A Culture of Engagement

Cathy Kaveny is, simultaneously, one of our country's most important religious intellectuals and one of our most rigorous legal scholars. She writes with great care and understanding, but also with passion and an uncommon humanity. A Culture of Engagement is a superb introduction to her thought. No matter where you stand, she will challenge you, and inspire you, too. -- E. J. Dionne Jr., Senior Fellow, Brookings Institute This is a bold and brilliant engagement with the fundamental questions of faith, freedom, and family-crisply written, cogently argued, and constructively casuistic. Building on her earlier masterwork, Law's Virtues, Cathleen Kaveny now shows us even more clearly how the law can teach us how to live a life of virtue as communicants and citizens in a world of ever-growing complexity. -- John Witte, Jr., Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law, McDonald Distinguished Professor, Director of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University Cathy Kaveny's A Culture of Engagement offers a highly instructive collection of her essays on law, religious liberty, American culture, Catholicism, and a host of contemporary social-ethical issues. Her voice is always calm, measured, and fair. Her thesis-that American Catholics should strive for a culture of engagement rather than merely openness or identity, resonates deeply. And it is consistently evidenced in her approach to a wide range of issues. This collection helps solidify Professor Kaveny's role as one of American Catholicism's leading public intellectuals. -- David P. Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics, Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life, Mercer University In this collection from her columns and blog posts for Commonweal magazine, Cathleen Kaveny draws on her mastery of both legal and moral thought to lead us beyond both the more liberal culture of openness and the more conservative culture of distinct religious identity toward a culture of discerning engagement. The precision of her language matches the precision of her judgment in one urgent chapter after another, and by the end of the book you will have had a master course on how general principles and particular situations mutually inform each other. -- Leo J. O'Donovan, SJ, President Emeritus, Georgetown University

Focusing on five broad areas of interest - Law as a Teacher, Religious Liberty and Its Limits, Conversations about Culture, Conversations about Belief, and Cases and Controversies, this title demonstrates how thoughtful and purposeful engagement can contribute to rich, constructive, and difficult discussions between moral and cultural traditions.Religious traditions in the United States are characterized by ongoing tension between assimilation to the broader culture, as typified by mainline Protestant churches, and defiant rejection of cultural incursions, as witnessed by more sectarian movements such as Mormonism and Hassidism. However, legal theorist and Catholic theologian Cathleen Kaveny contends there is a third possibility-a culture of engagement-that accommodates and respects tradition. It also recognizes the need to interact with culture to remain relevant and to offer critiques of social, political, legal, and economic practices. Kaveny suggests that rather than avoid the crisscross of the religious and secular spheres of life, we should use this conflict as an opportunity to come together and to encounter, challenge, contribute to, and correct one another. Focusing on five broad areas of interest-Law as a Teacher, Religious Liberty and Its Limits, Conversations about Culture, Conversations about Belief, and Cases and Controversies-Kaveny demonstrates how thoughtful and purposeful engagement can contribute to rich, constructive, and difficult discussions between moral and cultural traditions. This provocative collection of Kaveny's articles from Commonweal magazine, substantially revised and updated from their initial publication, provides astonishing insight into a range of hot-button issues like abortion, assisted suicide, government-sponsored torture, contraception, the Ashley Treatment, capital punishment, and the role of religious faith in a pluralistic society. At turns masterful and inspirational, A Culture of Engagement is a welcome reminder of what can be gained when a diversity of experiences and beliefs is brought to bear on American public life.