After Liberalism Continued

Regular readers will remember that the last issue inaugurated a series of three essays and responses designed to advance our thinking about what sort of religious and political culture we would like to see replace—or perhaps modify and renew—modern liberal culture. The papers were prepared for and discussed at a seminar held in late February in New York, all made possible by the generous support of the Simon/Hertog Fund for Policy Analysis and Fieldstead and Company.

Among the first things that First Things puts first is the dignity of the human person. Modern liberal culture may be excessive in its individualism, but its core commitment to defending the dignity of the individual surely needs to be affirmed. But how can we do so without endorsing liberalism?

David Yeago addresses this problem directly. “Modern but Not Liberal” offers a decidedly theological rationale for a vigorous defense of the dignity of the human person. It was a rationale that played a real if often inchoate role in the most important public endeavor to defend human dignity in recent American history, the civil rights movement, and one that we need to recover if we’re to rescue the insights of modernity from the moral collapse of liberalism into the dictatorship of relativism.

In response, the Dominican theologian Thomas Joseph White rejects the assumption that the profound demands of divine authority necessarily diminish us and assault our dignity as free and self-defining individuals. Shalom Carmy offers his distinctively Jewish story of a religious encounter with liberal culture, one he tells us was often happy, sometimes critical, but always presided over by a divine authority fully capable of shaping nuanced judgments.

Can we be modern without being liberal? An important question, yes, but there’s an even more important one: How can we be faithful to God’s covenant? That’s surely the first thing among first things.