Punishment as a response to deviant and criminal behavior is ubiquitous and multi-dimensional in nature. Retribution as a dominant philosophical rationale governs the imposition of criminal punishment in contemporary American society. There is a need to understand punishment in terms of what it symbolizes. This article proposes an approach that integrates critical insights of social theory and the principles of Catholic social thought to understand the meaning of punishment. Themes of power relations, person, and order reveal not only deeper dimensions of meaning, but contradictions inherent in current systemic penal practices and insight into changing trends as bases for policy initiatives.

Without factoring in the possibility of some direct or mediated intervention “from above,” the present sociological prospects for the Church, the Catholic school system, and American civilization are not particularly good. The only chance for our civilization lies with the possibility of a massive cultural revival centered on the resurrection of the natural law, Biblical wisdom, and Catholic social teaching. On the one hand, cultural revivals cannot be merely engineered. But, on the other hand, there will be no chance of a cultural revival in either Church or society without a revitalized Catholic educational system manned by dedicated Catholic professionals and buttressed by cadres of Catholics who are willing to volunteer their services. This paper, first, offers a list of propositions about the state of the contemporary Catholic school in our present time of cultural crisis, and then, second, follows with a list of proposals aimed at assisting in its revitalization.

The 2008 presidential election witnessed a struggle among Catholics with regard to their civic responsibilities. The U.S. bishops published documents and made numerous public statements for the purpose of clarifying a Catholic’s role in politics. Yet the presidential candidate with the most extreme positions against the fundamental issues of Catholic Social Teaching won a majority of the Catholic vote. This paper will examine the role of religion in politics and the importance of civic responsibility among Catholics. It will further lay the foundation for a detailed discussion of how Catholics should act in the public square and apply it to explaining the problematic outcome of the 2008 presidential election.

Although Catholic teaching opposes same-sex “marriage,” in America Catholics support SSM more strongly than do Protestants, and states with Catholic majorities are much more likely to regularize homosexual relations. Younger persons support SSM more strongly than do their elders, suggesting that support will continue to grow. The trends in American Catholic thought on this issue exemplify American exceptionalism, moralism, and growing secularism, and reflectcatechetical ambiguity, equivocation among the U.S. bishops, elite dissent, and the lingering effects of the clergy sex abuse scandals and the birth control controversy.

This paper proposes a Catholic narrative structure for the story of Western civilization, a general outline that eschews secularism and historicism as much as biblical literalism and Catholic triumphalism. In brief, St. Augustine is more correct than Leonardo Bruni: There is only one age of man. We, God’s wondrous creatures, do not change over recorded time. Everywhere in the world, best documented and demonstrated in the West, we see mankind struggle against himself more than merely respond passively to impersonal and improbable social, economic, political, or gender-based “forces.” God, the author of history, writes straight across crooked lines. He shows us that the path of history points toward unity in diversity.

Much of liberal theory tacitly presupposes a secularized and radicalized form of the religious view called fideism, according to which reason and faith, Athens and Jerusalem, have nothing to say to each other. John Paul II defended the contrasting view that only rightly ordered faith allows reason to become fully itself. If he was right, however, then to purge civic discourse of expressions of faith would make it not more rational, but less. Carson Holloway convincingly demonstrates this point through a sustained examination of thinkers who shaped the present age.