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Title: The Clash of Orthodoxies: Law, Religion, and Morality in Crisis by Robert P. George ISBN: 1-882926-62-5 Publisher: ISI Books Pub. Date: 01 November, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.12 (8 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: A Thoughful Examination of the War in the Public Square
Comment: Robert George, Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, book is a thoughtful work on the battle between the secualr orthodox and religious orthdoox of American culture. Though a previous reviewer thinks Goerge uses general statements (I'm paraphasing here), I think George tries, and for the most part is succesful in developing a construct on what is secular orthodox in his first chapter. He even includes a good exchange with a secualrists John Dever and avoids traditioanl straw men arguments. Unlike many books that try and reach new heights in polemics, George keeps the tone fairly academic, while still asserting writing style that is enjoyable.
He correctly identifies people like John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin as liberal theorists who support a culture of death. Further, he includes Peter Singer, who chairs the bioethics program at Prineton as a proponent of the "Culture of Death." Yes, Singer and others are probably the extreme, but George is demonstarting that ideas have consequences and that they are only a little removed from the liberal secular perspective.
The book slows done when one enters the section of "The Courts." This section is well written and necessary, but a little dry. His strongest chapter here is "Natural Law and Human Rights."
His chapter on "The Church" is extremely well written. Although he draws heavely from Catholic traditions, all traditional Christians can agree with the depraved state he writes about, although they may disagree on the approach needed to stay the course.
Rating: 5
Summary: Political philosphy of the highest order
Comment: In The Clash of Orthodoxies, a limpidly written and deftly argued collections of essays, Robert George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and one of the most important natural-law philosophers of our time, wants "to show that Christians and other believers are right to defend their positions on key moral issues as rationally superior to the alternatives proposed by secular liberals and those within the religious denominations who have abandoned traditional moral principles in favor of secularist morality." He triumphantly succeeds in this ambitious endeavor, and as a result our understanding of the cultural and moral struggle that convulses our country is vastly enriched.
To select one example from the numerous ones available in the book, Professor George's essay "The Concept of Public Morality" is a masterly clarification of an area that has become a terrible intellectual mess, a situation engendered by the reckless libertarianism of both the left and right. For instance, pornography is now an unavaidable part of our daily lives, and Professor George rightly contends that "where pornography flourishes, as it does in our own culture, it erodes important shared public understandings of sexuality and sexual morality on which the health of the institutions of marriage and family life in any culture vitally depend. This is a classic case in which the accumulation of apparently private choices of private parties has big public consequences." The stability (or what little stability is left) of what Professor George calls our "moral ecology" depends on the restoration of this kind of understanding in the place of the prevailing relativism that thwarts any serious reflection on the notion of public morality.
Professor George brings to all the complicated questions he explores a fairmindedness coupled with a moral position utterly devoted to the cause of life and the vindication of human dignity. This view is in emphatic opposition to the culture of death that is at the center of secular orthodoxy. He summarizes his view with characteristic precision and elegance: "It is the liberalism . . . of the rule of law, democratic self-government, subsidiarity, social solidarity, private property, limited government, equal protection, and basic human freedoms, such as those of speech, press, assembly, and above all, religion. This . . . is a decidedly old-fashioned liberalism -- if you will, a 'conservative liberalism.' It is the liberalism of Lincoln and the American founders, of Newman and Chesterton, of the Second Vatican Council and Pope John Paul II: A liberalism of life."
Professor George makes his case for this "liberalism of life" with uncommon rigor and clarity. As America inevitably confronts complex moral and political issues that seriously threaten to undermine our humanity, the thinking found in The Clash of Orthodoxies is precisely the orthodoxy needed to advance a rational culture of life.
Rating: 5
Summary: Reason in Defense of Life
Comment: I can say without qualification that the Clash of Orthodoxies is one of the most important books of the last decade in the area of moral theory. There is simply no better reasoned case for the culture of life and no better examination of the philosophic heart of the debate between that culture and the many anti-life commitments of secular liberalism in contemporary America. In short, The Clash of Orthodoxies is an indispensable book, and it should be read by anyone who has an interest in engaging the moral arguments at the center of public discourse on the momentous topics of the culture of life.
Robert P. George is the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, one of the most prestigious political science chairs in the country; he serves as director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, a dynamic new program centered at Princeton University and dedicated to the pursuit of excellence in constitutional studies and political thought; and he holds advanced degrees in law and legal theory from Harvard and Oxford. As one might expect, George's defense of traditional moral values evinces a high degree of philosophic sophistication, rivaling that of any moral theorist writing across the political spectrum today, and he is more than a match for liberal and leftist moral theorists such as John Rawls and Peter Singer.
Even so, no potential reader of this book should allow George's philosophic sophistication to give him pause. Indeed, the Clash of Orthodoxies manages simultaneously to communicate the essential core of the philosophic disputes at the center of the culture wars today and yet remain at a level easily accessible to the general reader and thoughtful non-specialist. Another virtue of George's books is its overarching fairness. George is painstakingly accurate, fair, and perhaps even overly charitable in his exposition and critique of the views of such prominent secular liberal individualist moral theorists as John Rawls and Robert Nozick. In fact, George demonstrates the extraordinary level of his commitment to a truly rigorous conception of fairness and accuracy in political debate by including in his book the full text of article-length critiques of his own work (rather than mere summaries or selective quotations) by liberal scholars such as Josh Dever and James Fleming, a practice almost unheard of in a book of this sort. Moreover, George's highly sophisticated philosophic analysis of liberal thinkers such as John Rawls suggests he understands those thinkers as well or better than they understand themselves. George's erudition and razor-sharp analytic mind, at times, are breathtaking.
The scope of George's book is quite broad, and it is well organized into three sections, involving the "clash of orthodoxies" in the public square, in the courts, and in the Catholic Church. Each of the three sections is further sub-divided into discrete but related and complementary essays, which are ideal for dipping into and also make the book a useful reference tool. The section on the public square examines issues surrounding the culture of life, such as abortion, same-sex marriage, and the concept of public morality; the section on the courts examines a number of "life" issues related to the Constitution, the scope of judicial review, the legitimacy of the Supreme Court's abortion decisions, and the relationship of positive law to natural law; and the section on the Catholic Church involves a discussion of issues such as liberalism and Catholicism, abortion and Catholic political leaders, Catholic participation in debates over bio-ethics and public policy, and the relationship of faith and reason.
The last of these is directly related to George's main thesis in the Clash of Orthodoxies: The superiority as a matter of reason or rationality of traditional Judeo-Christian morality to its anti-life rival(s). As George, writes: "My criticism of secular liberal views is not that they are contrary to [religious] faith; it is that they fail the test of reason." Indeed, George demonstrates through a series of complex and sophisticated moral inquiries into areas such as abortion, homosexual conduct, euthanasia, and the nature of marriage that the values of moral traditionalism can vanquish secular liberalism on secular liberalism's own epistemic terms: the appeal to reasoned argument rather than to religious authority. In short, human reason confirms the moral soundness of the culture of life, reveals the moral errors at the heart of anti-life belief systems, and is thus life's first and best defense against the recent inroads of anti-life movements in the cultural, political, and judicial arenas
The challenge of social liberalism and the recognition of the need for forthright reasoned engagement of anti-life intellectuals in the public sphere has awakened a new interest in the natural law tradition among non-Catholics, and therefore while George's approach is a philosophical one squarely in the Catholic tradition, it will be of great interest to a wide variety of readers, including Protestants, Jews, and non-believers. As George himself has observed, even groups traditionally suspicious of natural law theorizing, such as American Evangelicals, are now "among the most eager and enthusiastic to learn about the philosophical resources available to defend Christian faith and morals." There is no better book with which to begin or continue that study than George's The Clash of Orthodoxies.
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Title: In Defense of Natural Law by Robert P. George ISBN: 0199242992 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: April, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Written on the Heart: The Case for Natural Law by J. Budziszewski ISBN: 083081891X Publisher: Intervarsity Press Pub. Date: June, 1997 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: What We Can't Not Know: A Guide by J. Budziszewski ISBN: 189062649X Publisher: Spence Pub Pub. Date: March, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.95 |
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