Catholic Conservativism
By Mark Edwards
One of our friends at the USIH blog, Raymond Haberski, author of God and War: American Civil Religion since 1945, recently posted a historiographical question that I thought (with his permission) was good for us to consider. You can find his full post here. His opening question is below:
What studies have followed Patrick Allitt's excellent 1993 book, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics? I admire the work of Kristin Heyer who continues to write very interesting stuff on the prophetic witness of the Catholic Church since the mid-1980s. And there are collections of books, many of them filled with essays on law and natural law, on Catholic critiques of liberalism. But has there been a book that takes the straight-up intellectual history approach of Allitt's volume to the period after 1983?
And, if we can't identify such studies, why not? Are Catholic conservatives being neglected in the rush to profile evangelical conservative personalities and institutions?
I've also been meaning to put a plug in for USIH's Annual Meeting at the Graduate Center in New York, November 1-2. As you can see from the conference progam, organizers have assembled an all-star lineup with a number of promising panels and plenary addresses on the subject of religion.
One of our friends at the USIH blog, Raymond Haberski, author of God and War: American Civil Religion since 1945, recently posted a historiographical question that I thought (with his permission) was good for us to consider. You can find his full post here. His opening question is below:
What studies have followed Patrick Allitt's excellent 1993 book, Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics? I admire the work of Kristin Heyer who continues to write very interesting stuff on the prophetic witness of the Catholic Church since the mid-1980s. And there are collections of books, many of them filled with essays on law and natural law, on Catholic critiques of liberalism. But has there been a book that takes the straight-up intellectual history approach of Allitt's volume to the period after 1983?
And, if we can't identify such studies, why not? Are Catholic conservatives being neglected in the rush to profile evangelical conservative personalities and institutions?
I've also been meaning to put a plug in for USIH's Annual Meeting at the Graduate Center in New York, November 1-2. As you can see from the conference progam, organizers have assembled an all-star lineup with a number of promising panels and plenary addresses on the subject of religion.
Comments
That said the liberal/conservative fault line in Catholicism is very quirky and doesn't easily line up with the widely understood political/cultural version. That makes it very difficult to really document