Current Projects

Upcoming Publications:

Freedom, Virtue and the Common Good. Book under contract with Notre Dame University Press.

Freedom is an essentially spiritual notion, and therefore somewhat elusive and not subject to a complete theoretical definition. But freedom is not altogether limitless, boundless or undefined: freedom expresses itself within a meaningful horizon in which there is commerce between the most elevated and the most common. In Tocqueville’s terms, freedom experiences itself as “under the government of God and the laws alone.” That is, Freedom is without merely human or arbitrary constraint, but freedom is limited and defined by its relation to some higher reality. But this formula of Tocqueville’s is at least as much a question as an answer; indeed, one might say that the central question, the problem that drives the whole history of political philosophy is bundled up in this dual reference. What is the relation between boundless freedom (originally modeled by a Creator God) and concrete and knowable laws (moral and political) as dimensions in the necessary horizon of meaningful human action?