A new direction
A New Year is, by its very nature, an appropriate occasion to take stock. I am grateful for the additional inspiration I have derived in recent years from work like Greg McKeown’s, Essentialism. The Disciplined Pursuit of Less (2014). This year I read its follow-up, published in 2021, Effortless. Make It Easier to Do What Matters Most.
Through a podcast, I also came across Steven Lawson’s equally valuable Monk Manual project. No doubt, due to the authors' Mormon and Catholic backgrounds, respectively, both books fit in well with the books on Benedictine spirituality I signaled here earlier.
If I look back over the past year, it was one of the greatest pleasures to launch this Substack successfully. In this way, an understandably modest but by no means insignificant community of readers was formed interested in natural law, postliberalism, and religious freedom.
That occurred under the broad motto ‘Re-connecting constitutional law and natural law,’ which is also the subject of a new monograph I am preparing. It is a privilege to try out some of its ideas in advance in this distinguished forum.
Mindful of essentialism, such preparation leaves less room for other projects. One exception is an international volume on the relevance of Tocqueville’s thought for contemporary democracy, which I am preparing with Sophie van Bijsterveld, a Religion, Law, and Society professor at Radboud University Nijmegen.
The theme of this volume fits well with the theme of this Substack. The same goes for a hoped-for book on comparative approaches to ‘common good constitutionalism,’ for which Dr. Leonard Taylor (Atlantic Technological University Sligo) and I organized the kick-off with a panel at the ICLARS conference in Córdoba, Spain, last September.
Three pieces published last year that further deserve special mention are:
- ‘Liberal Democracy,’ in Christoph Hübenthal and Christiane Alpers (eds.), T&T Clark Handbook of Public Theology, Bloomsbury Publishing, New York, NY, 2022, 33-47.
- ‘Natural Law and the Future of Human Rights,’ in Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. & Irene Hadiprayitno (eds.), Human Rights at Risk. Global Governance, American Power, and the Future of Dignity, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, Camden, Newark, New Jersey, and London, 2022, 157-172.
- ‘Why Europe needs a more post-liberal theory of religious liberty. Examining a European court ruling on ritual slaughter,’ The International Journal for Religious Freedom, vol. 13 (2020) [published 2022], No. 1/2, pp. 157-167.
On the teaching front, two previously mentioned tutorials that I gave in the fall for Leiden Master's students in Constitutional and Administrative Law, on the books by Vincent Phillip Muñoz and Adrian Vermeule published in 2022, respectively, Religious Liberty and the American Founding: Natural Rights and the Original Meanings of the First Amendment Religion Clauses and Common Good Constitutionalism—Recovering the Classical Legal Tradition were highlights.
I also contributed as a guest lecturer to the module ‘Politics and Law’ from the newly developed Religion and Society Track of the Bachelor of Theology at the Theological University Kampen/Utrecht. It was fantastic working with this small but motivated group of students.
The same goes for the Study Association for Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Law members at Leiden University, JSV Justus Lipsius, for whom I hosted an evening in their series 'Philosophy and Faith' in November. The topic was James Madison's Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments (1785).
Finally, it was last year good to see the first contributions appear in the Journal of Religion, Culture & Democracy, of which I serve as an editorial board member. In addition to being a Senior Fellow of the Center for Religion, Culture & Democracy, from which the journal emanates, I remain proudly affiliated as a McCord Fellow at the Center of Theological Inquiry in Princeton, NJ.
One of the biggest compliments I received last year was a spontaneous direct message on one of the social media platforms: ‘I really appreciate the intellectual direction you have taken in the previous year! Keep it up!’ As it turns out, the year I spent on the Princeton campus had already laid the groundwork for this new direction.
I wrote a blog post about that last March, titled 'My introduction to postliberalism,' which can serve as a helpful backdrop for much that was set out above. In the blog post, I also refer to the metaphor of 'a concrete bunker without windows,' which Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, who died on New Year's Eve, used in his speech to the German Bundestag on Sept. 22, 2011.
The new direction, aimed at getting the windows open again, I hope to continue to build with others in 2023. I wish all members of this Substack community and other readers a prosperous 2023!