Posts tagged: Natural Law

Hadley Arkes and Encounters to Flip Over

By , January 20, 2011 11:52 pm

Hadley Arkes spoke this evening in the Harold B. Lee Library Auditorium at Brigham Young University. Until I saw a poster on campus advertising his up-coming speech on Constitutionalism and Its Presupositions, I had never heard of him, even though he is apparently at the front in the battle to save traditional marriage and to abort abortion.

Afterwards, I did the obligatory Internet search on his name and also visited a new webzine he and others just launched. The Catholic Thing is now bookmarked on my computer.

His most recent contribution is titled Ave Maria University: A Challenge Among Friends, a piece in which he recounts a conversation he had recently with a friend, a Harvard grad, who now has two daughters at Ave Maria and promises never to send his children to Harvard because, according to Akres,

The new sexual ethic, whether on pornography, promiscuity, abortion, homoeroticism, is so pervasive, touching every aspect of life, that there is little room for those who will not pay homage to that reigning ethic.

I understand the man’s concern. I sent a daughter to Berkeley. However, I find myself more in agreement with Akres:

He may indeed be right. But I think of Fr. Benedict Ashley, a central figure in teaching on the theology of the body. Ben Ashley, in the 1930s at the University of Chicago, was a flaming atheist and perhaps a Communist – until he met Mortimer Adler, who confronted him with Aquinas and natural law, and flipped him. That flipping produced a writer who has educated several generations of Catholics.

Substitute Mormon for Catholic–or don’t–and I must thank the many intelligent and eloquent believers who labor in Babylon to shepherd God’s stray and sometimes confused lambs back into the fold, turning some of them into intelligent and eloquent defenders of the faith in the process.

By the way, as Adler did to Ben Ashley, Akres did to me. No, I’m still Mormon, but I am a Mormon who will be reading much more about natural law, beginning with Arkes’s book Natural Law & the Right to Choose.

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