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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.

Coherence, Calvinball, and the Consistent Ethic of Life

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A consistent life ethic (CLE) should consider the totality of an act: not simply the consequences, but also the intention, the object chosen, and the circumstances of the act. Charles Camosy deserves our respect for boldly declaring the case for CLE, but the devil remains in the details. Without agreement on those details, the consistent life ethic remains as unpredictable and random as Calvinball.
Spa

Pampering or Truth? What Makes for a Worthy Life

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We stewards of the western tradition have good answers for what makes life worth living. If only we could be imaginative enough to give new voice to those ancient truths and avoid the stultifying fate of pampered souls.
Nones

The Nones: Education without Divinity or Selfhood

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If questions of ultimate meaning and purpose are shuttled to the side, as they are in so many of our schools and colleges, the various disciplines and domains of knowledge can never attain a unifying vision.

It’s Worse Than You Suspect: We Can’t Think our Way Out of Decline

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Given our splintered, irresolute wills, Alan Jacobs’s concept of thinking that “we can do better,” even if “we ought to,” is not enough. It’s going to take more than hope and a checklist.

A Decade of Acceleration and Resentment: The Cultural Impact of an Ideology of Equality

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If there is one thing that the prophets of egalitarian ideology cannot abide, it is the true and sincere believer in normativity—the person who judges that we are, each and every one of us, beholden to exercise our freedom in keeping with a higher law.

Rob Rieman, Joseph Pieper, and the Existential Poverty of the West

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Joseph Pieper knows what Rob Riemen has forgotten: the existential poverty of the West cannot be evaded or solved through humanism, for no ersatz god gives meaning to our poetry, song, dance, and drama. Absent God, it is all vapor, lacking the goodness to which we respond in wonder, delight, joy, and feasting.

Ross Douthat, Pope Francis, and the Future of the Catholic Church

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When it comes to the Catholic Church, there’s a quiet sense that the Vatican thinks in centuries, that a thirty-year crisis will hardly matter in time. Perhaps this time is different. But we don’t know, and Ross Douthat is honest enough to leave us hanging, waiting for the next installment of the Church’s story to be told.

Power, Preference, and Morality: On Alasdair MacIntyre’s Latest

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Despite the frustrating sense that much of its argument is asserted rather than demonstrated, there can be no doubt that those involved in the cultural disputes of our day ought to know Alasdair MacIntyre’s new book.

Betraying Liberal Education: A Response to President Paxson of Brown University

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Today’s universities are allergic to making substantive claims about what it means to live well in a good society. But liberal education, rightly understood, is a long, arduous apprenticeship of self-mastery.

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.
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