The current national officers of the SCSS are: 

MEMBERS of the SCSS BOARD of DIRECTORS

Dr. Joseph A. Varacalli of Nassau Community College-SUNY and Dr. Stephen Krason co-founded the SCSS. 

Biographical Information about the Officers of the SCSS

Stephen M. Krason is Professor and Director of the Political Science Program at Franciscan University of Steubenville.  He earned his J.D. and Ph.D. at the State University of New York at Buffalo.  He also holds an M.A. in theology-religious education from Gannon University.  He joined the Steubenville faculty in 1986.  He is admitted to the bars of Massachusetts, Nebraska, the District of Columbia, and certain federal courts including the U.S. Supreme Court.  He has authored Abortion:  Politics, Morality, and the Constitution; Liberalism, Conservatism, and Catholicism and Preserving a Good Political Order and a Democratic Republic, and edited or co-edited Parental Rights:  The Contemporary Assault on Traditional Liberties, The Recovery of American Education, Catholic Makers of America, We Hold These Truths and More, and Defending the Family:  A Sourcebook (the latter was a project of the SCSS).  He also has authored numerous articles, book chapters, and book reviews. His articles and reviews have appeared in such journals as The Catholic Social Science Review, Social Justice Review, Ethics and Medics, Faith and Reason, and Interpretation:  A Journal of Political Philosophy.  He has been listed in Who’s Who in the Midwest.  For several years, he was a consultant to the Pope John XXIII Medical-Moral Research and Education Center (now the National Catholic Bioethics Center) and has served as Coordinator of the Franciscan University’s Human Life Studies Academic Minor Program.  He helped draw up both the University’s Human Life Studies and the Humanities and Catholic Culture Programs.  He was co-founder of the SCSS and has been its national President  since its inception in 1992. In that capacity, he is also Publisher of The Catholic Social Science Review.  He also serves on the Board of Advisors of such organizations as the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights and the Catholic Educators Resource Center. In 1997, he received Franciscan University’s “Campus Leadership and Teaching Award.”  He teaches courses in a number of fields in political science.  His specialty areas are political philosophy, Catholic social teaching, American national government, and American constitutional law. He spent the Spring 2001 Semester on sabbatical from the University writing and compiling a book which he is continuing work on entitled, The Public Order and the Sacred Order: Reflections on Contemporary Socio-Political Problems and Prospects, in Light of Catholic Social Teaching, Philosophy, and the American Political Tradition.

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Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, where he teaches in the areas of philosophy of law, civil liberties, and American constitutional law and theory.  He is also founding Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton. He is also Of Counsel to the law firm of Robinson & McElwee.  In 1994, he represented Mother Teresa of Calcutta as counsel of record for her “friend of the court” brief asking the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade. A graduate of Swarthmore College, Professor George earned his law degree and a master’s degree in theology from Harvard University and his doctorate in legal philosophy from Oxford University.  He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at Swarthmore, and received a Knox Fellowship from Harvard for advanced study in legal philosophy at Oxford. He is author of Making Men Moral:  Civil Liberties and Public Morality (1993) and In Defense of Natural Law (1999), and editor of The Autonomy of Law: Essays on Legal Positivism (1996), Natural Law, Liberalism, and Morality (1996), and Natural Law Theory:  Contemporary Essays  (1992), all published by Oxford University Press.  His articles and review essays have appeared in the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, the Columbia Law Review, the University of Chicago Law Review, the American Journal of Jurisprudence, the Review of Politics, the  Review of Metaphysics, First Things, National Review, Boston Review, Commonwealth, and Crisis, among others.  Professor George is general editor of New Forum Books, a new series of books on law, culture, and politics published by Princeton University Press.  He has served as 1^st Vice President of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists since its inception in 1992, and is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of The Catholic Social Science Review.  He is on the Board of Directors of the National Association of Scholars and Board of Advisors of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. He served from 1993-98 as a presidential appointee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights, where he took the lead in the Commission’s hearings on religious freedom in America’s public schools.  In the 1989-90 term, he was a Judicial Fellow at the Supreme Court of the United States, where he worked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist and received in 1990 Justice Tom C. Clark Award. Among his other honors are a 1991 Silver Gavel Award of the American Bar Association and the 1994 Paul Bator Award of the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy. He is listed on the 1997 Templeton Foundation “Honor Roll” of outstanding professors.

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Kenneth L. Grasso is associate professor of political science and director of the Project on American Constitutionalism at Southwest Texas State University.  He formerly taught at St. Peter’s College and Fordham University.  He received his Ph.D. from Fordham University where he studied under Francis Canavan, S.J. A specialist in political theory, he has edited two volumes on Catholic social thought:  John Courtney Murray and the American Civil Conversation (Eerdmans, 1992) and Catholicism, Liberalism and Communitarianism:  The Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the Moral Foundations of Democracy (Rowman & Littlefield, 1995).  His articles and reviews have appeared in First Things, Crisis, Interpretation, Faith and Reason,  the Review of Politics and other journals, and he has published chapters in a number of anthologies.  He is active in numerous professional organizations and has helped organize panels for the SCSS’s Political Science Section at the annual American Political Science Association Convention and serves on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Catholic Social Science Review. He has also been in charge for the past two years of organizing the SCSS’s spring mini-conferences.

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D. Brian Scarnecchia is Instructor in Theology, Political Science, Human Life Studies at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Chairman of the University’s Department of Humanities and Catholic Social Thought, and a lawyer admitted to practice law in Ohio. He was formerly in full-time law practice, and now maintains a limited practice in light of his full-time faculty responsibilities. He has frequently represented pro-life and other clients pro bono. His law degree is from the University of Akron and he is an S.T.D. candidate at the University of Dayton. He holds the Human Life International Chair in honor of Father Paul Marx at Franciscan University and is Director of the Human Life Studies Academic Minor Program there. He is also currently Acting Director of the University’s Humanities and Catholic Culture Program and is a member of the Board of Directors of Catholics United for the Faith. He has lectured nationally and internationally on human life issues.  In 1998, he published an article, based on a lecture he gave in the Philippines, in the anthology Dialogue Between Faith and Culture, put out by the Asian Conference of Bishops. He is a gentleman farmer and grape grower with his family in Ohio. He has served as SCSS Treasurer since 1998. He has also been serving as SCSS Membership Chairman and previously was President of the SCSS Tri-State Chapter (Steubenville-Pittsburgh-Wheeling). He also acts as legal counsel for the SCSS and handled its incorporation and successful application for tax exempt organization status in 1995. During the past year, he prepared the SCSS’s application for Non-Governmental Organization status at the United Nations.

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