The Renewal of Civilization: Essays in Honor of Jacques Maritain

In 1965 Vatican II, the twenty first Ecumenical Council of the Catholic Church, issued Gaudium et Spes, - a blueprint for a new engagement between the Catholic Church and Modernity. The Church, while "scrutizing the signs of the times" and "interpreting them in the light of the Gospel," responded "to the perennial questions which men ask about the present life and the life to come."

Jacques Maritain, in The Peasant of the Garonne, showed that the challenge to internal renewal of the Church would also be a catalyst for a renewal of civilization! However, he saw that the dialogue with the modern world could be neither facile nor conducted in traditional terms. This 'aggiornamento' could not to be a case of "kneeling before the World" or an uninsightful clinging to tradition.

Some forty years later we continue to navigate between that Scylla and Charybdis of 'kneeling' and 'clinging.' In this book the project of renewal is examined in its ethical, political, aesthetic, and religious dimensions. The authors provide insight on the common good, moral truth, the virtues, culture, art and the beautiful, Christian morality and metaphysics, and the vocation of a Christian intellectual. The essays dissect traditional and contemporary sources, including the works of Jacques Maritain.