CAPP London Chapter – Meeting 2 – Monday, 7 December, 6pm – 7:30pm GMT via ZOOM

Dear all,

Following on from our last meeting on 2 November, our next meeting will be held virtually on Monday, 7 December from 6 – 7:30pm GMT.

Please look out for the Calendar invite with Zoom dial-in details, which I shall circulate under separate cover.

Dr. Sam Gregg will be our next guest speaker (bio below).

Our subject is :

Session 2: The origins of legal authority and the limits of the law
Topics to be addressed:
· Social contract theory and the limits of state authority as seen by Catholic social teaching
· The role of the conscience and the right to conscientious objection
· Curtailing civil liberties – when/if ever is this justified?
· The legality and morality of government responses to Covid-19: lockdowns, restrictions on fundamental freedoms; track and trace; mandated church closures; mandatory vaccines

As you can tell, a number of these points are being hotly debated in government, in the courts, and in the press. It should make for a lively discussion, not least because the UK Government lockdown is subject to review on 2 December !

We look forward to ‘seeing you’ on the 7th December and will circulate later this week a couple of preparatory readings for those who are interested.

Jean P. Casey
UK Coordinator, CAPPF

Dr. Samuel Gregg BIO
Dr. Samuel Gregg is research director at the Acton Institute. He has written and spoken extensively on questions of political economy, economic history, ethics in finance, and natural law theory. He has an MA from the University of Melbourne, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in moral philosophy and political economy from the University of Oxford.

Gregg oversees Acton’s research program and team of scholars and is responsible for oversight of research international programing, including budgeting, management, personnel, publishing, and program development and implementation.

He is the author of thirteen books, including Economic Thinking for the Theologically Minded (2001), On Ordered Liberty (2003), his prize-winning The Commercial Society (2007), Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy (2010), Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and How America Can Avoid a European Future (2013), For God and Profit: How Banking and Finance Can Serve the Common Good (2016), and Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization (2019). He has also co-edited books such as Profit, Prudence and Virtue: Essays in Ethics, Business and Management (2009), and Natural Law, Economics and the Common Good (2012).

He has also been cited in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, the Weekly Standard, Time Magazine, Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and Holy See’s L’Osservatore Romano.

In 2001, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and a Member of the Mont Pèlerin Society in 2004. In 2008, he was elected a member of the Philadelphia Society, and a member of the Royal Economic Society. In 2017, he was made a Fellow of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. He served as President of the Philadelphia Society from 2019-2020.

He is the General Editor of Lexington Books’ Studies in Ethics and Economics Series. He also sits on the Academic Advisory Boards of Campion College, Sydney; the La Fundación Burke, Madrid; the Instituto Fe y Libertad; and the Institute of Economic Affairs, London; as well as the editorial boards of the Journal of Markets and Morality and Revista Valores en la sociedad industrial.