(Excerpt)
We are enormously grateful to the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies for hosting the conference on February 14, 2020, dedicated to a review of our book manuscript, A Light Unseen: The History of Catholic Legal Education in the United States, and for publishing the papers of the conference participants. We are also grateful for the opportunity to offer some reply in the pages of the Journal. A Light Unseen sets forth a comprehensive history of the book’s subject matter. The book describes the purposes for which Catholic law schools were founded, the schools maturation and success in achieving accreditation and some measure of respectability, and their search for meaning since the 1960s-1970s when the prior unreflective cultural Catholicism of these schools dissipated and in some cases disappeared almost entirely. A Light Unseen’s last chapter provides a blueprint for the creation of authentically Catholic legal education grounded in the Catholic intellectual tradition. In particular, we argue that Catholic law schools reach their fullest expression when their teaching, scholarship, and student formation—their intellectual hearts—employ the Catholic intellectual tradition and its moral anthropology
