Forthcoming: A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism?

Dan Philpott and Ryan Anderson have announced the forthcoming publication of a compilation of 70 years of articles from the Review of Politics. A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism: Perspectives from the Review of Politics is due out from University of Notre Dame Press later this spring.

Here's the summary of the book on Amazon:

In A Liberalism Safe for Catholicism?, editors Daniel Philpott and Ryan Anderson chronicle the relationship between the Catholic Church and American liberalism as told through twenty-seven essays selected from the history of the Review of Politics, dating back to the journal’s founding in 1939. The primary subject addressed in these essays is the development of a Catholic political liberalism in response to the democratic environment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. Works by Jacques Maritain, Heinrich Rommen, and Yves R. Simon forge the case for the compatibility of Catholicism and American liberal institutions, including the civic right of religious freedom. The conversation continues through recent decades, when a number of Catholic philosophers called into question the partnership between Christianity and American liberalism and were debated by others who rejoined with a strenuous defense of the partnership. The book also covers a wide range of other topics, including democracy, free market economics, the common good, human rights, international politics, and the thought of John Henry Newman, John Courtney Murray, and Alasdair MacIntyre, as well as some of the most prominent Catholic thinkers of the last century, among them John Finnis, Michael Novak, and William T. Cavanaugh. This book will be of special interest to students and scholars of political science, journalists and policymakers, church leaders, and everyday Catholics trying to make sense of Christianity in modern society.

As a student of the late Fr. Ernie Fortin's, I'm especially happy to see John Finnis' (specially commissioned) response to Fortin's 1982 review of Natural Law and Natural Rights. Finnis pre-released his response to Fortin last year in the American Journal of Jurisprudence, writing:

Of the published reviews of Natural Law and Natural Rights, one of the most, and most enduringly, influential was Ernest Fortin's review-article "The New Rights Theory and the Natural Law" (1982). The present essay takes the occasion of that review's latest republication [in the Philpott/Anderson book] to respond to its main criticisms of the theory of natural law and natural or human rights that is articulated in Natural Law and Natural Rights.

Perhaps one of Fr. Fortin's students will take up the good priest's mantle and offer a response.