Welcome to the Ethics and Culture Forum, the new web "blog" of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture!

When we were designing our new website last Spring, one of our chief aims was to make our site more than just a place to get information on our conferences. We also wanted to make it a place where active discussion takes place on various issues of the day relating to the Center's mission. Hence we are very pleased to launch the Ethics & Culture Forum, which in fact will be just one of several new opportunities for live discussion on our new wesbite.

The discussion in the Ethics and Culture Forum will occur among a team of contributors, a team led by Center Director, David Solomon, and including John Haldane, Christopher Wolfe, Janet Smith, Pia di Solenni, Brad Lewis, Tom Cavanaugh, Mike Garvey, Nicholas Lund-Molfese, Kevin Ryan, John O'Callaghan, and myself, Daniel McInerny. We are very proud that this select group has agreed to join us in this enterprise. With their participation, the Ethics and Culture Forum promises to be a place where a rich and vibrant discussion takes place on how the Catholic intellectual and moral tradition can best help renew our culture.

Readers of the Forum are always welcome to e-mail their own comments to a Forum contributor at the address posted at the bottom of that contributor's post. Such comments, however, only become part of the Forum itself at the discretion of the Forum contributor and the staff of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.

Before I close this initial post, let me mention two books that readers of this Forum will want to note well, if they haven't already. The first is Tracey Rowland's Culture and the Thomist Tradition After Vatican II (Routledge, 2003). In this book Rowland argues that throughout the West the Church is at a crisis point in which it must recognize that the cultural structures surrounding it are either implicitly or explicitly inimical to her mission. To think that the Church can accommodate itself without compromise to the political, economic, and other cultural forces that characterize post-Christian, liberal democracies is for Rowland a naive and dangerous illusion from which Catholics must liberate themselves. The chief resource in this work of liberation is, Rowland claims, the Thomistic tradition, yet the ambivalence of this tradition vis-a-vis its attitude to modernity, she further claims, has jeopardized its ability to serve as the appropriate sign of contradiction to the times.

The second book is one by Forum contributor and Center Advisory Board member, John Haldane, entitled Faithful Reason: Essays Catholic and Philosophical (Routledge 2004). The essays in this collection deal with topics ranging from Catholicism and philosophy, faith and reason, ethics and politics, education and spirituality, and beauty and contemplation. Readers of this Forum will no doubt find the whole collection of considerable interest, though I would like to highlight two essays in particular: "Natural Law and Ethical Pluralism," and "Can a Catholic Be a Liberal? Catholic Social Teaching and Communitarianism." At the conclusion of the latter Haldane writes:

"Finally, then, my answer to the question posed in the title is that someone who follows the social teaching of the Catholic Church, as this has been developed out of the dominant 'Thomistic' trend in scholastic natural law theory and promulgated through the relevant papal encyclicals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, cannot accept the central doctrines of philosophical liberalism....Viewed more positively, the Catholic has reason to reflect upon the course of recent political theory and history--including the collapse of totalitarian socialism--and take satisfaction from the fact that the world seems to be learning what the Church has long been teaching. We need a truly social philosophy, in which the goods of communal life are combined with the legitimate liberties of private interests."

Both of these books deserve a wide and careful reading.

Daniel McInerny
mcinerny.3@nd.edu