Summer 2011 Journal of Catholic Social Thought

You'll want to run to your local newsstand to purchase the Summer 2011 issue of the Journal of Catholic Social Thought, which is published by Villanova University (the journal is available at the Philosophy Documentation Center for those with access to it). The issue is comprised of papers delivered at a symposium last fall at Villanova Law on Ministers of the Law: A Natural Law Theory of Legal Authority (Eerdmans, 2010) by Jean Porter, the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology and Concurrent Professor of Law at Notre Dame. There is much to admire and much to disagree with in the book--as Russell Hittinger says in his blurb on the back of it, Porter "illuminates and at the same time renders subtle in every hue and shade a most difficult set of questions on natural law. I could not stop reading, and in some places disagreeing with, this splendid work." The symposium papers include appreciations and also respectful but tough disagreements from Kevin Flannery, SJ (Pontifical Gregorian University), Nicholas Wolterstorff (Yale), Brad Lewis (Catholic University of America), Jay Mootz (UNLV), Maris Köpcke Tinturé (a very promising young philosopher of law at Oxford and student of John Finnis's), and our own Patrick Brennan, as well as a keynote address from Jean Porter.