David Matzko McCarthy

Moral Theology with the Saints

The article explores the way that the lives of the saints, and the churchs remembrance and veneration of them provide a practical setting for moral reflection, for drawing near to God amid the ordinary, and for living graced and virtuous lives. It reviews recent developments in a theology of sanctity and inquires about the difference that the saints make to moral reasoning. Finally, it considers the life of Venerable Solanus Casey, O.F.M. Cap. as an extended example of the articles thesis.

Craft as a Place of Knowing in Natural Law

The article offers a proposal about natural law inquiry in terms of knowledge attendant in the practices of a craft. We begin by discussing Aristotle’s analogical use of crafts in considering knowledge of ethics and politics in the Nicomachean Ethics. We inquire further into craft as a way of knowing by consulting the works of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and sociologist Richard Sennett. The framework of a craft is connected to moral realism through an analysis of works by Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil. Finally we provide a proposal for natural law inquiry in relation to the embodied and embedded nature of craft.

Natural Law and Our Contemporary Institutions

Abstract Extending recent directions in the field and informed by a renewed reading of Aquinas, we argue for a broadened sense of the natural law that radiates to social and political life, not only in the narrow form of positive law but in the life of our institutions that necessarily presume an ordering to the common good. While increasingly under the threat of privatization or bureaucratization in individualistic cultures, institutions can and do function as sites where gifts are freely given and received, shared goods articulated and debated, and friendships formed.