Kudos for Aquinas

THOMAS AQUINAS COLLEGE — The Princeton Review has named Thomas Aquinas College the nation’s fifth-best value among private colleges in the 2008 edition of America’s Best Value Colleges. “This isn’t your standard college,” the guide said about Thomas Aquinas. “Students take their faith and their intellectual life very seriously.”

Roberts Honored

ASSOCIATED PRESS, April 18 — Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts will receive an honorary degree at the College of the Holy Cross’ commencement ceremonies May 25. Roberts’ wife Jane Sullivan Roberts is a 1976 graduate of Holy Cross.

Anti-Catholicism Assailed

THE WASHINGTON POST, April 30 — Geoffrey Stone, provost of the University of Chicago Law School, has been taken to task by faculty colleagues over his criticism of the Supreme Court’s five Catholic justices. In an item posted on the University of Chicago’s blog headlined “Faith-Based Justices,” Stone criticized Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito Jr. for voting to uphold the federal partial-birth abortion ban in last month’s 5-4 decision in the Gonzales vs. Carhart case. Stone’s claim that the Catholic justices failed “to respect the fundamental difference between religious belief and morality” was dismissed by other faculty bloggers. “Stone was immediately hooted down, blogospherically, for faulty logic, ‘religious bigotry’ and failing to note anything from the majority opinion that would indicate the justices relied on religious belief, rather than their interpretation of the law, to uphold the ban passed by Congress in 2002,” the Post reported. “That ban, they noted, was approved by substantial and bipartisan majorities, made up of Catholics and non-Catholics.”