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R.J. Snell

R.J. Snell is Editor-in-Chief of Public Discourse and Director of Academic Programs at the Witherspoon Institute. Previously, he was for many years Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Philosophy Program at Eastern University and the Templeton Honors College, where he founded and directed the Agora Institute for Civic Virtue and the Common Good.

He earned his M.A. in philosophy at Boston College, and his Ph.D. in philosophy at Marquette University. His research interests include the liberal arts, ethics, natural law theory, Thomas Aquinas, the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the work of Bernard Lonergan, SJ.

Snell is the author of Through a Glass Darkly: Bernard Lonergan and Richard Rorty on Knowing without a God’s-eye View (Marquette, 2006), Authentic Cosmopolitanism (with Steve Cone, Pickwick, 2013), The Perspective of Love: Natural Law in a New Mode (Pickwick, 2014), Acedia and Its Discontents (Angelico, 2015), and co-editor of Subjectivity: Ancient and Modern (Lexington, 2016) and Nature: Ancient and Modern (Lexington), as well as articles, chapters, and essays in a variety of scholarly and popular venues. He and his family reside in the Princeton area.

A Bridge to Nowhere: Fr. James Martin and the Catholic/LGBT Divide

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Fr. James Martin, SJ, has attempted to build a bridge between the Catholic Church and the LGBT community, but by shirking the difficulty of confrontation, he has traded genuine encounter for a thin and generic substitute.

Swastikas and Safety Pins: The Grim Heritage of Identity Politics

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A war of every group against every other is the sine qua non of identity politics. The peacefulness of classical liberalism is rejected root and branch, for war is the goal.

Rebuilding Cultural and Intellectual Life: An Invitation to Witherspoon’s Summer Seminars

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The Witherspoon Institute’s summer seminars help the university accomplish its purpose: to teach students to work together to pursue truth with humility and dedication.

Against Pious Nihilism: C.S. Lewis on Natural Law

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For many, the Narnia stories were their first exposure to the goodness of God and his creation. While they called us to move “further in and further up” to things that were more real and solid than these Shadowlands we now inhabit, they did so by calling us to attend to the traces of the divine already present in the created order.

Universities and the Dangers of Docility

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We need docile teachers and students, those unafraid of the fundamental questions and the highest things: those who want truth.

Better to Give than to Receive: Catholicism and the Enlightenment

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In science and philosophy, politics and society, the Enlightenment and the Faith could and did bring mutual intelligibility to each other, showing no intrinsic incompatibility—“faith cannot collide with enlightened reason,” a new book reminds us, for truth cannot contradict truth.

Ancient Wisdom in Barren Times

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Far too many of us, even the most tender and gentle, have absorbed the hypothesis that a refusal of life is the condition of love.
Public Discourse

No Longer Calm, But Alive: Robert Royal’s Catholic Humanism

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Robert Royal makes the case that, despite a twentieth-century period of confusion and fragmentation, Christian humanism has been renewed and revitalized, so that today it is “as alive as it has ever been.”
Public Discourse

Prudence and Moral Absolutes

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Refusing to make exceptions to absolute moral norms is not unrealistic, imprudent, or inhumane. The purpose of norms is to promote human flourishing and protect what is good
Public Discourse

Blind Resentment

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The struggle against Catholicism in today’s culture is not particularly about religion. It is a revolt against reason and reality. Many have internalized such resentment that they are unable to see truth.
Public Discourse

Rehabbing Authenticity in an Ideological Age

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We can only define ourselves authentically in terms of, in Charles Taylor’s words, a “backdrop of things that matter”—a set of values that transcend our arbitrary choices. The second of a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Authenticity and the End of Rhetoric

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Our current jargon of “authenticity” is an affront to political friendship—it demands that others always capitulate to our claims, and makes not doing so tantamount to harm. The first of a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Natural Law is neither Useless nor Dangerous: A Response to Hart and Potemra

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A recent claim to reject the natural law for its uselessness and false claims to neutrality misunderstands the first-personal perspective of contemporary natural law. The second in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Understanding Natural Law: A Response to Hart and Potemra

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A recent claim to reject the natural law risks misunderstanding the role of reason and overlooks the difference between practical reasoning and morality. The first in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Reason and Compassion in the Marriage Debate

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In their book What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George draw our attention to the question that matters most in the marriage debate—what marriage is—and make a reasonable and compassionate argument for marriage as a one-man one-woman union.
Public Discourse

Saving Natural Law from Itself

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Naïve proponents and skeptics of the natural law often point to the world “out there” as the source of objective truth (or lack thereof), but the truths of the natural law are to be found through the actions of our intellect.
Public Discourse

Liberal Love and Sargent Shriver

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It’s far too easy when bickering about this or that policy, and particularly when the policy is morally charged, to miss the values modeled by good men and women when we disagree on the means.
Public Discourse

Is the Natural Law Persuasive?

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One can neither deny nor question the natural law’s persuasiveness except by asking questions, conducting inquiries, achieving understandings, reaching judgments, and making choices—all of which are the natural law at work.
Public Discourse

Intelligible Goods, Marriage, and Intellectual Conversion

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Unless we ask the “what” and “why” in ethical debate, we aren’t doing ethics. Debating ethics requires intellectual conversion and thus a commitment to intelligible reality.
Public Discourse

Protest and Reason

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In order to stop our present decline, we must transcend our natural tendency to retreat into factions and instead begin to sacrifice for the common good.
Public Discourse

Offense and Criticism in the Marriage Debates

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To take offense does not free us from further argument or criticism. Instead, offense demands ongoing criticism between partners in ethical discourse as a recognition of their fundamental human equality.
Public Discourse

Bored to Death

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We live in days of distraction.
Public Discourse

Sex Gone Wrong

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On the dualism of degrading desire.
Public Discourse

The Shock of Recognition

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Newly defined and vigorously enforced rights have proliferated even as they are uprooted from any philosophic grounding.
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