Jurist Samuel von Pufendorf made important contributions to the study of law in light of the political realities created in the aftermath of the Thirty Years' War. As a young student of ethics and politics, Pufendorf was impressed by the natural-law theory of Hugo Grotius. A faithful Lutheran all his life, Pufendorf's overriding concern was to harmonize the insights of early Enlightenment political thinking with Christian theology. In 1660 he was appointed professor of natural law at the University of Heidelberg. In 1667 he moved to the University of Lund, where he wrote his influential work, Of the Law of Nature and Nations,...

John Calvin, reflecting on the truths found in “secular writers,” concluded that “the mind of man, though fallen and perverted from its wholeness, is nevertheless clothed and ornamented with God's excellent gifts” (Institutes, ii.2.15). Richard Mouw, in He Shines in All That's Fair (the text of his 2000 Stob Lectures), exhorts us to take hold of this insight, lest we miss in this world signs of God's common grace.

Mouw begins with the question, “What is it that Christians can assume they have in common with people who have not experienced the saving grace that draws a sinner into a restored relationship with God?” Answering this question of commonality is of “particular importance” for discerning the form of “Christian involvement in public life in...

Islam is a vast religion, boasting millions of adherents, spanning large areas of the globe, and encompassing thirteen centuries of history. Muslims are united in their belief in the one transcendent, immanent God of pure singularity. They hold the Qur'an to be the literal word of God, eternally coexisting with God, and transmitted to all the prophets beginning with Adam, but only purely, undefiled, and completely to Muhammad, the Seal of the Prophets. Islam spread by the sword, proselytization, spiritual example, and financial incentive.

In its first six centuries, Islam was wracked by civil war, conquest, and invasion. Those first centuries also saw Islamic civilization in its full flower, highlighted by universities, philosophy, law, science, art, and literature. Political instability was no barrier to...

The conceptual distinction between the exercise of authority and the exercise of power provides an essential guide to understanding the present and future status of Christendom, which has not been abolished but, rather, has taken on new forms in our times. The Second Vatican Council, in its document Lumen Gentium, clarified that the Kingdom of God is not a place or a government, much less an earthly end-state arrived at through the political process. Instead, it is “established by Christ as a communion of life, charity and truth; it is also used by him as an instrument for the redemption of all and is sent forth into the whole world as the light of the world and the salt of the earth.“ Its ecclesiastical manifestation is the pilgrim church that ”buds and grows until the time for the harvest” (cf. Mk. 4:26–29),...

A committed Roman Catholic, Robert Kraynak has produced one of the most significant political books for American Catholics since John Courtney Murray's We Hold These Truths. A professor of political theory at Colgate University, Kraynak deserves mention along with Murray, Jacques Maritain, and Reinhold Niebuhr as a thoughtful commentator on the most profound of issues. His work will shake any reader, secular or faithful, to rethink the relationship between one's citizenship and one's faith.

“We must face the disturbing dilemma that modern liberal democracy needs God, but God is not as liberal or as democratic as we would like Him to be” (italics in original). Kraynak's argument, presented initially as the Frank M. Covey Lectures at Loyola University, carefully combines sober analysis of church...

How many times in the past months have we been struck by the expansive scope and seemingly endless depth of evil? In the midst of something so heinous, so diabolical, can the hand of the One whose finger is said to write straight with crooked lines be detected?

As the stories of the orphans and their grief are told and retold, whether in our national media or in our kitchens, there is lurking in each telling and retelling the ominous question underneath it all: Why?

Not that a simple and straightforward declaration from heaven itself would heal the wounds that we bear; yet the question of why evil exists is one that weighs heavy on many hearts these days.

No full answer, in the form of a sentence or a proposition, could ever satisfy the question, even if it were to drop from...

It is now common to argue that the roots of many of the features of modern culture—secularism, utilitarianism, and materialism, to name a few—are found in the ideas of the Enlightenment, a European-wide, eighteenth-century movement described by Immanuel Kant as “man's release from his self-incurred tutelage.”

Kant suggested that the Enlightenment freed man from his inability to use innate understanding without guidance from another person. More broadly, the Enlightenment as it unfolded in certain parts of Europe stressed above all the autonomy of reason as the key tool through which human thought and action might be explored. The term Enlightenment has become most closely associated with France, where thinkers such as Voltaire argued for the primacy of reason with no less a purpose in mind than...