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Religious liberty and the human good

Authors

Prof. Dr. Robert P. George

Keywords:

Religious liberty, basic human goods, integral human fulfillment, Martin Luther King, Nostra Aetate, Dignitatis Humanae, natural law

Abstract

“Religious liberty and the human good” is a defense of a robust conception of the obligations of governments to respect and protect religious freedom for the sake of the basic human right of religion itself, considered as an irreducible dimension of integral human well-being and fulfillment. This methodologically Aristotelian and perfectionist approach to the defense of religious liberty provides a principled way of defending a central freedom rationally and identifying its limits.

Author Biography

Prof. Dr. Robert P. George

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. In 2012–13 he is on leave from Princeton as a Visiting Professor at the Harvard Law School. He is the author of In Defense of Natural Law (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Making Men Moral: Civil Liberties and Public Morality (Oxford University Press, 1993). He is a member of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom and has served on the President’s Council on Bioethics and as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights. He is a former Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he received the Justice Tom C. Clark Award.