About David L. Schindler

David L. Schindler (1943-2022) was Dean Emeritus and Gagnon Professor of Fundamental Theology at the Pontifical John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family at The Catholic University of America. He was editor-in-chief of the North American edition of Communio: International Catholic Review, a federation of journals founded in 1972. He is the author of Ordering Love: Liberal Societies and the Memory of God, Heart of the World, Center of the Church: "Communio Ecclesiology, Liberalism, and Liberation", and Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity: The Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom.

Science and Spirit: Beyond the Wasteland

By |2023-09-17T13:49:25-05:00September 17th, 2023|Categories: Christianity, Communio, David L. Schindler, Featured, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Technology, Timeless Essays|Tags: , , , , |

The burden of Theodore Roszak’s “Where the Wasteland Ends” is to explode the myth that the problems attendant upon the technocratic society can be resolved by technology. Where The Wasteland Ends: Politics And Transcendence In Postindustrial Society, by Theodore Roszak (492 pages, Doubleday, 1972) The burden of this book is to explode the myth that [...]

Ecology in Light of Integral Human Development

By |2023-07-30T21:45:26-05:00July 30th, 2023|Categories: Caritas in Veritate, Catholicism, Communio, Conservation, David L. Schindler, Environmentalism, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis, Romano Guardini, St. John Paul II, Timeless Essays|

Every being is good because it is created. To be created is to be loved into existence by God. Every creature is thus good in itself, both because it is loved by God and because, as a participant in this love of God for it, each creature also loves itself. Because all creatures share in [...]

We Are Not Our Own: Childhood in a Technological Age

By |2023-08-19T08:31:18-05:00November 17th, 2022|Categories: Catholicism, Christian Humanism, Communio, David L. Schindler, Essential, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Humanum, Pope Benedict XVI, St. John Paul II, Timeless Essays|

Jesus makes becoming like children a condition for entrance into heaven and hence for the everlasting participation in divine life to which we are all invited. The human being is not only to begin as a child, as it were, but also to end as one. Liberal culture’s anti-child practices are bound up with a [...]

Trinity, Creation, & the Order of Intelligence in the Modern Academy

By |2022-11-17T19:32:35-06:00January 2nd, 2019|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christian Living, Christianity, Culture War, David L. Schindler, Intelligence, St. John Paul II|

Holiness, with its call to share in the perfect love of the Father in the Son by the Spirit, is inclusive of the objective order of intelligence. “Holiness is intended to comprehend the order of being in its entirety.” David L. Schindler The Second Vatican Council insists that “all Christians in any state or [...]

Mercy as a Reality Illuminated by Reason

By |2022-08-10T15:51:45-05:00December 26th, 2018|Categories: Catholicism, Charity, Christian Humanism, Communio, David L. Schindler, Pope Francis|

In his apostolic exhortation, Evangelii gaudium [EG], Pope Francis insists that we need to anchor our approach to the Church’s missionary task in the Incarnate Word as the principle of reality (“il criterio di realtà”: 233). This principle can be a guide for “the development of life in society and the building of a people,” [...]

Freedom, Truth, and Human Dignity

By |2022-11-17T19:43:14-06:00December 19th, 2018|Categories: Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Communio, David L. Schindler, Politics|

Granted that the right to religious freedom is founded in the dignity of the human person, on what does the dignity of the human person itself finally rest, and how does one’s conception of these foundations affect the nature of the right? Can one assert a civil right to religious freedom without thereby at least [...]

The Given as Gift

By |2022-12-18T20:48:47-06:00December 12th, 2018|Categories: Christian Humanism, Christianity, Communio, David L. Schindler, Philosophy, Science|

What is entailed by the original nature of the creature as gift? The crucial point is that the relation to God that establishes the creature in its own being, and indeed that implies a shared relation of each creature with all other creatures, is truly in the creature. What the creature most basically is, is [...]

The Embodied Person as Gift

By |2020-09-06T11:19:21-05:00December 5th, 2018|Categories: Christian Humanism, Communio, Culture, David L. Schindler, Natural Law|

The body in its physical structure as such bears a vision of reality: it is an anticipatory sign, and already an expression, of the order of love or gift that most deeply characterizes the meaning of the person and indeed, via an adequately conceived analogy, the meaning of all creaturely being. This is the burden [...]

We Are Not Our Own: Childhood in a Technological Age

By |2022-02-23T10:06:32-06:00April 12th, 2016|Categories: Abortion, Christianity, Communio, Culture, David L. Schindler, Family, Featured, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Pope Benedict XVI, St. John Paul II, Technology|

Childlikeness, as both the beginning and the end of our creaturely way of being, is the key to being effective and realistic in efforts to renew the world, and indeed is the grounds for never-failing hope in these efforts. Liberal culture’s anti-child practices are bound up with a logic of childlessness most basically defined in [...]

Stratford Caldecott: A Man Fitted for Our Time

By |2022-03-16T12:06:53-05:00September 16th, 2014|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, David L. Schindler, Stratford Caldecott|

Editor’s Note: Stratford Caldecott was a Senior Contributor to The Imaginative Conservative. The eulogy below was given by fellow contributor David Schindler at Dr. Caldecott’s Requiem Mass, Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola (July 31, 2014). Stratford Caldecott was a man fitted for our time. We must submit to providence about why he has left us so soon. [...]

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