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Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence
The Mighty Work Of Making Nations Happy: A Response To James Davison Hunter, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
The Mighty Work Of Making Nations Happy: A Response To James Davison Hunter, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Working Paper Series
This article is an invited response to James Davison Hunter’s much-discussed book To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2010). Hunter, a sociologist at UVA and a believing Protestant, claims that law’s capacity to contribute to social change is “mostly illusory” and that Christians, therefore, should practice “faithful presence” in the public square rather than seek to influence law directly. My response is that it is, in fact, law’s stunning ability to alter and limit available choices that makes it an object of deservedly fierce contest. The wild …
Subsidiarity In The Tradition Of Catholic Social Doctrine, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Subsidiarity In The Tradition Of Catholic Social Doctrine, Patrick Mckinley Brennan
Working Paper Series
This chapter is an invited contribution to the first English-language comparative study of subsidiarity, M. Evans and A. Zimmerman (eds.), Subsidiarity in Comparative Perspective (forthcoming Springer, 2013). The concept of subsidiarity does work in many and varied legal contexts today, but the concept originated in Catholic social doctrine. The Catholic understanding of subsidiarity (or subsidiary function) is the subject of this chapter. Subsidiarity is often described as a norm calling for the devolution of power or for performing social functions at the lowest possible level. In Catholic social doctrine, it is neither. Subsidiarity is the fixed and immovable ontological principle …