Non declinavit ad dextram sive ad sinistram.
“The Common Good” is a bland, empty phrase that gets tossed around a lot. In our inaugural podcast, ( iTunes) the editors of The Josias are here to take back The Common Good and give it some substance. Along the way we’ll encounter some Nazis, do battle with unnamed French Thomists, and record and delete an entire 12 minute segment about Schubert.
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The Josias is planning an online reading group to discuss Andrew Willard Jones’s new book, Before Church and State: A Study of Social Order in the Sacramental Kingdom of St. Louis IX. Jones’s book is perhaps the most important recent work on a subject of great concern to The Josias: the relation of spiritual to temporal power. Jones argues that the understanding of the relation of spiritual and temporal power elaborated in the teachings of the popes of the High Middle Ages has been imperfectly understood by historians. Historians have tended to place that understanding, and the conflicts in which it was elaborated, in the context of the narrative of the rise of the sovereign, national state. Jones argues that that narrative, in which conflicts between spiritual and temporal power in the Middle Ages are viewed as conflicts between the “secular” power of “the state” and the “religious” power of the “church” for “sovereignty” within society obscures the way in which medieval society actually functioned and understood its own functioning. In the Middle Ages, he contends, there was no such thing as “religion” or “the secular” in the modern senses of those words, there was therefore no such thing as “the church” in its modern sense of a voluntary association with purely religious aims, and there was no such thing as “the state” or the “sovereign” monopoly of power that characterizes that modern institution. Before Church and State is not only an insightful treatment of an historical period; it is also an important contribution to the proper understanding of perennial Church teaching on the relation of the two powers. Continue reading “Online Reading Group: Andrew Willard Jones’s Before Church and State”
The Josias’s Library links important texts that inform our attempt to articulate an authentically Catholic political stance from which to approach the present order of society. Most of the links have been to texts hosted on other websites, with the exception of our own Translations. We have generally prefaced our translations with short, introductory notes, explaining the context of those texts, and showing their relevance for our project. We now intend to provide similar Introductions to the other texts in the Library. The first of the new series of introductions introduces an excerpt from the Apology of Tertullian.
We would like to draw the attention of our readers to the following conference on the common good at the University of Notre Dame. The theme is clearly closely related to our concerns here at The Josias, and some of our authors will be presenting papers.
The Common Good as a Common Project is a graduate student conference sponsored by the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame.
Continue reading “Conference on the Common Good at the University of Notre Dame”
It is tempting in a liberal world, in democratic societies, to fall into the quietism which limits prayer to private piety and the hidden life. But in the same way that we ought to bring the truths of faith to bear in all our external dealings, we should bring the troubles of temporal affairs into our prayer. Prayer is not merely a private act, but a public one. The liturgies offered by the Church are public acts of service—service to God, on behalf of the people. And just as the individual good is inseparable from the common good, our prayer ought always to involve supplication for the good of the community and concern for the preservation and perfection of the secular order.
Today in the United States is the highest feast day in the political calendar. We ask you, dear readers, in the spirit of St. Pius V, to pray Psalm 73 (74) and offer a rosary for the conversion our rulers and the restoration of Christ’s social reign among us.
