A Knightbridge Professor

Abstract

William Sorley argued that God provides the best and most rational and unified view of reality, the ground of both the natural and moral orders. What a close look reveals is that Sorley’s approach, rather than dated, remains a lively, instructive, and powerful model to follow. Whether he was integrating or reconciling various pieces of natural theology—the causal and moral, is and ought, reality and value, life and work, finite and infinite goods, the temporal and transcendent, the moral law and evil, philosophy and poetry, or morality and metaphysics—his was an expansive and integrative mind and an open and capacious heart whose prescient insights have proven the test of time. He demonstrated what long and intimate acquaintance with the world of ideas can generate, and his enduring example can serve as an inspiration and corrective to much of what passes for apologetics today.