The Calvinist International
On the eve of the 239th anniversary of the independence of the United States, it is a good time to take stock of how matters stand. What is the state of its union? That state is now dominated by recent Supreme Court decisions, most importantly the decision mandating the legal definition of marriage to include same-sex […]
Here follows a translation of the first paragraphs of the introduction to Guillaume Groen van Prinsterer’s Unbelief and Revolution. Harry van Dyke’s otherwise excellent translation truncates this part, a bad move on his part as this passage sets the stage for everything that follows, and lays out the importance of this inquiry in no uncertain terms. A […]
Pt. 2: A Critical Examination of Catholic Social Teaching on the Question of Private Property (See Pt. 1 for an introduction to the theoretical issues at stake in this discussion) Having at great length defined the nature of our quarry, we are now in a position to sift through the documents of Catholic Social Teaching […]
Professor Scott Pryor of Regent University School of Law has posted a short response to Dr. Littlejohn’s initial essay on private property, and you can read it here. While appreciative of Dr. Littlejohn’s argument, Professor Pryor emphasizes the necessary role of contracts in property rights, and he argues that both “rights” and “right order” are […]
Part I: On Property Rights—Subjective and Objective, Human and Natural A. Private Property, Law, and Human Rights 1. The background of the debate A couple of weeks ago, in response to an interesting interchange between the Catholic bloggers Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry (or PEG) and Elizabeth Bruenig on the subject of private property, natural rights, and positive […]
From Friedrich Julius Stahl, Private Law (WordBridge, 2007), Chapter One: The Right of the Person in General §. 2. The Rights of Personality Being a person, man is an original, independent and thus absolute end of creation and the world-plan (Book I, §. 6): not mankind as a genus, not the concept of man, but the […]