David L. Schindler

“[T]he greatest threat to academic freedom today comes from within and not outside the university: it comes from the theological-ontological blindness of the modern disciplines themselves.”

“Natural law, rightly understood, . . . neither presupposes a reality that is ‘actually meaningless’ when considered objectively or ‘in itself,’ nor does it first become ‘rational’ only by virtue of the activity of human beings and apart from the original ordering activity of the intelligent Creator God.”

“[Recent approaches in Catholic moral theology] reject . . . an inadequately conceived objective law only to back . . . into a reductive sense of subjective freedom .”

Professor Kenneth Schmitz, a member of the original board of the American Communio , and its president for several years, passed away on August 25, 2017 at the age of 94.

“[A]ction is more dramatic, precisely because of the natural love of God and the good lying at the heart of freedom.”

“Participation in love, which takes the form of responsive generosity, defines one’s most basic act as a creature.”

Realization of a true ecology demands . . . the genuine ‘presencing’ of beings to each other, even as this presencing demands recognition of a giftedness, hence generosity, inherent in beings—indeed, in all beings.

"My participation in love, which takes form as responsive generosity, defines my first and most basic act as a creature."

"The separation of ideas and reality . . . leads to a dialectic of 'idealism' and relativism."

Stratford Caldecott was a man fitted for our time. We must submit to providence about why he has left us so soon. We come to mourn his passing, but also to recall his life.

“[T]he juridical idea of freedom, in abstracting the negative meaning of a right from its positive link with truth, so far . . . renders the right to religious freedom arbitrary; while the Declaration’s idea of freedom, in affirming freedom’s positive . . . obligation to seek the truth . . . demands a genuinely universal right to religious freedom.”

"Every distinction and abstraction in the cosmos implies a sense of the God-world relation."

“Catholic social teaching is a vision of reality—an understanding of being, man, and God—that unfolds an entire way of life, at the heart of which is a moral-social practice.”

"Originary experience embeds a desire of man to say forever: to give the whole of himself irrevocably to the whole of God, in a way that involves the whole of creation."

“The burden of ‘witness’ rightly understood is not that one is unwilling to dialogue with another, but that the dialogue called for in given cases demands clarity from the outset regarding the gravity of what is at stake.”

“We are not our own. . . . Belonging to ourselves at its root is always anteriorly a belonging to God and to others, to the entire community of being.”

We dedicate the Summer 2008 issue of Communio to Trish Bozell's memory, and wish to provide an introduction to some small part of her goodness and grace to our readers who may not know of her and her extraordinary life.

“Though there is much movement and much noise and sometimes great violence in democratic societies today, there is virtually no drama.”

"Austriaco defines being not by what it is, but by what is its first (ontological) effect ."

"The assertion that OAR enables us to create pluripotent stem cells without creating an embryo is certainly true only if the mechanistic philosophy mediating this claim is certainly true, which it is not."

“We can form proper ethical judgments with respect to biotechnological science’s production and manipulation of embryonic stem cells for health-serving ends only insofar as we recover adequate notions of nature and human-organic life (as gift).”

"In the future we will laugh at chance." (Goethe, Faust )

“Community is not first an object of choice but a gift always already given and calling forth gratitude and further giving.”

"Holiness is intended to comprehend the order of being in its entirety."

“The problem of our time . . . originates in the loss of the inherently ‘symbolic’ dimension of the creaturely order of things and persons.”

"[T]ruth and goodness are not ugly, finally, because being is love and love is being, and this is beautiful!"

"The point . . . is that we must follow Christ into the heart of the culture, and stay there to the end."

American religion has developed a relation to God that is without mind (fideism, pietism) and, therefore, a mind that is without real relation to God (atheism, mostly implicit).

Giussani’s method of “proof” is as simple and as profound as falling in love: I am provoked by, and thereby become alive to, the beauty of an other.

"Liberalism invites us to dialogue within the (putatively) open and pluralistic market of religions, all the while that it has already, hiddenly, filled the terms of that dialogue with a liberal theory of religion."

The deepest meaning of temporality is found in relation to eternity, in the relation of love which is from and for the Father.