Soul of the World: Notes on the Future of Public Catholicism - Softcover

If nothing else, Weigel's book will alert critical readers to the complexity of moral discourse in the contemporary world. It is a laudatory treatment of John Paul II's social philosophy that is equally indebted to Richard John Neuhaus and John Courtney Murray. With those thinkers, Weigel reaches back to the second-century Letter to Diognetus to affirm that the church is related to the world as the soul is related to the body. He is forthcoming enough to acknowledge that this image carries "paradoxical . . . connotations of distance and intimacy, the present and the future, the mundane and the transcendent." The paradox of those connotations is the contested terrain of moral and political discourse, and Weigel is a veteran of the contest on the side of a strand of theological conservatism consistently identified with Neuhaus and the current pope. Weigel's reading of Centesimus Annus and Veritatis Splendor will give readers who share his conservatism (as well as readers who don't) occasion to think together about both the historical project and the public space of democracy in the light of political developments since 1989. Steve Schroeder