http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com Wed, 08 Feb 2012 03:37:06 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en In a world preoccupied with material wealth and convenience, the gift of life is often minimized and sometimes forgotten altogether. Modernity encourages us to view “unwanted” life as a burden that will hold us back. For Muslims, however, just as for many in other faith traditions, life must be acknowledged, ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/4387 If you were truly opposed to something, then you would try to defeat it, especially if your conscience tells you that this something is both a moral wrong in itself and disastrous in its consequences. Now, it might be that, for various reasons, your desire to act to defeat this ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/3940 Matthew O’Brien and Robert Miller have continued the discussion over moral absolutes and the role of God in moral theory and practice, raising several interesting issues. My final contribution to this conversation will address only two of those issues, namely, from Miller’s essay, the role that “natural causation” plays in ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/4636 The loudest voices in our national debates about political economy tend to be libertarians and social welfare statists. To our detriment, most public policy discussions are filtered through these two lenses. At the same time, we tend to conflate the policy issues facing our nation as if they were one ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/4646 You may already know, but Mitt Romney only had to pay about a 15 percent personal income tax rate over the last two years. As we search around for someone to blame for this situation—after all, many taxpayers who made far less paid a far larger percentage to Uncle Sam—we ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/4633 Steven Pinker, a Harvard psychologist, is well known for his 2008 article in the New Republic titled “The Stupidity of Dignity.” The President’s Council on Bioethics, in its Human Dignity and Bioethics, had underscored the importance of dignity in contemporary ethical discussion, and Pinker wanted to reject it wholesale. Pinker ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4540 The “marriage equality movement”: that’s the name chosen for themselves by same-sex “marriage” supporters. The implicit argument is that the state’s granting marriage licenses only to opposite-sex couples is undue discrimination. The claim has an initial plausibility: the state grants a marriage license to John and Mary but not to ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4597 On November 3, 2011, our nearest Communist neighbor-nation came as close to acknowledging the failure of Communism as any Communist nation can be expected to come. Cuba announced that, after half a century of state control of land, it is permitting the conveyance of real estate titles between private owners. ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4400 I agree with so much of Matthew O’Brien’s brilliant essay on why God matters in ethical theory that I hesitate to pursue a disagreement on a relatively minor issue. But because the disagreement illuminates some important questions, I cheerily forge ahead. First, the areas of agreement: O’Brien and I agree that ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4589 A familiar metaphor to describe the Republican coalition is the “three-legged stool,” where each leg represents social, economic, and defense conservatives. It has traditionally been said that the coalition will collapse if any of the legs is cut off. Yet every so often, we hear various commentators calling in more ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4588 The great French Jesuit Henri de Lubac once wrote, “Suffering is the thread from which the stuff of joy is woven. Never will the optimist know joy.” Those seem like strange words, especially for Americans. We Americans take progress as an article of faith. And faith in progress demands a ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4575 Today, thousands of people at the March for Life in Washington, D.C., are commemorating the thirty-ninth anniversary of a legal and moral monstrosity, Roe v. Wade, and its companion case, Doe v. Bolton. The two cases, in combination, created an essentially unqualified constitutional right of pregnant women to abortion—the right ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4577 The week before Christmas, the financial world stirred with news that AT&T would no longer pursue a merger with its cellular competitor T-Mobile. Announcing that it and T-Mobile’s owner, Deutsche Telekom AG, intended to scuttle their $39 billion merger plan, AT&T cited opposition to the deal by the Federal Communications ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4559 In my previous essay, I argued that the stylistic eccentricities of modernist poetry embody the most important philosophical assumptions of modernity. One clear implication of this argument, which perhaps many of my readers anticipated, is that the pre-modern or “classical” tradition of poetry—the tradition of metrical, generic, linearly narrative and discursive ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4483 One need not look too closely at a typical work of Byzantine art—the icon of the Virgin of Vladimir, for example, or the mosaic of Justinian in Ravenna’s San Vitale—to recognize the dramatically stylized mode of representation common to such works. Matthew Gervase, in his book Byzantine Aesthetics, refers to ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4481 “We do not offend God unless we act contrary to our own nature.” This remark, which Thomas Aquinas makes in his book Summa Contra Gentiles, is a pithy summary of his view of morality. It encapsulates morality’s twofold source in human nature and God’s law. God commands us to act ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4534 From the “very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland,” Alabama Governor George Wallace, in his 1963 Inaugural Address, famously summarized his position on one of the most divisive national political issues of his time: “Segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.” A few months after ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4503 Every now and then, the Supreme Court surprises its critics by getting something absolutely, completely right: Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, decided on Wednesday, is just such a case. The Court held that the Religion Clauses of the First Amendment—both the Free Exercise Clause ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4541 Bullying has attracted significant media attention in recent years, usually focusing on the most extreme examples of such behavior. Bullying can certainly be so severe as to trigger the police power of the state, and even federal involvement in enforcing civil rights (for example, through the Constitution’s mandate of “equal ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4526 The Massachusetts Medical Society recently voted to affirm its opposition to physician-assisted suicide. This vote matters because a movement is now afoot to de-criminalize assisted suicide in Massachusetts (and elsewhere). If successful, this movement would enlist physicians to assist in acts of self-murder. The physicians want no part in that. ... http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/01/4486