God and the City

God and the City explores the relationship between politics and theology, arguing that politics cannot be separated from the question of God's existence. It suggests that the modern liberal project has deluded itself in attempting to render religion a private matter, and that the "God question" must be integrated into the proper political order. The book also examines the body-soul relationship to understand the nature of political authority and the presence of God in human community.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 216 pages
Publication date: 10 November 2023
Publisher: St Augustine's Press

Based on the Aquinas Lecture presented at the University of Dallas in 2022, God and the City seeks to explore politics ontologically. In simpler terms, it aims to delve into the nature of political order itself, its implications for the fundamental questions of existence, and how it relates to issues such as man, being, and God.

Aristotle and Aquinas, following in their footsteps, categorized metaphysics and politics as "architectonic" sciences, as they both concern the entirety of reality, of which the specific sciences study a part. Chapter one of this book establishes that, just as metaphysics, in studying being as a whole, cannot help but address the question of God in some regard, so too does politics, the ordering of human life as a whole, necessarily implicate the existence of God. In this context, the modern liberal project has misguided itself by attempting to render religion a private matter rather than a genuinely political one. We cannot organize human existence without making some claim about the nature of God and his relationship to the world, whether implicitly or explicitly.

The second chapter approaches this theme from the anthropological dimension. As Plato affirmed, the "city is the soul writ large": if man is religious by nature, he cannot be properly understood, and the human good cannot be properly secured and fostered, if the "God question" is "bracketed out" of the properly political order. Moreover, if we fail to recognize the essentially political dimension of our relationship to God, we will be unable to properly grasp the presence of God in the (ecclesial and sacramental) Body of Christ: God cannot be real in the Church as Church unless he is also real.

Dimension: 7 x 4 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781587313288