You’re going to want to read the second issue of New Polity Magazine.
In it, we move from describing liberalism to describing what a postliberal society looks like.
Matthew Dal Santo argues that the symbols of the Lion and the Unicorn, stripped from the original context of Christendom in Britain’s modern monarchical liturgies, capture the contradiction in the UK’s contemporary integralism, in which the monarch is “responsible both to God (in her anointing) and to her people (by convention).” Modern sacramental nominalism inevitably leads to this strange end, but still, there is hope to be found in the last anointed monarch of Europe.
D.L. Schindler, continuing from Dal Santo’s discussion of nominalism, deconstructs the idea that things can be neutral in God’s economy. We are told that “money” or “the internet” are neutral tools, or that political debate should be held within a neutral public square; but liberalism invented the category of neutrality for its own ends. Without the mask of liberalism, things declared “neutral” are revealed to be “diabolical” by the very fact of being cut from the reality of Creation and made to operate as if neither God, nor God’s justice, makes any difference at all. Schindler argues that we need a “renewal of what Catholics understand as a ‘sacramental’ vision of things, founded upon the reality of the God who is, in Jesus Christ, at once Creator and Redeemer of the world.”
Reuben Slife follows from this by interpreting Laudato Si as a truly postliberal encyclical. Pope Francis likewise sees that “science and technology are not neutral.” Technologies have their own “internal logic” that reshapes the way we relate to the world, “a framework which ends up conditioning lifestyles and shaping social possibilities.” These conditions are created by the technocratic hand of man, and not by God’s design. God’s creation is unavoidably “‘of the order of love,’ a love that comes to fruition only in our freedom. This is why ‘the invisible forces of the market’ cannot rightly “regulate the economy.” But this also means there is a way out.
Andrew Willard Jones describes this way out by describing the world of Innocent III, in which the governing authority did not develop along the lines of technocratic power but within an order of love: “The whole social order, temporal as much as spiritual, was moving toward Glory, to the perfection of contemplation that would only occur in heaven, but which was anticipated in the monastic life.” Jones offers a vision of a clear, social answer to contemporary integralism’s most vexing question: How is the spiritual power of the Church supposed to relate the temporal rulers of this earth?
I (Jacob Imam) ask this same question by taking up the fishing imagery surrounding St. Peter’s vocation. The call to be “a fisher of man” is far from a serene evangelical vocation. It finds violent allusions in the Old Testament, symbolizing the usurpation of pagan kingdoms. All the kings of the earth must look to the authority of Christ’s vicar to know that their own order is right and just. Peter does not become another human sovereign; he serves to eliminate them. The papacy becomes the Spiritual Power that judges all temporal princes. True integralism fishes out the kings of the earth.
Marc Barnes argues that St. Thomas Aquinas provides a groundwork for a postliberal anthropology, one which does not treat man as an animal, whose sexual difference is solely for the sake of the reproduction of the species, but as male-female society, whose sexual difference is for the sake of the intellectual operation, which finds its end in the contemplation of God.
And Brandon McGinley helps us to consider the profound implications of this claim, that the family is the basis of society. He writes:
The “priesthood of all believers” into which we are initiated by baptism tends to get misunderstood in one of two ways. On the one hand, most often, it’s ignored entirely because we’re so well trained by the prevailing order not to think of the laity as having genuine, comprehensive religious duties. On the other hand, some elevate it disproportionately, in order to deemphasize the priesthood of ordained, sacrificing priests of Jesus Christ. In between we find the quite lovely reality: that we all share in Christ’s “prophetic and royal mission,” that we are called not just to absorb His grace but to communicate it to others.
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