Reflections on "Universal Absolutes"

Abstract

On the grounds of an (essentially) Roman Catholic moral theology and political philosophy, Michael J. Perry states and argues for positions that vindicate the accent of recent popes on human rights as both a matter of faith and of reason—positions I believe to be largely valid and that could gain even stronger support from a Reformed Christian philosophical theology. This should not be surprising, for the Catholic tradition was the common tradition for centuries, it deeply stamped the legal structure of the West that gave rise to “rights talk,” and those strands which led to human rights in its modern form were implicitly in it, even if they were strengthened by the struggles of Protestants to establish a right to convert and, later, to advocate the freedom of religion on spiritual, intellectual, and organization grounds. Perry knows, as most Catholic and Protestants believe, that social morality is unavoidably linked to religion, that these matters can be discussed in public discourse, and that it is fateful for politics, law, social well-being and international relationships to do so. These matters are made clear not only in this book, but also in his earlier Love and Power: The Role of Religion and Morality in American Politics, The Constitution and the Courts: Law or Politics and Religion in Politics: Constitutional and Moral Perspectives. In the present book, as in the other remarkable products of this decade, we find Perry engaged not only with contemporary political philosophy and jurisprudence, which are largely secular in outlook, but with a number of scholars who are concerned with what David Tracy has called “public theology,” a term which several Protestants as well as Catholics have adopted—although in somewhat different ways.