Annual Themes

Clifford Geertz once observed that law is a way of “imagining the real,” that it offers “visions of community” rather than “echoes of it.” If so, then the gender debates represent more than clashes between interest groups, masking instead the deeper question of what we think is real.

This special edition presents some of the papers given at colloquium on U.S. v. Skrmetti, to be decided by the Supreme Court, probably in June 2025. The case concerns a Tennessee law prohibiting the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones on children. However the decision turns out, it will have profound implications.

"The eclipse of the idea of authority is an essential characteristic of today’s world; in fact, it is the most immediately observable characteristic." This insight of Del Noce starkly evokes fundamental questions often left unanswered: What is authority? How does it relate to power? This four-part series begins by taking up these very questions. Subsequent issues examine questions related to more specific domains: parents' rights in regard to their children, agents and ideologies that exercise control over contemporary man, witting or unwitting, and, lastly, power in the Church.

Birth. Death. What lies in between? A short span, often punctuated by suffering and loneliness. Each of us must wrestle with the “perennial problem of human finitude” (Ratzinger) and face the question of our life’s meaning. Is it good . . . fundamentally? Does it promise anything? Does it keep its promise? This four-part series begins with a focus on the Dobbs Decision, which sent the question of abortion back to the states. The question of death, a "happy death," is taken up next; what might such a death look like and how can one prepare? Following this, we turn to the contrast between a life lived to the fullest, as in the example of the saints, and to a life lived "barely," numbed by the abuse of drugs or technology. Lastly, we take up the theme of the human desire for the infinite and the quest for its fulfillment, rightfully ordered and otherwise.

Human life is saturated with the experience of objects. We are, at all times, surrounded by things, whether made or natural. Yet, the ubiquity of things is also the cause of their neglect. How often do we properly attend to the things around us or reflect on the unconscious decisions we make as to their purpose, meaning, and worth? This three-part series examines the very things we so easily overlook and disdain, or focus on and cherish. For behind every encounter with the things of this world lie fundamental judgments as to the nobility of our embodied existence, the dignity of our being creatures in a material world and the meaning of human labor through which created things are transformed into newly fruitful human artifacts.

We used to know ourselves by looking to what was most familiar—to our bodies, families, customs, and traditions. Who we were was tied to place, a community of relations whose bearings remained fixed and stable. Today, such embeddedness is intolerable. Identity is something we create, something we express while compelling the recognition of others. Yet, our new “fluid” selves have yielded only homelessness, an existence without roots in either place or person. This three-part series begins with a closer examination of the concept of identity, its historical transformation and fragility in a modern age. The second issue in the series takes up the theme of tradition (and Tradition) and is followed by a final issue on man’s political nature, with an emphasis on both the common good and questions of religious freedom.