Liberal Ideology, An Eternal No; Liberal Institutions, A Temporal Yes? And Further Questions

Abstract

Michael Baxter's long review provides an outline of David Schindler's useful first book; concentrates on its treatment of John Courtney Murray; gives a free pass to its lengthy ontological and theological speculations; and calls attention to its impracticality. Like Baxter, I share de Lubac's view of grace and nature (mediated to me by three Jesuits, Henry Bouillard, Juan Alfaro, and Bernard Lonergan), although I draw from it practical applications quite different from those of Schindler and Baxter. Further, I agree with the main thrust of Baxter's criticism: just where one wants to test Schindler's grand hypotheses about how grace ought to work in a “civilization of love,” particularly with regard to politics and economics, Schindler has almost nothing practical to say, and such few gestures as he offers seem lamely indistinguishable from those he criticizes, for example Murray (on the First Amendment) and Richard John Neuhaus (on the public square). His reading of my own work, too, is excessively polemical.