Last month, Joe Bessette and I participated in a panel discussion about our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishmentat the Fall Conference of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. The other participants were Gerard Bradley and John O’Callaghan, and the session was moderated by Matthew Franck. The session can now be viewed at YouTube.
Recently I responded to David Bentley Hart and Paul Griffiths’ negative reviews of the book. In his “While We’re At It” column in the January issue of First Things, Rusty Reno expresses his own disagreement with Hart and (to a lesser extent) Griffiths. (You’ll need to scroll down to find the relevant section.)
The Claremont Review of Books has posted its annual Christmas Reading List with suggestions from a variety of writers and thinkers. Two of them, The Witherspoon Institute’s Matthew Franck and C. J. Wolfe of North Lake College, refer to By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed. Franck says, among other things, that “this is the book that must be refuted if further steps are to be taken by Church leaders to condemn the death penalty.”