Friday, May 19, 2023
Moreland on Liberalism and Christianity
Our own Michael Moreland has posted on SSRN a new paper, which discusses (among other things) the presentations at a conference last fall at Notre Dame Law School on Liberalism and Christianity. Here's Michael's abstract:
The essays in this Symposium engage in recurring sets of issues, and here I wish to highlight four of them: (1) the relationship between liberalism and theological traditions; (2) the historically contingent and contested accounts of how liberalism and Christianity have developed over centuries in a relationship that has varied from conciliatory to hostile and what implications that account has for the history of ideas; (3) debates in legal scholarship that are illuminated by posing broader questions about liberalism, Christianity, and constitutionalism, and in particular the relationship of liberalism to different social forms, including religious institutions; (4) the renewed interest in the relationship between liberalism and Christianity in light of a new generation of critics of liberalism, whether Catholic integralists or other types of anti-liberalism, and the question—posed forcefully at the end of Steven Smith’s paper—of if not liberalism, then what else?
I presented at the symposium, but didn't (mea culpa!) produce a law-review article. Here is a short version of my presentation, "Why Liberalism and Constitutionalism Need Christianity."
https://mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2023/05/moreland-on-liberalism-and-christianity.html