We Hold These Truths Because They Are True

We should not let the year end without noting the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of an American classic of political philosophy, one that combines both an appreciation of the unique nature of the American project with a profound understanding of the eternal verities of natural law reasoning, a mode of thought and discourse embedded in the nation's founding documents but otherwise banished from the halls of our great secular universities.

In 1960 the venerable publishing house of Sheed and Ward released We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition by John Courtney Murray, S.J. It was a series of essays exploring "the American Proposition" which Abraham Lincoln cited in the opening lines of his Gettysburg Address.