Natural Law Debates

David Bentley Hart’s column ” Is, Ought, and Nature’s Laws ,” which appeared in our March issue, has sparked quite the online conversation over the past couple weeks. I’ve collected some responses and related posts for those interested in following along; if you know of any that I’ve missed, feel free to leave them in the comments.

National Review ’s  Michael Potemra says he found the article as “something like a drenching with ice-water.”

At the American Conservative , Rod Dreher applies Hart’s analysis to the same-sex marriage debate,  Alan Jacobs ponders what we should do when natural law arguments fail to persuade our interlocutors, and Noah Millman asks what’s natural about natural law.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry chimes in at the American Scene  pointing out that while society’s rejection of the natural law is a problem for religious people, it’s a much larger problem for the secular Enlightenment project.

Finally, in a two part feature on Public Discourse , R. J. Snell argues that Hart and Potemra misunderstand natural law and concludes that natural law is neither useless nor dangerous.