Letters to the Editor
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‘The Problems of Skeptic & Believer’
Adam Kirsch’s article [Arts+, “The Problems of Skeptic & Believer,” September 27, 2006] was the second time that he has mis-characterized my views, and I don’t like it one bit (see also, “Free-Associating About Faith,” March 7, 2006). I ask him: Please limit criticism to what I do think, not to what I do not think. Instead he makes several wrongheaded characterizations.
Neither my daughter nor I belong to the Religious Right; I am usually referred to by friends and enemies as a ‘neo-conservative,’ and I am proud of that. Yet I prefer to call myself ‘a Catholic whig,’ holding the liberty of the human person to be the golden thread of history, a tradition that runs through Thomas Aquinas, the Salamanca School (which defended the human rights of the American Indians and blacks before Thomas Hobbes or John Locke set pen to paper), Tocqueville, Acton, Luigi Sturzo, J. Maritain, John Courtney Murray, John Paul II, and many others. Nil humanum mihi alienum might well be one of our mottoes.
In the countries around the world in which I am active, and by readers of my books, I am regarded as singularly pro-American, perhaps to a fault. How could I not be?
Like Professor Wood, Jana and I found overwhelming evidence that Washington’s public prayers, decrees of days of Thanksgiving, and daily life, show without doubt that he expected God to act as the “wonder-working” Jehovah acted in leading the Israelites to liberty. Washington wrote that no people had a greater duty than the Americans to thank God for the “interpositions” of his Providence, which they had often experienced, in the great war just concluded. He was not talking of an otiose belief in Providence, but of actual experience of it.
MICHAEL NOVAK
Washington, D.C.
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