This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2014 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site (skrason.wordpress.com). He argues that, despite the criticism of President Obama’s seemingly excessive exercise of executive power to further an ideologically leftist secularist agenda, the strong and maybe unprecedented use of presidential power after him may be the most certain way to try to restore weakened American constitutional principles and traditional liberties and to begin to reverse our serious cultural decay.

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2014 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site (skrason.wordpress.com). It discusses how Catholic social teaching does not mandate particular public policies and must not be confused with a point of the teaching itself. It emphasizes that there can typically be many different policy approaches that can be used to make sure that moral demands are met.

This was one of SCSS President Stephen M. Krason’s “Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic” columns that appeared during 2014 in Crisismagazine.com and The Wanderer and at his blog site (skrason.wordpress.com). He argues that the common strain running through such political developments as the rise of Islamism, modern political ideologies, and contemporary leftism is the fact that, one way or the other, they represent man trying to make himself God. To paraphrase Irving Babbitt and others, as the notion of God goes, so goes philosophy, and society and culture, and politics, and economics—the religious outlook is at the core of all other perspectives.

Since the pontificate of St. John Paul II, the Pope has been a leader of world significance, which brings the Holy Father into contact with the President of the United States (POTUS). John Paul II dealt with five chief executives. The recent history of presidential-papal interactions suggests five roles into which Presidents cast the Pope and three lessons about the relationship between POTUS and Peter.

Adding the phrase “Roman Catholic” to “political philosophy” implies that political philosophy is a work of reason that, in its own order, reaches legitimate issues and problems that it cannot itself resolve. This phrase suggests that, contained within revelation, are responses to the unanswered issues as posed in political philosophy. These responses suggest that there is a coherent relation between reason and revelation that arises directly out of political philosophy as such.

What has concerned me most is the coherence of political philosophy in the light of what is not political philosophy. Reality, what is, is always richer than our knowledge of it. If we are to understand political things, we have to understand more than political things—things like history, science, literature, practical living, common sense, philosophy itself, and yes, the terms and content of revelation.

Orestes Brownson is regarded as one of the most important contributors to Catholic social thought that the United States has ever produced. Although he is famous for changing his views during the course of his intellectual career, he in fact consistently defended several core principles. His defense of community and social obligation never wavered. He called for greater social equality as a young socialist and Transcendentalist; as a mature Catholic he urged his readers to take seriously Jesus’s command that they love one another. Although Brownson wrote in the nineteenth century, his views remain relevant in the second decade of the twenty-first century. His work challenges the narcissism, individualism, and selfishness that plague our world today. In contrast to our culture’s tendency to focus on the individual, Brownson calls for us to think about our communities. He asks us to rise above our sinful natures.

For James Schall, revelation becomes open to us, on the most important questions that revelation can address, when it is opened by people who “study politics,” as Samuel Johnson had it. For Plato, the best city, the best political order, was spun out in the world of speech. It is not a place we expect to inhabit. But Plato had Socrates say at the end of the Republic that, whether this City exists anywhere or not, it is the only city in which the thoughtful man would wish to take part. But even so, as Schall says, revelation alerts us to the possibility that our true home will really be elsewhere.

The most prolific and genuinely provocative writer in America today is James Schall. Schall tells that the Catholic Church is today about the sole source of a genuinely reasonable—meaning genuinely realistic—view of “what is.” That’s why Schall contends that political science is not a natural science; our lives as social or relational animals living together in community can’t really be understood realistically without seeing the whole truth about who each of us is.