Happy New Year: reading recommendations

A happy 2015 to you all!

1) A draft programme for the Catholic Social Teaching Classes is now available here. As it is still draft, please check on the blog or with Elizabeth for updates. (See 'Newsflash' on right sidebar of blog.)

2) As everyone else seems to be doing this at this time of year, I thought I'd get some suggestions for 2015 reading. Please feel free to comment or to add your own suggestions!

Philippa Bonella
SCIAF Head of Communications and Education: 

1. Working together, SCIAF, Justice and Peace Scotland and Mission Matters Scotland have produced a resource on Catholic social teaching for parish groups.  A four week programme guides participants through prayer, learning key elements of CST and discussing how to put faith into action within a parish context.    http://www.justfaith.org.uk/resources



There’s also a 3 minute animation on CST for anyone who needs a refresher!


2. Some of the interventions at the recent UN General Assembly by the new Holy See representative are really worth a read.  I particularly recommend the document on poverty eradication – summarising Catholic teaching both current and timeless, in less than 2 pages! [PDF download here]


Elizabeth Drummond Young
Director, Albertus Institute:


Hospitality as Holiness: Christian Witness amid Moral Diversity, by Luke Bretherton (2010) Farnham: Ashgate ISBN: 9781409403494 p/bk £19.99 [Google Books record here.]

 Bretherton  wants to explore how hospitality can be a force for solving ethical disputes. There are two distinct parts to this book; the first is a theoretical discussion of the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and two theologians, Germain Grisez  and Oliver O’Donovan about how their philosophy makes room for  solving intractable issues. Bretherton  sides with O’Donovan, who emphasises the life of Christ on earth as the model for a Christian life. The second part  is  a case study of how hospitality can provide an answer to the  ethical dispute of whether euthanasia is an appropriate response to the terminally ill. Bretherton gives a distinctive Christian response against euthanasia and then uses the hospice movement as a instance of how the  Christian social practice of hospitality  is the way for Christians to relate to non-Christians in ethical disputes. A good example of a book which combines theory and practice. First part hard going if you  aren't a philosopher or theologian - probably best approached in the library with a coffee break or two but worth the effort!


Stephen Watt,
Tutor, Albertus Institute

1) Pierre Manent: Seeing Things Politically: Interviews with Benedicte Delorme-Montini (2015)

St Augustine's Press ISBN: 978-1587318139 h/b £17.84 [Amazon here]

This is either a bit of a cheat as a selection (as it hasn't been published in English yet) or an example of serendipity! I've long been an admirer of Manent who I think deserves to be better known in the UK as a political thinker. (An essay of his which introduces key themes in his thought is here.) I read the French version of these interviews in 2014, and was wondering whether to include them in this end of year 'booklist' when I realized that the English translation is coming out next year. As well as introducing some of Manent's thought, the interviews are a fascinating insight into the life of a key French Catholic intellectual. (And unlike many other French intellectuals, Manent writes clearly!)

2) Edward Feser: Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (2014) Editiones Scholasticae ISBN: 978-3-86838-544-1p/b £29.45 [Publisher's description here]

Feser has been a highly visible presence in the revival of neo-Thomism which seems to be taking place in the USA. (His blog [here] manages to combine a sure grasp of philosophical technicalities with biting wit when provoked.) With the publication of this manual of scholastic metaphysics, Feser provides an accessible account of the basics of the metaphysics of St Thomas Aquinas as seen by someone who has a firm grasp of modern analytic philosophy. This won't be an easy read for someone without a background in philosophy, but does at last provide a modern alternative to some of the introductory manuals in English which are showing their age! (For those who want a gentler introduction to the metaphysical issues, Feser's earlier (popular) The Last Superstition [Google books here] or (more academic) Aquinas [Google books here] are probably better alternatives.)

Happy Christmas

           A very happy Christmas to all readers of this blog and to all friends of the Institute!

Human Rights Day 2014

Happy Human Rights Day! (Details here.)

I'll admit that I had no idea it was human rights day today until I happened to come across a mention online. Although it celebrates a particular document -the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights- it provides an opportunity for all of us to reflect more widely on human rights.

Catholic teaching on human rights is centred firmly on the dignity of the person. (A helpful page summarising some key points of this teaching can be found here.) The question of how to express this fundamental good in national and international law is rather trickier: given the inevitable compromises and difficulties in getting agreement between people (and peoples) of different backgrounds, inevitably the depths and details of such teaching are almost impossible to institutionalise completely and satisfactorily. However, the Church has been broadly supportive of the UNDHR. As St John Paul the Great stated in Pacem in Terris [here]:


143. A clear proof of the farsightedness of this organization [ie the UN] is provided by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1948. The preamble of this declaration affirms that the genuine recognition and complete observance of all the rights and freedoms outlined in the declaration is a goal to be sought by all peoples and all nations.

144. We are, of course, aware that some of the points in the declaration did not meet with unqualified approval in some quarters; and there was justification for this. Nevertheless, We think the document should be considered a step in the right direction, an approach toward the establishment of a juridical and political ordering of the world community. It is a solemn recognition of the personal dignity of every human being; an assertion of everyone's right to be free to seek out the truth, to follow moral principles, discharge the duties imposed by justice, and lead a fully human life. It also recognized other rights connected with these.

So let's celebrate the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights as a 'step in the right direction'. But let us also be mindful of the fact that these rights are binding not just because (in various ways) they have been taken into the body of international law, but because they rest on truths about human nature and its worth that remain true whatever any particular country or individual or international body thinks. And let's also remember that this vision of true human dignity is often countercultural, both because it is based on timeless truths about human nature often disregarded by particular ages or cultures, but also because it takes account of the supernatural end of human life in the Beatific Vision after death. It can, for example, as in Masaccio's painting of the Crucifixion of St Peter (above), find an image of the height of human dignity in the violent death of a man hanging upside down.


Further reading:

The following paper isn't an easy read (if you're struggling, skip ahead to sections III and IV (starting at p.53)). But it gives a good account of the understandings of human dignity in the works of St Thomas Aquinas and St John Paul:


Aguas, J.J.S. (2009) 'The Notions of the Human Person and Human Dignity in Aquinas and Wojtyla', in Kritike, vol. 3, no 1 (June), pp.40-60.


(PDF downloadable here.)

It's a Wonderful Life...?

Whilst Catholics are still in the penitential season of Advent, the secular world has already begun  what seems to be the 100 days of Christmas, ending some time around mid afternoon on 25 December with the ritual doze in front of the Queen's Speech.

And with this extended season comes numerous screenings of It's a Wonderful Life. (For those of you not familiar with the film, Wikipedia's article is here.) I was amused recently to find a discussion of the film by the Catholic political scientist, Carson Holloway. (Link here.) Although it's a discussion set firmly in the context of American politics (but then, isn't the film itself set firmly in an American context?), it does have much to provoke thought on wider Catholic principles. A taster:


Finally, we might consider the standards that guide Bailey’s service to his fellow men. Why does he think it’s important to help them buy homes for their families? Bailey follows his father’s example, which is more than merely traditional. When Peter Bailey tries to convince his son to work at the Building and Loan, he justifies its work by appealing to human nature. He tells him that the institution’s work helps to satisfy a “fundamental urge,” that it is something “deep in the race” for a man to want his own, privately owned home. This standard found in human nature supplies the Baileys, father and son, with a standard of goodness, of what constitutes true human flourishing, that teaches them how to do good for their fellow men. The things that are good are the things that are experienced as good by human beings as such, and not merely the things that any particular set of human beings might happen to desire.

Contemporary American liberalism has largely rejected such standards of goodness as unduly restrictive and even oppressive. Fixed standards rooted in human nature might require that society say “no” to some disordered desires that are incompatible with our nature. Our liberalism, however, recoils from such discipline, because it is incompatible with liberalism’s egalitarianism, its insistence that all ways of life and all desires must be regarded as equally acceptable.

I'll let you read the whole piece and decide what you make of it yourself. (Comments welcome!) One reaction I had (to the film and the essay) is that it reminded me of some comments by Yves Simon (in ch5 of his Philosophy of Democratic Government here).

The description of the family found in Aristotle's Politics (Book i) is that of an institution dedicated to the welfare of man in the needs and acts of daily life; with regard to such needs and acts, the family aims at self-sufficiency. [...] the Aristotelian description remained until recently the pattern followed by the rural family. It is hardly necessary to stress the advantages of a system which incloses the whole cycle of wealth, from ownership of the land to the use of the product, within a small unit in which strong feelings of friendship make possible an almost complete community of goods. Such a system rules out the infuriating disorders, so intensely resented by the men of the twentieth century, resulting from the nondistribution of the available product.

So very much the heart of the film: small town America with a close community life, based on a stable family. But Simon goes on:

However, the superiority of rural life with regard to community feelings does not hold in all respects and is not unqualified. In old-fashioned rural families, community feelings are generally restricted to a narrow group and are accompanied by isolationist dispositions which may prove acutely antisocial. Intense devotion to the family often combines with readiness to treat the rest of the world as foreign and hostile; the sense of justice is often uncertain when the partner does not belong to the family circle or to the native community, which is confusedly identified with the family. Besides its general inconveniences, such an attitude of distrust beyond the limits of a small circle is exceedingly harmful to democracy. It makes impossible the normal operation of two essential organs of democratic life -- the party and the labor union. In societies where family feelings are so exclusive as to arouse distrust of every outsider, political parties turn to cliques, and exploitation thrives on unorganized labor.

I think that's my main worry about the film. It portrays the intimacy of small town life well and the Catholic value of solidarity within that context. However, it says little about how to live out principles such as solidarity in a wider, more complex context (and those wider, more complex contexts cannot simply be wished away). For example, the focus of the film is perhaps the Buildings and Loan Association which throughout is threatened by a Scrooge like figure (Mr Potter) and ultimately saved by a whip-round among the townsfolk. All good mythical stuff -and much that can be translated into talk of subsidiarity. But by portraying banking in a moral fable, does the film encourage us to ignore the real problems of international finance (and a globalized economy) and the difficulty of easy solutions, in favour of a pantomime of heroes and villains?

Answers in the comments box please!

Future posts will deal with other Christmassy themes such Heideggerian authenticity in Elf. :-)