The Cold War was an intelligence war, waged by the Soviets with a powerful weapon called disinformation. Soviets used this weapon to strike against Western values, heroes, and institutions. They aggressively used it to spread atheism into the highly Catholic nations over which they had gained control in World War II. Catholic prelates, including Cardinals Wyszyński of Poland, Mindszenty of Hungary, and Stepinac of Croatia, were among the earliest targets. Eventually, even the wartime pontiff, Pius XII, was falsely portrayed. Whereas the false depictions, created for political reasons, do harm to truth, the Church, and mankind, faith in the Church’s teachings has been a source of great strength for many who have been subjected to disinformation. In a world where Christianity is often under assault, those who can distinguish between truth and falsehoods told for political advantage must serve as beacons of light and reflections of the good that can come from pursuing the truth while remaining faithful to the Church.

Many modern readers of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina view Anna’s passionate and scandalous romance with Vronsky as tragically heroic insofar as she desires nothing more than true love at any cost. These readers tend to view the story of Levin’s faith journey as inconsequential. This paper argues that such a reading is counter to Tolstoy’s intended message. Tolstoy intended to write a novel about the challenges of Christian faith in nineteenth century Russia. In doing so, he rewrote Paul’s Letter to the Romans in a manner consistent with his own emphasis upon the importance of the natural life—a life which embraces the natural cycle of birth and death and avoids the artificiality of urban, cosmopolitan life.

Steven D. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City takes its place alongside James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars as one of the two truly indispensable books on today’s Culture Wars. It advances our understanding of today’s conflict by situating it historically and focusing our attention on its religious dimension. Smith argues that today’s conflict is the latest episode in a longstanding conflict between immanent forms of religiosity which locate the sacred in the world of space and time, and transcendent forms of religiosity which locate the divine beyond space and time. As compelling as it is, the volume’s argument would have been strengthened by a more sustained treatment of the nature of the political community and the essential role played within it by the truths held in common by the members concerning God, man, nature, and history.

Steven D. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City is an important and unique contribution to the vast literature on the American culture war. Smith’s distinction between immanent and transcendent religion refines and deepens James Davidson Hunter’s famous analysis of this conflict. As illuminating as this volume is, however, it fails to fully appreciate the religious dimension of the American founding. Specifically, Smith does not acknowledge or account for the covenantal nature of the American founding, and thus does not recognize the full degree to which the American experiment was informed by the transcendent religions of the Western world, namely, Judaism and Christianity.

Steven D. Smith persuasively shows that paganism and Christianity are in a culture war that spans two thousand years. Throughout his book, he shows that Christianity is the exceptional religion in three ways. First, Christianity is more authentically open to philosophy than paganism. Second, Christianity does not sacralize the State. Third, Christianity provides a more fulfilling understanding of sexual ethics. Despite the exceptionalism of Christianity, it is currently facing a significant challenge from a renewed and secularized paganism. This secularized paganism is attractive due to the fallibility of human nature. However, Christianity’s theology and intellectual tradition provide meaningful answers and rebuttals to paganism’s more sensual claims.

In Pagans & Christians in the City, Steven D. Smith argues that in contrast to ancient Rome, ancient Christianity, following Judaism, located the sacred outside the world, desacralizing the cosmos and everything in it—including the political order. It thereby introduced a political dualism and potentially contending allegiances. Although Smith’s argument is right so far as it goes, it underplays the role of Christianity’s immanent dimension in subverting the Roman empire and the sacral pattern of antiquity. This division of authority not only undermined the Roman empire and antique sacral political order more generally—it also subverts the modern state, which, in the work of Hobbes and Rousseau, sought to remarry what Western Christianity divorced.

This paper examines three paintings by T. Gerhardt Smith as pro-life responses to the life issues of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia: Sorrow Without Tears: Post-Abortion Syndrome, Femicidal National Organization Woman’s Planned Parentless Selfish Movement, and Killer Caduceus. After identifying foundational principles of art aesthetics from a Catholic perspective, the paper determines that Smith’s paintings are consistent with ideas enunciated in St. John Paul II’s Letter to Artists (1999).

In Laborem exercens, Pope St. John Paul II proposes some fundamental “Elements for a Spirituality of Work.” In thinking about the future development of a theologically robust “Spirituality of Work,” this paper explores Augustine’s theology of labor. It frames its examination by setting forth the philosophical evaluation of labor contemporary to Augustine. It then appraises the different facets of Augustine’s teaching on labor in De opere monachorum. Finally, it looks to his De Genesi ad literam for a more developed account of labor, which is grounded (ultimately) in the very being of God, who himself labors in his creation.

This article focuses on a forgotten evolutionary trend of liberalism clearly visible in Lord Acton’s writing. According to him, liberalism has roots not only in the theories of early modern thinkers but also in political practice, as seen in English and American political regimes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first—doctrinaire liberalism—aims at changing the political order by appealing to higher principles and resorts to social engineering and coercion. The second rests on the organic growth of existing political institutions, laws and customs. Acton claims that only the latter is truly liberal, while the former is in fact illiberal.

Justice Pierce Butler was a devout Catholic who is best remembered for his dissenting vote in Buck v. Bell (1927), in which the Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s eugenic sterilization law. Butler is often misunderstood by critics who look only to the consequences of his opinions and not to the reasoning behind them. An analysis of Butler’s personal faith and opinions provides evidence that his jurisprudence reflects the principles of Catholic social doctrine. Finally, two cases in which Butler’s Catholic Faith likely influenced his votes are reviewed. The article concludes that Butler needs to be better understood.

Two areas of moral theology where many misunderstand Catholic teaching and find themselves deviating from traditional moral norms are conscience and truth. Many find conscience to be a means through which one can reshape ethical judgments, and truth to be derived from one’s own conscience. The model for an authentic understanding of conscience and the reality of universal moral norms is found in the writings and preaching of Saint John Paul II. This essay offers an overview of conscience and truth according to the Pope, and thereby give readers some idea of how a defense of conscience and truth can be made against contemporary challenges.

Two years ago (2018) was the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Humanae Vitae. It was also the year Pope Paul VI was canonized a saint of the Catholic Church. The Pope who was once vilified for writing the encyclical has now become the Pope raised to the altar. We know what has become of the Pope, but what is to become of his encyclical? This article examines what was occurring at the time of the encyclical’s release and what it has been like to live with half a century of the encyclical’s rejection. The prospects are not very good for anything like a cultural conversion any time soon—maybe not for the foreseeable future. But we are encouraged now at this moment in history by what the prophet Habakkuk says in his Old Testament book. “The vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment and will not disappoint.”