This review essay provides an exploratory critique of one prominent contemporary sociology of religion textbook from the perspective of a Catholic sociological sensibility. It is written with the projection that the critique could eventually be expanded into a more systematic and exhaustive review of other major textbooks in the field. The textbook is analyzed in light of eight fundamental questions.

This essay looks into the paradoxical friendship of Jacques Maritain, a Catholic philosopher, and Saul Alinsky, a radical community organizer. Commentators Bernard Doering and Charles Curran have used the fact of this friendship to draw the erroneous conclusion that Maritain approved of Alinsky’s philosophy. However, a closer look at their respective writings shows that Maritain and Alinsky retained profound disagreements on basic philosophical issues. Particular attention is paid to Maritain’s letter in response to Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, in which Maritain raised objections to many of Alinsky’s ideas. Thus, Maritain didnot compromise his Christian worldview.

This essay maintains that although We Hold These Truths represented an important milestone in Catholic reflection on the American regime, Murray’s analysis of public morality and the state’s role in its promotion and enforcement is notably weak and of little assistance to us today. More specifically, it argues that Murray’s analysis is insufficiently philosophical and too concerned with the pragmatic task of forging an approach widely acceptable in the America of his day; that it rests on an artificial distinction between “private” and “public” morality that fails to sufficiently appreciate the essential dependence of sound morals legislation upon the government’s recognition of moral truth; and that it too closely identifies the whole of law’s competence with the scope of its coercive jurisdiction, thus failing to appreciate the directive and educative properties of law and its role in the establishment of conditions conducive to human flourishing.

The allocation of finite resources is a pressing concern at all levels of government. Such decisions are not only, of necessity, moral ones, but are in many cases, directly or indirectly, literally matters of life and death. As such, they are a proper and important concern for Catholic social thought. Previous researchers have explored what insights and principles may be gleaned from Catholic social teaching, as principally expressed in formal pronouncements of the Magisterium, with regard to the theory of resource allocation. The purpose of this short article is to explore what Pope Benedict XVI’s 2009 Caritas in Veritate might add to,modify, or take from, what has gone before.

This article offers an outline of administrative decentralization, subsidiarity, and related principles as they emerge from Tocqueville’s account of American democracy and the social teachings of the Catholic Church, respectively, accompanied by an analysis of the philosophic and theological underpinnings of each account. This analysis reveals a profound theoretical as well as practical harmony between the two notions: namely, that both are grounded in the potential of human beings to perfect themselves through virtuous actions, which society must foster in a fashion that preserves the freedom of citizens, who can achieve thecommon good only by taking active responsibility for it.

John Courtney Murray’s landmark work, We Hold These Truths, was conceived and brought into being by the editors of Sheed & Ward, who wanted to bring Murray’s work to a broad cross-section of America. When it first appeared, the book was reviewed favorably in both religious and secular journals. Political conservatives were particularly enthusiastic about its defense of natural law principles and its opposition to secularism. By the late 1960s, liberal Catholics interested in legalizing abortion began citing its distinctions between public and private morality. In the 1980s, neoconservative Catholic thinkers embraced the book for much the same reason that conservatives had endorsed it in 1960. While many other Catholic thinkers on both the left and right have grown more critical of the work in recent years, neoconservatives have remained its most dedicated adherents.

Work provides the opportunities that social justice distributes. Without work there isn’t even the possibility of justice. On the one side, this fact calls us to think clearly about what works and about what creates value in the economic world, and about how this is forged into economic justice. This short essay focuses on that junction between work and justice, drawing on two recent encyclicals for their insight into justice, and drawing on recent economic history for insight into what actually works economically. In the end one conclusion becomes clear: our work is justified by what it teaches us and nourishes in us, but even more it is judged by the objective value of what it produces.

This essay seeks to dispel two common misunderstandings of the argument of We Hold These Truths. Contrary to what is sometimes asserted, it argues, Murray does not turn the American founding into an expression of Thomistic political theory. Although he emphasizes the Christian and medieval roots of the American democratic experiment, Murray also recognizes—even if he does not explore the point systematically—the imprint left on the American founding bydistinctively modern intellectual currents. Likewise, it maintains that although the rejection of the natural law tradition under the impact of Enlightenment rationalism figures prominently in Murray’s account of the crisis of the modern West, Murray’s account of the role of natural law in this crisis must be seen against the backdrop of a broader analysis whose focus is theological and spiritual in nature, and which sees the ultimate source of this crisis in modern culture’s rejection of Christian revelation.

This essay explores the project undertaken by Murray in We Hold These Truths and its relevance to contemporary America. When it first appeared in 1960, We Hold These Truths made a powerful case to the American public for the compatibility of Catholicism and American democracy and of the need for a renewal of America’s historic public consensus rooted in natural law. It also emphasized the role that the Catholic political tradition could play in this renewal. Although parts of its argument may be problematic, and vast changes in America’s cultural and religious landscape make it dated in some respects, five decades after its original publication, Murray’s book nevertheless remains highly relevant to our contemporary situation, both as a contribution to democratic theory and as a profound reflection on the nature of “the civilization of the pluralist society.”

The Mexican Reforma is often considered a classic example of the power struggles that occurred between church and state throughout the nineteenth century. However, since in this case both sides claimed to be Catholic, the most important battles in Mexico were actually intra ecclesiam. Ultimately, it was a fight over access to the sacraments that drove Mexico into civil war, transforming both the Church and society in the process. The current debate in the United States over allowing public figures who violate Church teaching to receive Holy Communion should be considered within the context of the Mexican experience.

The significance of the title of Benedict XVI’s encyclical Caritas in Veritate has not been adequately appreciated. It is the first social encyclical with an expressly theological title. Benedict calls for Catholics to shape the economic world (specifically, globalization) with Christian love.