Joseph’s Reviews > Tea Party Catholic: The Catholic Case for Limited Government, a Free Economy, and Human Flourishing > Status Update

Social justice is thus another way of describing our obligation to contribute to the common good, with the emphasis being upon people receiving what they are owed. Obviously the state has a role in this... Equally significant, however, is the emphasis upon society pursuing this end. It follows that social justice is not and cannot be the government's exclusive concern.

"Secularism" today, however, often denotes a distinct set of beliefs which hold that any religious-motivated action is unacceptable in the public square. Such secularism has nothing to do with maintaining a healthy distinction between spiritual and temporal authority. Rather it is about the state effectively prohibiting or unduly restricting religiously motivated acts outside the freedom of worship.

"Secularism" today, however, often denotes a distinct set of beliefs which hod that any religious-motivated action is unacceptable in the public square. Such secularism has nothing to do with maintaining a healthy distinction between spiritual and temporal authority. Rather it is about the state effectively prohibiting or unduly restricting religiously motivated acts outside the freedom of worship.

...what is at stake is knowledge of the truth and our ability to arrange our lives on the basis of what we discern to be the truth, consistent with the freedom of others to do the same. Truth is thus the foundation of religious liberty, but truth is also the goal of religious liberty.

The point of religious tolerance was, to [Charles] Carroll's mind, not the promotion of religious indifferentism (the self-evidently false position that all religions are basically the same and therefore equally meaningful or meaningless). Rather it was to create conditions in which people could argue about their respective religions' claims of truth without such differences leading to tragedies...

Well, we agree on the insidiousness of fiat money.

...it remains that a culture of inexorably-increasing levels of public and private debt and a failure to confront its moral and economic causes can slowly corrode the sense of responsibility on the part of governments and individuals for their freely-undertaken financial obligations and severely tempt them- and the rest of us- to live in a fantasy world of moral and fiscal unreality.