2004 and Beyond

As many of you know, I have strong thoughts about this election and the current differences between the Democratic and Republican parties. I am much more passionate, however, about our common CST project, which transcends politics, political parties, and this election year. The Church's social teaching will always be in tension (and hopefully dialogue) with the state and the political parties. As Catholic lawyers and academics who are committed to the Catholic faith and the Social Teaching that flows from that faith, we can use our talents to tease out the implications of Catholic Social Teaching for the law in a pluralistic secular state, confront specific structures of injustice, and work to expose the danger of building a society of liberty and equality for all on the sandy foundation of the autonomous individual while proposing a vibrant and viable alternative rooted in a Catholic understanding of the human person.

To be sure, this election is part of that puzzle, but to my mind it is but a small part of the attempt to transform our culture from a culture of death (in all its forms - abortion, materialism, etc) into a culture of life that values the dignity of each individual and that understands that the common good is something more than the aggregate of individual preferences and desires.

On all fronts, we have our work cut out for us. Just as an example, last weekend, I judged ten or twelve high school Lincoln-Douglas value debate rounds where the issue pitted individual liberty v. the common good. Not surprisingly every debater (including the ones from the Catholic high school) viewed liberty through the prism of liberal individualism and every debater viewed the common good as the aggregate of individual conceptions of the good.

My question to my fellow bloggers, how do we re-introduce an alternate (and more realistic) conception of the person and society into a culture that largely has not been trained to hear or make sense of our arguments? In other words, how do we get traction? Paolo, does Luigi Guisanni have any insights that might help us here?