So I don't want to speak about capital punishment and the title of the talk.

Let's see if this comes back on here.

Should.

Ah, good.

Title of the thought is the natural law justification of capital punishment.

The material I'm going to present tonight is excerpted from a book that came out last year,

co-authored with Joseph Bassett, who teaches

political science at Claremont McKenna College. This is our book entitled by Manchella's Blood

B Shed, a Catholic defense of capital punishment. And as you can get from that title, we get

into, in some detail, specifically Catholic theological issues that arise in the context of the

discussion of capital punishment. Those will not, however, be issues of the sort I'm going to be

talking about tonight. I'm going to focus as the title indicates on the philosophical side of

the issue, the natural law justification. What you see here on the overhead is a little outline of the talk, to give

your eyes something to follow as I speak here. So let me get right into the talk. Any

contemporary Christian defender of capital punishment faces a threefold burden. First, he asked to

explain the philosophical or natural law basis of the morality of inflicting a penalty of death

for the gravest crimes. Second, he asked to address various theological considerations

deriving from scripture and the history of Christian thinking on this subject, including, for Catholics

like myself, prudential

judgment of recent popes to the effect that capital punishment is in modern circumstances

rarely, if ever, called for. Third, he has to respond to common objections grounded in social

science to the effect that the death penalty fails as a deterrent, or that it is applied

...