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R.J. Snell

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bored to Death

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We live in days of distraction.

Sex Gone Wrong

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On the dualism of degrading desire.

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.

Marriage and the Law of Tradition

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Custom and tradition, far from being necessarily irrational, are often the vehicles of guiding and binding reason.

Universities and the Graciousness of Being

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Civility is at the foundation of democratic society, but our educational institutions have lost their manners and the grace of gentility.

Remembering the Pill

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The fiftieth anniversary of oral contraceptives is a reminder of all the things the Pill lets us forget.

Desires Natural and Unnatural: A Reply to Paul Griffiths

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A recent First Things article on natural law misses the mark.

Bad Reason and the ‘Manhattan Declaration’

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A good deal of online commentary about a recent ecumenical statement misunderstands the nature of human reason.
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