No natural lawyer in the classical natural law tradition derives an ought from an is because, when it comes to practical reason, natural lawyers do not derive ought. Rather, they begin with the first principles of practical reason, which are underived. They then use these principles together with an understanding of the nature of the thing at hand to arrive at moral conclusions.
The restoration of Western civilization from its present travails requires getting the story right. Gregg’s Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization may be the most important recent work in this area, offering an important corrective to the other stories on offer.
It was Christianity, not modernity, that separated church and state. It was modernity, not Christianity, that sought to bind them back together. And, at day’s end, the American order has more in keeping with the Christian apostasy than with either antiquity’s sacral political orders or modernity’s rejection of the claim that there exists any domain outside the jurisdiction of the modern state.
Because he accepts a Straussian framework that sees modernity rather than Christianity as the major turning point of Western history, Rod Dreher underestimates the influence of Christian and classical thought on the American founding.
Strauss’s account of reason and revelation seems to depend for its intelligibility on an account of knowledge—upon an epistemic method and a noetic structure—itself ultimately unintelligible.
When we think of Jesus as providing a model for behavior for the religious, private, or civic realm but not for politics and government, we adopt a fragmentation utterly foreign to the New Testament.
Though it is often criticized as being based on Hobbesian principles, James Madison’s constitutional theory is basically Thomistic.
Decisions of the Supreme Court that go beyond power delegated to the judicial branch or are contrary to the Constitution are null and void. To protect our constitutional republic, citizens, states, and the other branches of the federal government must resist any such decision.