Pro-life and pro-choice advocates have both accused the other side of being similar to the defenders of slavery and/or Hitler. This essay seeks to clarify this debate by outlining the three main dimensions of reality as it is inhabited by human beings: the vertical axis (God and nature), the horizontal plane (sociality), and individual selfhood. These dimensions have corresponding political forms (monarchy, democracy, individualism) and they also serve to channel and rhetorically justify violence. “Re-enactment” is a better term than “analogy” when one understands that othering and violence are shape-shifting phenomena in human history.

When Edward Snowden decided in 2013 to hand over thousands of classified documents to reporters, he launched a firestorm of criticism aimed at both himself and the US National Security Agency. The NSA’s collection of metadata ended in 2015 as a direct result of Snowden’s revelations. He continues to leak classified documents from his political asylum in Russia. This article uses just war theory, theories of civil disobedience, and Church teaching on resistance to political authority to examine Snowden’s whistleblower decision. It applies the following categories of variables: moral order and the common good; virtue and rights; redress and subsidiarity; and success and proportionality.

In 2004 a much-publicized discussion took place between the political philosopher Jürgen Habermas and the Catholic theologian Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI). Essentially, the role of religion in the public sphere was at stake. Habermas, speaking of a “post-secular” age, attempted to find a more vocal place for religious views, subject to a “translation proviso.” Ratzinger, while acknowledging the need for better dialogue between the religious and the secular, argued that there was no longer a common basis for it in “natural reason.” Both figures can be seen as speaking to the practical and the theoretical aspects of the dialogue, respectively. Once this difference is understood, Habermas’s suggestions can be accepted.

This review essay reflects on two works that pertain to the postsecular: Josef Bengtson, Explorations in Post-Secular Metaphysics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); and Florian Zemmin, Colin Jager, Guido Vanheeswijck, eds., Working with a Secular Age: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Charles Taylor’s Master Narrative (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016). The profound influence of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007) is well illustrated in these two works under review. The review essay situates postsecularity in the context of debates on secularization and the sociological expectations this process generates. By treating postsecularism in terms of contextualisation, metaphysics arises as a default position pertaining to transcendence in Bengtson’s work. The efforts in the Zemmin, Jager, and Vanheeswijck work to steer the Taylor work in the direction of Islam are given a critical appraisal. A particular outcome of postsecularity is to render as untenable sociology’s customary detachment of religion from theology. Lastly, for Catholicism, postsecularism draws attention to a long-standing and long-denied crisis in the reproduction of belief in modernity and in a secularized Europe in particular. A singular exception to this crisis occurs in Scandinavian countries, notable for their absence of religion, which are experiencing a small, but significant renaissance of Catholicism. This opens out a positive side to debates on postsecularity which indicates that it is not solely about mirages which give comfort to secularized forms of sociology.

This was one of SCSS President, Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly at his blog site (https://skrason.wordpress.com/) and in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer. This column tells families and others proposing the “Benedict Option”—i.e., trying to separate as much from the secular culture as possible and trying to build up small Catholic subcultures where their children can be effectively reared in the Faith and family integrity preserved—to be attentive of the threat posed by the current child protective system and the need to seek to reform it.

This was one of SCSS President, Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly at his blog site (https://skrason.wordpress.com/) and in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer. This column speaks about what might be called a new expression of literalism and fundamentalism, especially among liberal Catholics and some in Church leadership, to take certain Scriptural passages and Church teachings and apply them to current situations and public questions without regard to the context of the situations or full attention to nuances or even to the facts present—to in a certain sense absolutize the contingent. Sometimes this is done to promote certain policy agendas and without even considering the full statement of the Church’s teaching, as it is expressed in the social encyclicals and other documents.

This was one of SCSS President, Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appear monthly at his blog site (https://skrason.wordpress.com/) and in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer. This column discusses the problems of guaranteeing free higher education at state universities and colleges that was especially promoted by Senator Bernie Sanders in his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, and which is likely to continue as a political issue in the years ahead.