Students of law and business administration are perplexed by the solidarity and resilience of the modern corporation. This is because knowledge of the defining elements of the corporation—of individual interests and the nexus of contracts—cannot account for the integrity and vitality of the whole. Beginning with the seminal ideas of Mary Parker Follett about organizations, specifically her ideas about functional relating and self-creating coherence, this essay draws upon Catholic Social Theory to explain how the life of the corporation is rooted in the life of the nuptial pair. Despite its often vast complexity, the modern corporation is literally an incorporation: a joining of male and female in one body. Implications of this idea about the corporation for our understanding of corporate law and business administration are discussed. Also briefly considered are implications of this idea for a theology of the corporation.

Data on the location of abortion clinics and crisis pregnancy centers in California are used to estimate Poisson models of the number of both kinds of clinic, to compare their location decisions, and to better understand the factors which limit clinic availability in some counties. The locations of the two types of clinic are determined in significantly different ways. Market size is the most important factor explaining the lack of clinics in certain counties; labor force participation rates,Catholic population, and cultural/political environment also play significant roles. Ethnicity plays only a modest role in clinic location. Instrumental variables generalized methods of moments estimates suggest that the number of abortion clinics has no independent effect on the number of crisis pregnancy centers.

By reviewing the notion of the human person found in the modern liberal tradition, this essay seeks to give an account of the possible tensions between modern liberal political life and human fulfillment as understood in Catholic tradition. Resolving any such tensions would require showing that the philosophical underpinnings of modern liberalism are compatible with man’s “transcendent dignity” to pursue and live the Truth. By way of conclusion, the Church’s rapprochement with modern liberalism is discussed in light of Benedict XVI’s comments on and praise of American civil life made during his recent visit to the U.S.

Human Dignity is the preeminent goal and principle of Catholic Social Teaching. However, there does not appear to be any systematic way of evaluating the effectiveness of proposed social actions or policies for their effectiveness in upholding Human Dignity. Social Doctrine identifies three additional permanent principles: the Common Good, Solidarity, and Subsidiarity; and, Human Dignity is upheld best when these other three are each fully and equally met. The resulting “triad stool” model proposed here which upholds Human Dignity offers the faithful a powerful means of understanding and evaluating social actions for their advancement of Human Dignity.

This is an attempt to understand why Carson Holloway’s book, The Gospel of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity, so strongly emphasizes that the culture of death is tyranny. Since Aristotle, tyranny has been a political idea. John Paul’s thought focuses on culture not politics. But Holloway interprets him as saying that the culture of death is political tyranny. I had trouble grasping how that might be, especially since the ancients, and Aristotle in particular,did not regard abortion and infanticide (the central characteristics of what John Paul calls the culture of death) as tyrannical, or even as ordinarily unjust. One result of my grappling with this problem was that I came to see that Holloway’s argument was more right than not. Another result was that I came to understand that the culture of death is a new form of tyranny, one that is specifically the product of modern liberal political philosophy. A third result was that I had to ask, andgained insight into answering, how liberal modernity makes it so difficult to see the culture of death, to which it gives rise, as a political tyranny.

Beginning by praising Carson Holloway’s The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity for both contributing to our understanding of John Paul’s posture toward modernity and bringing his thought into conversation with the thought of some of the intellectual architects of liberal modernity, my essayproceeds to identify several subjects I wish Holloway had explored further, including the positive aspects of John Paul’s appraisal of liberal modernity and the engagement with modern thought that looms so large in his pre-papal philosophical writings. It then explores John Paul’s account of the achievements issuing from the modern quest for freedom, and the connection between the crisis that has engulfed this quest and the understanding of human freedom that informs contemporary culture. Against this backdrop, it examines John Paul’s efforts to address this crisis by articulating an anthropology that will assimilate the legitimateinsights of modern philosophies of freedom and consciousness into the broader framework provided by the philosophy of being as that philosophy has been understood within the Christian metaphysical tradition; and how the understanding of freedom that emerges from this anthropology differs from that which dominates contemporary culture. Far from being an adversary of the modern quest for freedom, John Paul believes that this quest is ultimately rooted in the revolution in human self-understanding wrought by Christianity, and seeks to articulate the intellectual foundation necessary to bring it to a successful conclusion.

Communitarian Robert Nisbet’s most famous book, The Quest for Community, falls short of what it intends to prove. Nisbet misinterprets Tocqueville on the nature of individualism and fails to comprehend the nature of the modern state. Most importantly, he never asks whether the local communities which he takes to be so valuable could themselves ever be oppressive. The failure to inquire into the nature and substance of justice allows Nisbet to emphasize the evils ofcentralization while suppressing any possible benefits. Such an unbalanced argument ignores true subsidiarity and in the end renders itself incoherent.

This article explores the viewpoints of two world historians, Jared Diamond and Christopher Dawson. Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, has a scientific view of the past. Dawson, a prominent Catholic metahistorian, sees God’s Providence in history. Their differing historical perspectives highlight three issues: the relationship between history and science, the role of religion in society, and the significance of the individual in history. In examining these issues, Diamond and Dawson present contrasting interpretations of the rise of the West in world history. On this basis, finally, the two project deeply contrasting views of the future.

In view of the social normalization of homosexuality and the painful awakening to the reality that a not-negligible percentage of priests, especially in the Western world, is homosexually oriented, the question of why this orientation is irreconcilable with ordination has become more urgent. The decisive arguments are theological and have to do with the prospective priest’s full manhood. These arguments are in harmony with modern psychological insights into (male) homosexuality as a personality defect that blocks the person’s growing to mature manhood. It is argued that only after having demonstrably overcomehomosexual tendencies should a candidate be admitted to the seminary.

Regarded as the greatest of Russian philosophers, Vladimir Soloviev (1853-1900) was praised by Pope John Paul II for establishing “a fruitful relationship between philosophy and the word of God.” As the Christian philosopher of Godmanhood and critic of naturalism and atheistic humanism, he saw the urgency of ending the tragic schism between Russian Orthodoxy and Rome. His ecclesiological masterpiece, Russia and the Universal Church was an unequivocal profession of faith in the Catholic doctrine of the Roman primacy. French Jesuit Michel d’Herbigny’s seminal book Vladimir Soloviev: a Russian Newmaninfluenced many writers who similarly saw certain resemblances between two of the pioneers of nineteenth-century ecumenical thought, Soloviev and the Blessed John Henry Newman. Soloviev’s theocratic theology of politics and development of the social gospel remain of particular interest to students of Catholic social doctrine.

This essay explores “the metaphysics of American ideas” and the strengths and weaknesses of Murray’s argument in We Hold These Truths. The philosophical principles that animate the American founding, it argues, presuppose a particular understanding of the structure of being whose roots are biblical in inspiration. Murray’s account, it continues, calls our attention to the many links between the American founding and the Catholic tradition, suggests ways in which Catholic thought can give us a deeper understanding of the “truths” informing the Founding, and illuminates the gulf between contemporary America’s secular “superculture” and the many cultures of local America. Expressing some concerns about the conceptions of reason, nature, and grace that inform Murray’s thought, and of Murray’s engagement with the thought of the American founders, it concludes by attempting to extend We Hold These Truths’ argument by identifying three truths, over and above those identified by Murray, that are essential to a proper understanding of the American democratic experiment.

An aspect particularly striking about Caritas in Veritate among social encyclicals is its emphasis from the beginning on Augustinian-based metaphysics. This paper considers Pope Benedict’s metaphysical starting point as a key contribution to social doctrine in times marked by the concrete embodiment of globalization, to which the postmodern mind has responded with increased secularism and religious indifferentism. Pope Benedict is seeking to guide globalization by man’s rediscovery of himself via a metaphysics open to faith. Such a metaphysics reveals man’s essentially relational character, intimatingthe unity in diversity of the Trinity, by whose power in charity lies the only lasting hope of human progress and development: not merely the peace of the earthly city but the city of God in its heavenly fulfillment. Broad as it is deep, Caritas in Veritate applies its metaphysics to social virtue in action in a variety of social concerns relevant to our contemporary world and society.