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Catholics are no strangers to religious discrimination and even persecution in the United States. During the nineteenth century, American Catholics endured much marginalization and even occasional violence. During that time, however, they were not known as great articulators of the principles of religious liberty. The Catholic hierarchy was not yet thinking in those terms.

But a hundred years later, much has changed, given the openness to the categories and rhetoric of religious liberty signaled at Vatican II, influenced in part by John Courtney Murray's earlier writings. That event occurred in the 1960s, but it is only in the last decade or so that increasingly expansive secular government programs have signaled a return to a growing public policy marginalization of not just Catholics, but of conservative religious groups generally. This time, though, Catholic leaders and thinkers are finding their voices in defense of the principles of religious liberty.

This collection of essays from an academic conference at the Franciscan University of Steubenville is a good sampling of this expression. By their nature, such collections are often uneven in quality and not thematically well focused, and the current collection so suffers, but not overly." [Excerpted from review