Discourse on Democracy series, Texas State University at San Marcos, October, 2015
Question:
To grasp what natural law is all about, we have to understand nature as fashioned according to certain purposes. We have to view every kind of thing there is as an arrow directed naturally to its goal. The way Thomas Aquinas put this was to say that the “nature” of any particular thing is “a purpose, implanted by the Divine Art, that it be moved to a determinate end.”
See also Just Like Me
Stay calm; this is merely a reflection on one of the differences between Catholic and Protestant culture, not an attempt to cast aspersions.
Mondays are usually for letters from students. Some are philosophical or theological; others, like this one, more practical.
A colleague of mine worries about the cacophony of voices in the modern world. Instead of complaining that we have no answers, he complains that we have too many – there are too many religions, too many philosophies, too many sacred texts. We are in a new and unprecedented intellectual condition, he tells me -- a Pluralism.