Through the blog medium, I’ve done a lot of the research that “marshal[s] the resources to actually pull off such an alternative account.” Not in this one post, though. It’s taken years. Calvin’s “Institutes,” for instance, contain little to support the idea of “natural rights.” And later Calvinists, who supposedly laid the ground for rights teachings, for instance, Samuel Rutherford, said things like the following (I do reproduce this quotation in my blog post) on Calvin helping to have Servetus executed simply for speaking his Unitarian conscience:

“It was justice, not cruelty, yea mercy to the Church of God, to take away the life of Servetus, who used such spirituall and diabolick cruelty to many thousand soules, whom he did pervert, and by his Booke, does yet lead into perdition.”

– Samuel Rutherfurd, “A Free Disputation Against Pretended Liberty of Conscience.” (1649).

How does anyone “wittingly” avoid being assimilated to regnant paradigms that are irreconcilable with the ones to which we consciously subscribe? I ask this in all earnestness.

I think MacIntyre’s whole project is devoted to answering this question. Rowland has built upon his philosophical project of dialectical “cave escape” a formidable, non and even-anti liberal theological edifice. For Gil Bailie and the Girardians, as well as Simone Weil, the key is identifying with the victim and the socially marginalized to ensure one’s God-centeredness and thus immunity from the contagion of the otherwise infallibly infectious noble lies going around.

Charles Taylor seems to suggest that the key is to recognize our own “spin” on the world and to constantly have the consciousness that we can’t really escape such spinning, and with that consciousness, nevertheless, to engage in dialectical encounters with other spins in order to get closer to the non-spun truth.

Well, I think you may be right about the Whiggish spin in Wolterstorff, but how does one avoid spinning out of control, as it were? For a Catholic, the answer seems simple, full immersion in the non-spun Tradition of the Church and to build culture and society from such immersion. But the problem remains: how to know that one is actually thinking and acting in an authentically Christian manner, even with the assurance of infallible, dogmatic truth and liturgical access to the reality of the living God, and not with some unwitting assimilated liberal spin?