Weigel on the Second Vatican Council

I read, enjoyed, and highly recommend George Weigel's new book, "To Sanctify the World:  The Vital Legacy of Vatican II."  It is timely, thoughtful, enlightening, and hopeful.  It is nothing like a critique or a complaint - observations about various post-Council missteps in liturgy, music, etc. are brief and confined to endnotes -- it is not a "what went wrong?" book.  Instead, it is a positive -- and again, hopeful -- account of the need for the Council, the intellectual and other developments that preceded and animated it, the Council's work and output, and the "keys" to understanding, embracing, and implementing its Christocentric and evangelical foundations.  At root, the Council was about, he explains, the basic Christian proposal that, in Christ, God has revealed not the truth about Himself, but also the truth about the human person.  And so, given that for nearly 20 years we've been talking about the relevance of Christian moral anthropology to "legal theory", it's a great book for MOJ!

Of particular interest and importance, in the present moment, is the chapter on the Declaration on Religious Freedom.  Weigel efficiently sets out the Declaration's argument for the human right to religious freedom (and the duty of all persons to seek the truth about God) and also about the Freedom of the Church.  The "healthy secularity" model is defended, and connected with the correct understanding of the social kingship of Christ.

Check it out!