{"id":3187,"date":"2006-04-11T12:03:06","date_gmt":"2006-04-11T12:03:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/prudentially-speaking.html"},"modified":"2006-04-11T12:03:06","modified_gmt":"2006-04-11T12:03:06","slug":"prudentially-speaking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/prudentially-speaking.html","title":{"rendered":"Prudentially speaking"},"content":{"rendered":"

An interesting report over at Mirror of Justice about a recent conference on the subject of prudential judgment.<\/a><\/p>\n

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In his keynote address, Chris Wolfe (Political Science, Marquette) emphasized that although the magisterium has power to make particular political judgments, it should exercise caution and do so only sparingly.  Chris argued that because (among other things) policy issues are factually complex, the bishops have limited competence in many areas, and the laity should be energized (through taking responsibility in their fields of expertise) rather than enervated, the bishops should usually place much more emphasis on forming the laity spiritually and morally than on taking policy positions.  On a later plenary panel, Michael Baxter (Theology, Notre Dame) gave a paper called "The Trouble With Prudence":  the trouble, in his view, is that treating issues as "prudential" easily degenerates into a device for setting some moral problems aside (whether abortion or unjust war) in order to achieve one’s overall preferred moral-policy goals (whether left or right).  He called on Catholics to be plain speaking in naming evil, to be more disciplined in avoiding cooperation with evil, and to renounce political utopianism that leads one to justify evil in the name of promoting an ideal such as democracy or freedom.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An interesting report over at Mirror of Justice about a recent conference on the subject of prudential judgment. In his keynote address, Chris Wolfe (Political Science, Marquette) emphasized that although the magisterium has power to make particular political judgments, it should exercise caution and do so only sparingly.  Chris argued that because (among other things)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nPrudentially speaking - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/04\/prudentially-speaking.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Prudentially speaking - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"An interesting report over at Mirror of Justice about a recent conference on the subject of prudential judgment. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3187"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3187\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}