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The article focuses on addressing Minkoff et al.'s concerns about the potential erosion of pregnant patients' right to refuse medical interventions aimed at protecting the life or health of a fetus, contrasting with their interpretation of the legal reasoning in the Dobbs decision. It clarifies that while Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey recognized a negative right to seek abortion without undue government interference.

The article analyzes legal, constitutional and philosophical disputes over religious liberty involving speech or expression. Topics discussed include Two-Sovereigns Thesis versus the Religion is Not Special (RNS) thesis, treatment of religious speech as special and non-special in the U.S. Supreme Court's religion jurisprudence and under the Religion Clause of the First Amendment, and RNS view in accounting for the religious nature of certain types of cases in U.S. jurisprudence.

The article explores the right of natural parents to direct the religious formation of their children. Topics discussed include the status of a pre-political fundamental right to be recognized by the government under the U.S. Constitution, the views of Catholic scholars Romanus Cessario and Mary McAleese on parental rights and the rite of baptism, and how these views can offer glimpse of how the rejection of extra-governmental moral authority provides a basis for illiberal policy prescriptions.

The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life, Volume I: Odyssey of the Religion Clauses. By James Hitchcock. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. np. The Supreme Court and Religion [...]

Religion in the Liberal Polity. Edited by Terence Cuneo. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. np. According to most versions of political liberalism (PL), the government ought [...]

TOTAL TRUTH: LIBERATING CHRISTIANITY FROM ITS CULTURAL CAPTIVITY. By NANCY PEARCEY. Crossway. 479 pp. $25. IT IS DIFFICULT to imagine an encounter in the public square in which one party [...]

Good and Bad Ways to Think About Religion and Politics BY ROBERT BENNE EERDMANS, 12.0 PAGES, $14 For some Americans, as for the Founding Fathers, the separation of church and [...]

James Keenan raises a number of issues concerning the relationship between feminism and the prochoice position on abortion rights in connection with a previous article discussing the views of Judith Jarvis Thomson. The point was that certain feminists are inconsistent in adopting a libertarian position with regard to abortion while supporting state intervention in other areas. This did not mean that feminism and prochoice are identical or that all feminists are antifamily. Certainly, as Keenan suggests, more attention should be given to prolife feminism.

Judith Jarvis Thomson has presented an influential argument for abortion based on the woman's right to control her body. She compares the pregnant woman to someone who is involuntarily plugged into the circulatory system of a famous violinist suffering from an otherwise fatal kidney ailment. Thomson's argument is flawed in that it assumes that moral obligations must be voluntary, denies special obligations to family members, denies prima facie rights of the unborn and ignores the distinction between killing and withholding treatment.

Recovering Self-Evident Truths: Catholic Perspectives on American Law. Edited by Michael A. Scaperlanda and Teresa Stanton Collett. Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2007. 403 pp. np. [...]

The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Polities Without Cod. By George Weigel. New York: Basic Books, 2005. 202 pp. $23.00. George Weigel opens this small, though powerful, book […]

This article critically assesses an account of religious liberty often associated with several legal and political philosophers: Ronald Dworkin, John Rawls, and Christopher Eisgruber and Lawrence Sager. Calling it the Religion as Comprehensive Doctrine approach (RCD), the author contrasts it with an account often attributed to John Locke and the American Founders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, the Two Sovereigns approach (TS). He argues that the latter provides an important corrective to RCD's chief weakness: RCD eliminates (or greatly diminishes) from our vision those aspects of religious belief and practice that most conventional religious believers would consider essential to their faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Catholics and Evangelical Protestants often find themselves on the same side on a variety of issues in bioethics. However, some Evangelicals have expressed reluctance to embrace the natural law reasoning used by Catholics in academic and policy debates. In this article, I argue that the primary concerns raised by Evangelicals about natural law reasoning are, ironically, concerns expressed by and intrinsic to the natural law tradition itself. To show this, I address two types of Protestant critics: (1) the Frustrated Fellow Traveler and (2) the Solo Scripturist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay is a critical analysis of the book authored by John Corvino, Sherif Girgis, and Ryan T. Anderson, Debating Religious Liberty and Discrimination. The book offers two contrary views on how best to think about some of the conflicts that have arisen over religious liberty and anti-discrimination laws, e.g., Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Comm'n, 138 S. Ct. 1719 (2018). One position is defended by Corvino, and the other by Girgis and Anderson. After a brief discussion of the differing views of religious liberty throughout American history (including the American founding), this essay summarizes each side's arguments. This is followed by two sets of critical comments: (1) Neither side adequately explains why the celebration of weddings--the focus of the most prominent cases--are thought to have religious significance by many citizens; and (2) Each side is making arguments that the other side would have made until just recently. It seems that yesterday's liberals have become today's moralists and vice versa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Claims of religious conscience that run counter to prevailing cultural trends are increasingly met with bewilderment and disbelief. The author argues that this should not surprise us given the ways in which the rational and liturgical status of religious beliefs and practices (especially those tightly tethered to the Christian faith) are widely misunderstood and misrepresented by jurists and legal philosophers. To make this point the author discusses some recent arguments found in court cases as well as in legal scholarship on religion. He encourages Catholic philosophers--who typically do not work in this area--to enter the fray by contributing to the jurisprudential literature that touches on issues of faith, reason, and religious liberty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE CASE FOR LIFE: EQUIPPING CHRISTIANS TO ENGAGE THE CULTURE by Scott Klusendorf Crossway Books, 256pages, $15.99 The author has been in the trenches of the pro-life movement for nearly [...]

Encyclopedia of Religious Freedom. Edited by Catharine Cookson, general editor. With Satvinder Singh Juss and Derek H. Davis, associate editors. New York: Routledge, 2003.555 pp. $125.00. Reference works play an [...]

By Peter Kreeft. San Francisco, Calif.: Ignatius Press, 2002. 133 pp. $9.95 paper. This volume is authored by one of Christendom's most gifted writers, Peter Kreeft, a professor of philosophy [...]

In her ground-breaking 1971 article, "A Defense of Abortion," Judith Jarvis Thomson argues that even if one grants to the prolifer her most important premise-that the fetus is a person-the prolifer's conclusion, the intrinsic wrongness of abortion, does not follow. However, in her 1995 article, "Abortion: Whose Right?," Thomson employs Rawlsian liberalism to argue that even though the prolifer's view of fetal personhood is not unreasonable, the prochoice advocate is not unreasonable in rejecting it. Thus, because we should err on the side of liberty, the right to abortion is vindicated. In this article, I argue that Thomson's latter reliance on Rawlsian thinking suggests a way of re-reading her earlier essay that casts doubt on whether she really grants the dominant prolife account of unborn human life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented on the book "Biomedicine and Beatitude: An Introduction to Catholic Bioethics" by Nicanor Pier Giorgio Austriaco. It explores Austriaco's views on Catholic bioethics with regards to how secular bioethics is hard to sustain. It tackles the challenges that secular bioethics poses to Catholics and offers several examples of moral dilemmas associated with secular bioethics.

Supporters of Justificatory Liberalism ( JL)-such as John Rawls and Gerard Gaus-typically maintain that the state may not coerce its citizens on matters of constitutional essentials unless it can provide public justification that the coerced citizens would be irrational in rejecting. The state, in other words, may not coerce citizens whose rejection of the coercion is based on their reasonable comprehensive doctrines (i.e., worldviews). Proponents of the legal recognition of same-sex marriage ( SSM) usually offer some version of JL as the most fundmental reason why laws that recognize marriage only if it is a union between one man and one woman are unjust. In this article I argue that the application of JL in support of legal recognition of SSM does not succeed because the issue under scrutiny-the nature of marriage-is deeply embedded in, and in most cases integral to, many (if not most) citizens' reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Thus, I argue that because of the effects and consequences of the legal recognition of SSM, it results (or will result) in a violation of JL against dissenting citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the idea of human dignity and bioethics, enlightenment liberalism, and scientific materialism. It states that enlightenment liberalism does not incorporate the view of the human person to avoid violating the principle of liberal democracy while scientific materialism is a view that science is the only way of knowing. It discuss professor Steven Pinker's claim that dignity is subjective and unnecessary to bioethics and it threatens the hegemony of principlism.

The ascendancy of Christian activism in bioethical policy debates has elicited a number of responses by critics of this activism. These critics typically argue that the public square ought to embrace Secular Liberalism (SL), a perspective that its proponents maintain is the most just arrangement in a pluralist society, even though SL places restraints on Christian activists that are not placed on similarly situated citizens who hold more liberal views on bioethical questions. The author critiques three arguments that are offered to defend SL: (1) the golden rule contract argument, (2) the secular reason argument, and (3) the err-on-the-side-of-liberty argument. The author concludes that each of these arguments fail to support SL. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]