David S. Crawford

“Just as art and the rules of skill must both employ human creativity and draw on nature, so too practical reason works with what is given and aims toward an excellence to which a nature is called.”

“To already be something before an act of freedom suggests to the modern mind a loss of freedom rather than its ordination.”

“Public reason as it is currently configured in numerous court decisions, acts of legislation, and in political debate generally, in its blindness to communities as natural and integral wholes, effectively conceives all marriages as essentially ‘gay.’”

“In trying to understand the meaning of religious freedom [the] problem is [one] of admissible forms of public discourse, given the culture generated by political and juridical liberalism.”

“The technical management of life and death implies an avoidance of the necessity of love, or put better, it implies a kind of falsification of love and its fruit.”

“If personal identity is not simply reducible to familial relations, it nevertheless is substantially rooted in them. If we are to ‘see’ or to ‘know’ the new marriage and the new family, the fleshly one must make its contribution precisely in its visibility.”

“The body is . . . an anamnetic expression of good as form or, we could also say, of beauty, disclosing the vocation of human nature itself.”

"Is the perspective of the acting person really exhaustively intentional?"

“How are we to understand the famous passage from Veritatis splendor telling us that the body is a ‘sign’ and an ‘expression and promise of the gift of self, in conformity with the wise plan of the Creator’?”

"My precise criticism of liberalism is that it remakes the person and the 'family' in the image of its voluntarist and procedural concept of justice and the basic anthropology this entails."

"The person as such has been rendered androgynous."

"The condition for the possibility of Christian marriage is the virginal consent of Christ and of his Mother on behalf of the world."

"The counsels are not only one state of life, they are in some sense the inner meaning of the whole Christian life made explicit. . . . Each state of life, and indeed the entire moral life, must ultimately look to them to see its 'inner form,' even while each retains its integrity as such."

"The responses of Christ and Mary, precisely as poor, virginal, and obedient, possess universal significance, that is to say, are crucial for understanding the meaning and form of the human response to God."

"If the counsels and marriage disclose the authentic structure of creaturehood, as well as the meaning of the community creaturehood implies, then they also are called to 'reconfigure' the world . . . by simply being 'what they are' in the world."

"Our understanding of the wrongfulness of contraception . . . will only be as good as our theology of marriage."