism of the Catholic Church and other sources. The second edition, as did the first, has received the Imprimatur from Most Rev. John M. D'Arcy, bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend. The second edition has also received from the Office for the Catechism of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops a Declaration of Conformity, certifying that it is in conformity with the Catechism. The second edition is therefore included in the USCCB's Conformity Listing of Catechetical Texts and is officially approved for use in Catholic schools and educational programs.

In What Happened to Notre Dame? (St. Augustine's Press, 2009), Charles E. Rice, Professor Emeritus at Notre Dame Law School, traced that university's loss of Catholic identity to the Land O'Lakes Declaration of 1967 in which Notre Dame and other "Catholic" universities declared their independence from the Church. In fact they substituted for the positive guidance of the Magisterium a counterfeit orthodoxy of political correctness, money, and secular prestige. This book, Right or Wrong, is a compilation of columns Professor Rice wrote for the campus newspaper, The Observer, from 1970 through 2010. Those bi-weekly columns are concise, readable, and practical. They offered the students an access to the authentic teachings of the Church that they might not otherwise get in the politically correct "Catholic" university of Land O'Lakes. Those columns present those teachings, not as abstractions, but as practical guides to real-life issues. Drawing upon his wide experience in constitutional law, jurisprudence, tort, and other areas, Professor Rice tells it like it is on a wide range of issues, including abortion, euthanasia, contraception, homosexuality, pornography, clergy sex abuse, feminism, marriage, bioethics, the death penalty, just war principles, the War on Terror, "Catholic" politicians, etc., etc. He describes Land O'Lakes as a "suicide pact" that has made "Catholic" universities subservient to government, corporate donors, foundations, and the secular educational establishment. Professor Rice, however, goes beyond criticism. He offers a very practical way for Notre Dame to recover its Catholic identity. And he urges that we pray, especially through the intercession of Notre Dame, Our Lady, for her University and for our country.

When the University of Notre Dame announced that President Barack Obama would speak at its 2009 Commencement and would receive an honorary doctor of laws degree, the reaction was more than anyone expected. Students, faculty, alumni, and friends of Notre Dame denounced the honoring of Obama, who is the most relentlessly pro-abortion public official in the world. Beyond abortion, Obama has taken steps to withdraw from health-care professionals the right of conscientious objection. Among them are thousands of Notre Dame alumni who will be forced to choose between continuing their profession and participating in activities they view as immoral, including the execution of the unborn. And they will be forced to that choice by the politician upon whom their alma mater confers its highest honors. (Mary Ann Glendon, distinguished Harvard law professor and former ambassador to the Vatican, felt obliged to turn down the prestigious Laetare Medal because of this.) Notre Dame's honoring of Obama is not merely a "Catholic" thing. Many thousands of citizens with no Catholic or Notre Dame connections have protested it. They see it as a capitulation of faith to expedience and the pursuit of vain prestige. Obama's record and stated purposes are hostile to the most basic truths of faith and the natural law affirmed by the Catholic Church and by many others. Four decades ago, in 1967, the major "Catholic" universities declared their "autonomy" from the Catholic Church in the Land O'Lakes Declaration. The honoring of Obama reflects the replacement by those universities of the benign authority of the Church with the politically correct standards of the secular academic establishment and, especially, of the government. There is a lesson here for all Americans. Notre Dame fell into relativism and expediency because it rejected the Church as the authentic interpreter of the moral law. In this post-Christian era, American culture is following a similar path by reducing morality to the unguided consensus of individual choices. If no code of right and wrong has moral authority - not even the Ten Commandments - then society is ruled by the conflict of interests, and might makes right. The jurisprudence of such relativism is legal positivism in which no law can be criticized as unjust because no one can know what is "just." What Happened to Notre Dame? by Charles E. Rice, with an Introduction by Alfred Freddoso - two of Notre Dame's most distinguished scholars, who together have served the University for over 70 years - first recounts the details of Notre Dame's honoring of President Obama. It then examines the succession of fall-back excuses offered by the Notre Dame President Rev. John I. Jenkins, c.s.c., and University publicists to justify Notre Dame's defiance of the nation's bishops and of Catholic teaching. But Rice is not content with mere reportage. What Happened to Notre Dame?diagnoses the problem's roots by first providing an overview of the Land O'Lakes Declaration, its inception and its aftermath, including the ways in which its false autonomy from the Church has led to an erosion of the Catholic identity of Notre Dame and other Catholic universities. Then, it offers a cure. Christ, who is God, is the author of the divine law and the natural law. The book presents reasons why an acknowledged interpreter of these laws is necessary, and why that interpreter has to be the Pope exercising the Magisterium, or teaching authority of the Church. And it shows why it is so important that we have such a moral interpreter for all citizens and not just for Catholics. The alternative is what Pope Benedict XVI calls the "dictatorship of relativism," which the book analyzes. Even for those who do not share the Catholic faith, our reason leads us to conclude that the natural law is the only moral code that makes entire sense and points to the conclusion that the Vicar of Christ is uniquely suited to give authoritative interpretation to that law. In the final chapter Rice shows why great good can come out of Notre Dame's blunder in rendering its highest honors to such an implacable foe. Notre Dame got itself into such a mess because it attempted to be Catholic without the Church and ended up defying the Church and disgracing itself. But good can result from the lesson here that roll-your-own morality is no more tenable than roll-your-own Catholicism. * * * * * Rice shows why what happened to Notre Dame is symptomatic of what's happening in other Catholic colleges, indeed colleges with non-Catholic religious affiliations. He shows how the abandonment of principle at the college level spills over to the general culture, with devastating effect, as religious standards get pushed out of the public square. And, finally, he shows why people who have never seen the Golden Dome, never rooted for the Fighting Irish, and never graced a Catholic Church, also have a stake in what happened to Notre Dame.

"Contraceptive sex," wrote social science researcher Mary Eberstadt in 2012, "is the fundamental social fact of our time." In this important and pointed book, Charles E. Rice, of the Notre Dame Law School, makes the novel claim that the acceptance of contraception is a prelude to persecution. He makes the striking point that contraception is not essentially about sex. It is a First Commandment issue: Who is God? It was at the Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930 when for the first time a Christian denomination said that contraception could ever be a moral choice. The advent of the Pill in the 1960s made the practice of contraception practically universal. This involved a massive displacement of the Divine Law as a normative measure of conduct, not only on sex but across the board. Nature abhors a vacuum. The State moved in to occupy the place formerly held by God as the ultimate moral Lawgiver. The State put itself on a collision course with religious groups and especially with the Catholic Church, which continues to insist on that traditional teacher. A case in point is the Obama Regime's Health Care Mandate, coercing employees to provide, contrary to conscience, abortifacients and contraceptives to their employees. The first chapter describes that Mandate, which the Catholic bishops have vowed not to obey. Rice goes on to show that the duty to disobey an unjust law that would compel you to violate the Divine Law does not confer a general right to pick and choose what laws you will obey. The third chapter describes the "main event," which is the bout to determine whether the United States will conform its law and culture to the homosexual (LGBTQ) lifestyle in all its respects. "The main event is well underway and LGBTQ is well ahead on points." Professor Rice follows with a clear analysis of the 2013 Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. Part II presents some "underlying causes" of the accelerating persecution of the Catholic Church. The four chapter headings in this part outline the picture: The Dictatorship of Relativism; Conscience Redefined; The Constitution: Moral Neutrality; and The Constitution: Still Taken Seriously? The answer to the last question, as you might expect, is: No. Part III, the controversial heart of the book, presents contraception as "an unacknowledged cause" of persecution. The first chapter argues that contraception is not just a "Catholic issue." The next chapter describes the "consequences" of contraception and the treatment of women as objects. The third chapter spells out in detail the reality that contraception is a First Commandment issue and that its displacement of God as the ultimate moral authority opened the door for the State to assume that role, bringing on a persecution of the Church. The last chapter, "A Teaching Untaught," details the admitted failure of the American Catholic bishops to teach Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae. But Rice offers hope that the bishops are now getting their act together Part IV offers as a "response" to the persecution of the Church three remedies: Speak the Truth with clarity and charity; Trust God; and, most important, Pray. As the last sentence in the book puts it: "John Paul II wrote in a letter to U.S. bishops in 1993: 'America needs much prayer - lest it lose its soul.'" This readable and provocative book is abundantly documented with a detailed index of names and subjects.