Human rights, virtue, and the common good: untimely meditations on religion and politics

Product Description


Volume Three of
Ernest Fortin: Collected Essays discusses the current state of Christianity--especially twentieth-century Catholic Christianity--and the problems with which it has had to wrestle in the midst of rapid scientific progress, profound social change, and growing moral anarchy. In this volume, Fortin discusses such topics as Christianity and the liberal democratic ethos; Christianity, science, and the arts; Ancients and Moderns; papal social thought; virtue and liberalism; pagan and Christian virtue; and the American Catholic church and politics.


Review


Ernest Fortin possesses that rare combination, found only in the greatest thinkers, of both immense learning and a playful intellect. His essays are grounded, but not confined, in tradition; they are scholarly, but not pedantic. They are eloquent testimony to the eros of the mind. (Glendon, Mary Ann)

Such deep and wide learning is rare enough. But the cumulative effect of bringing together all these valuable contributions is to let us see something rarer still: the life of a mind that is humane, lucid, and wise. (Lerner, Ralph)

Ernest Fortin has a place of honor at the table of quiet erudition and uncompromising curiosity where adults try to understand how the world went crazy, and what might be done about it. If we are ever so much more fortunate than we deserve, younger scholars will follow Fortin in what is best described as the path of wisdom. (Rev. Richard John Neuhaus)

These three volumes are fundamental contributions to the problem of modernity. In his analysis of rights, Catholic social thought, the state, and general questions of justice, Ernest Fortin has penetrated to the core of the misplaced ideologies and enthusiams that have appeared in religious circles...Fortin is one of the few thinkers who take everything into consideration--experience, history, philosophy, revelation, the tradition of reason. (Schall, James V.)

A grand champion of reasoned faith and faithful reason, Ernest Fortin lets us hear the Christian voice in political philosophy with all its eloquence and subtlety. Fortin has erudition and wit and generosity of spirit, and he is also that rarity, an observer of the political scene who does justice to both the here and now and the everywhere and always. (McWilliams, Wilson Carey)


About the Author


Father Ernest L. Fortin, one of the nation's foremost thinkers in the fields of philosophy and theology, is Professor of Theology at Boston College, and the author and editor of numerous books on ancient and medieval philosophy and religion.