For centuries, philosophers, political theorists, jurists, theologians, and
other thinkers have proposed, discussed, and debated the idea of natural
law. Proceeding from an assumption of a shared nature in all human
beings, irrespective of culture or location, natural law proponents contend
that based on human intuition and reasoning, there is a universal knowledge
of the shared nature.
In a detailed but easy-to-follow format natural law proponent
J. Daryl Charles presents 50 questions and answers regarding the idea of
natural law. Discussions include:
• How is natural law defined?
• Where do we find evidence of the natural law?
• Why is the natural law important?
• What is the relationship between the natural law and human rights?
• What is the relationship between the natural law
and world religions?
• What is the natural law important to politics?
• What are the standard objections to the natural law?
Each question and answer is presented with thorough documentation
About the Author:
J. Daryl Charles, PhD, is an affiliate scholar of the John Jay Institute, serves as a contributing editor of Providence: A Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy and the journal Touchstone, and has served as the Acton Institute Affiliated Scholar in Theology and Ethics. Charles is author, co-author, editor or co-editor of 23 books, including Virtue amidst Vice (Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), The Unformed Conscience of Evangelicalism (InterVarsity Press, 2002), Retrieving the Natural Law (Eerdmans, 2008), War, Peace and Christianity (Crossway, 2010), Natural Law and Religious Freedom (Routledge, 2018), America’s Wars and the Just War Tradition (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019), and most recently, Just War and Christian Traditions (University of Notre Dame Press, 2022), and Our Secular Vocation (B&H Academic, 2023). He is also the translator (German to English) of Claus Westermann’s Roots of Wisdom (Westminster John Knox Press, 1995).
Charles has taught at Taylor University and Union University and was a 2013/14 visiting
professor in the honors program at Berry College. Has served as director and senior fellow of the Bryan Institute for Critical Thought and Practice, as the 2007/8 William E. Simon visiting fellow in religion and public life at the James Madison Program, Princeton University, and as the 2003/4 visiting fellow of the Institute for Faith and Learning, Baylor University. Charles’s research interests include faith and public life, the natural law, the ethics of war and peace, and criminal justice ethics. Before entering the university classroom full-time he did public-policy work in criminal justice in Washington, D.C.
