Sabtu, 01 September 2012

The Challenge of Catholic Thought

What studies have followed Patrick Allitt's excellent 1993 book, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics?  I admire the work of Kristin Heyer who continues to write very interesting stuff on the prophetic witness of the Catholic Church since the mid-1980s.  And there are collections of books, many of them filled with essays on law and natural law, on Catholic critiques of liberalism.  But has there been a book that takes the straight-up intellectual history approach of Allitt's volume to the period after 1983?

I ask because I am working through questions about the kind of vacuum that Richard John Neuhaus's The Naked Public Square seemed to fill.  In searching for studies that consider the infighting among Catholics in the mid-1980s and the stark difference that appeared to grow between Catholic intellectuals over issues of war and peace; poverty and wealth; and justice and rights, I have yet to find a volume that does what Allitt's did for the period from Buckley to Michael Novak.  Novak is a case in point: has there been a good study of his transition from the left to the right to the halls of political power?

I pasted a photo of John Courtney Murray in this post because it seems that all post-1945 Catholic thought touches upon his influence in moving Catholics intellectuals toward a new understanding of their relationship to the nation.  Neuhaus seemed to position himself as Murray's successor, but here again, I can't find much on this particular connection.

Like my post proposing a bibliography for the New Christian Left, I wonder if we might consider a list on either the New Catholic Right or the schism in Catholic thought.

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