Conference on Catholic Social Thought and the Law 2004

Many of the members of this blog group participated in a conference held at Villanova in October 2003 on the topic of "Catholic Social Thought and the Law." The papers from this conference will be published in Villanova's new interdisciplinary journal, the Journal of Catholic Social Thought. As the papers are edited, we will post some of them in our sidebar. Next year's conference (October 2004) will be on the meanings of subsidiarity for the law. Subsidiarity is a key concept in Catholic Social Thought and, interestingly, has both right and left interpretations. The right uses it to emphasize the importance of intermediary private institutions as means of restraining the power of the state; the left finds in it a basis for emphasizing the communitarian nature of those intermediary institutions (and urges state support for them). European Catholic Social Thought theorists have elaborated the concept far more than Americans. We hope to explore subsidiarity's implications in a variety of fields, and invite proposals for paper. Contact Mark Sargent at Villanova directly if interested.