Our next monthly meeting will be held on Friday, December 10th, from 3:00pm to 4:30pm. We will be discussing “Dialogue with Professor David L. Schindler on Conscience, Moral Theology, and Modernity” by Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler as well as “Conscience, Moral Theology, and Modernity: A Reply to Professors Salzman and Lawler” by David L. Schindler from the Winter 2020 (Volume 47.4) issue of Communio entitled “Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of the Birth of Karol Wojtyła”.
We will be meeting in the basement hall at St. Michael’s Church, the corner of University Avenue and Hemlock Street, Waterloo (across from Laurier). Enter the door at the north end of the University Avenue parking lot.
The following are taken from the Introduction to the issue:
Todd A. Salzman and Michael G. Lawler respond to David L. Schindler’s article that appeared in the Summer 2019 issue of Communio in “A Dialogue with Professor David L. Schindler on Conscience, Moral Theology, and Modernity.” The authors present here their shared understanding of the place of conscience in human action, acknowledging a basic agreement with Schindler that God is present in the natural constitution of the human person. They clarify, however, that their approach to natural law grants primacy to the finite subject’s role in making practical judgments regarding facts that, they hold, do not themselves express moral values and obligations in their very order. “In reality, we have no experience of uninterpreted pure nature; we experience nature only as interpreted and socially constructed by rational, social beings.”
In “Conscience, Moral Theology, and Modernity: A Reply to Professors Salzman and Lawler,” David L. Schindler addresses the sense in which God is objectively present to the human mind and conscience. God’s presence, Schindler maintains, is given already in the nature of things in such a way that each creature is to be received as an intrinsic bearer of meaning. Unlike Salzman and Lawler, Schindler thus affirms that nature as given does provide an authentic standard for moral judgments, and that this alone yields a sufficient foundation for the subjective act of freely and creatively taking up the reality that precedes the agent. “[T]he human being, in knowing things, does not give them an actual meaning where there was no meaning at all! On the contrary, he or she gives them a newly extended and deepened meaning. . . . [T]hings in their original nature as created are never ‘actually meaningless.’ They always actually participate, as creatures, in the mind and will of God.”
It will be hybrid meeting. If you are joining us in person, please note that screening/contract tracing, distancing and masking will be required.
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.