Thank you. Thank you. Can everyone hear me? Do I need the mic? If I speak this

loudly, it seems like it's okay. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, thank you for inviting me. It's an honor to be here.

So this is an exciting time for Catholic political thought.

There's a whole lot going on, as I'm sure a lot of you are aware.

And part of this, I think, is because the post-war, the sort of post-war dream of a Catholic-friendly liberalism has lost a lot of its credibility.

And then also a lot of the old loyalties that held the two major political

coalitions of the 20th century together have largely dissolved. Most obviously, with the

communist gone, conservatives are finally willing to actually look at what libertarians believe

and repudiate it, which I at least find invigorating. So as Catholics, we find ourselves

in a situation where we can

get to revisit and honestly read our tradition's social thought without manipulating it to fit

into prior essentially partisan agendas. And this also is exciting. Now, one of the directions

that this new vitality is going is being called post-liberalism, which at its simplest seems to be just a suspicion

that the assumptions that underwrite liberalism, most directly, that society is made up of

autonomous, subjective utility, maximizing individuals, and that the proper role of politics

is to facilitate this maximization as much as possible, that these assumptions are under suspicion.

Within post-liberalism, however, there is emerging a wide

range of really very different modes of political thought.

For example, the national conservatives

are attempting to reestablish the nation state

as the primary unit of social cohesion.

You have a revived Christian left wing that is seriously and thoughtfully connecting capitalism

...