Venezuela’s Agony, the Catholic Church, and a Post-Maduro Future
Although many are dissatisfied with the Vatican’s efforts to mediate Venezuela’s political crisis, Venezuela’s Catholic Church is the one institution that has retained its integrity throughout two decades of a leftist-populist tyranny. What might this mean for a post-dictatorship Venezuela?
The Scandalous Academy: Social Science in Service of Identity Politics
Thanks to the work of sociologist Mark Regnerus, a prominent peer-reviewed journal has retracted a deeply flawed study on how social stigma affects the life expectancy of sexual minorities. This failure of peer review isn’t an isolated case: the more social science research supports the dogmas of identity politics, the less closely it is examined, and the more enthusiastically it is promoted.
Lay Review With Teeth: What (Didn’t) Happen at the Vatican’s Sexual Abuse Summit
The Vatican’s recent Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church failed to produce any new reforms. Cardinal Cupich’s proposal would leave decision-making power in the hands of those authorities that Church members trust least: the bishops and the Vatican hierarchy. Instead, the Church needs to take investigatory and disciplinary processes out of the hands of local bishops and assign them to a national panel with lay members.
The Meaning of Meaninglessness
The authors of The Terror of Existence: From Ecclesiastes to Theater of the Absurd clearly feel an urgent existential imperative to grapple with the question of how we should live. It is, as they point out, a question even the nihilist must eventually answer.
Humanly Speaking: Aristotle, the First Amendment, and the Jurisprudence of Pornography
Far from being an exercise of self-expressive freedom, as some suggest, pornography binds internally, its addictive properties consuming its consumer under a tyranny of license both brutal and total. It denies our humanity as well as our liberty by moving us away from human speech and toward bestial voice.
Putting Adam Smith Back Together
The choices underlying marketplace transactions are more complicated and less narrowly self-regarding than we often suppose. By returning to the full corpus of Adam Smith’s writings, we can escape economistic conceptions of human beings and enhance our understanding of how market economies actually work.
Pilgrimage and the Christian Life: A Lenten Meditation
To live in the world as a pilgrim is to hold things, and places, and even people, lightly—enjoying them all in God, not as gods. For the nature of sin is not that we love bad things, but that we love good things as if they were final things.
Birth Control, Blood Clots, and Untimely Death: Time to Reconsider What We Tell Our Teens?
By increasing the risk of blood clots, stroke, and heart attack, hormonal contraception leads to the death of 300-400 women every year. To give some perspective, meningitis killed forty-five people in 2017. Most states mandate meningitis vaccination for college and university students. Would they consider the same kind of prevention campaigns for the deadly blood clots caused by hormonal birth control?
Equip Yourself to Become A True Trans Ally: Read Walt Heyer’s Trans Life Survivors
By sharing the stories of real people suffering real pain and struggling with enormous regret, Walt Heyer enables us to gain the first thing a person seeking to be a true trans ally needs: compassion.
The West is a Third World Country: The Relevance of Philip Rieff
Cultural conservatives face a time when it is not simply a question of debating the nature of our culture on some commonly agreed foundation. It is a time when we face the complete transformation of our culture into an anti-culture.
Are We All “Cat Persons” Now? How Modern Dating Destroys Intimacy
“Cat Person” powerfully reveals one of the most tragic costs of the sexual revolution: the fading possibility of true personal intimacy between a man and a woman.
In Their Own Words: Parents of Kids Who Think They Are Trans Speak Out
Parents like us must remain anonymous to maintain our children’s privacy, and because we face legal repercussions if our names are revealed. Parents who do not support their child’s gender identity risk being reported to Child Protective Services and losing custody of their children.
The Founders’ Natural Rights Philosophy Does Not Entail Radical Autonomy
It’s an error for conservatives to see the American Founding’s emphasis on natural rights as necessarily fostering extreme individualism in contemporary America. Eighteenth-century Americans would have viewed the notion that rights could be exercised contrary to natural law as ridiculous.
Courteous but Cowardly: Today’s Tolerant Atheism
For many college students today, to say that man is made for the knowledge (and perhaps even love) of God suggests that those who do not acknowledge God are somehow inadequate, incompetent, or ignorant. For them, such a claim amounts to condescension. This generation distances itself both from the vitriol and virulence of “the new atheists” and the naivete and fundamentalism of religionists in the pursuit of otherwise serene and humane existence.
The International Implications of Overturning Roe v. Wade
If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade it might set back the movement for an international right to abortion several decades. It might even defeat it once and for all.
John Quincy Adams contra Patrick Deneen: Marriage, Family, and the Story of the American Founding
Can we hold to the truths of the Declaration of Independence—that we are endowed by our Creator with natural rights and that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed—without undermining respect for those natural duties and natural relationships that do not depend on our consent?
How The Summer of Love Became The Final Bourgeois Revolution
What started as a rebellion against bourgeois conformity and oppressive technocracy ultimately ushered an age of triumphant individualism and economic globalization. The rediscovery of Marxism by the young rebels of the sixties started a long-term transformation of the left from advocate of the working class to political home of the professional elites. How did that happen?
How a Once-Secular Iranian Muslim-Turned-Atheist Turned Catholic
The story of Sohrab Ahmari is one of extremes. By turns, he was a rebel, Iranian expat, an atheist, a bohemian dissident, an anti-Mormon provocateur, a communist, a lawyer, a teacher, a libertine, and finally, a Christian.
It Is Never Necessary to Intentionally Kill a Fetal Human Being to Save a Woman’s Life: In Support of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act
The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act provides a scientifically sound, medically accurate, and respectful approach to ensure that the innocent human being who survives an attempted abortion will be treated with the same human dignity and respect that similarly aged human beings receive in the course of good neonatal medical care. It also ensures that human beings with disabilities are not targeted for intentional killing at the moment of birth.
President Trump’s Assault on Legal Immigration
To remain prosperous, America needs more immigrants.
Community-Based Businesses Help Tame Market Economy Excesses
Capitalism is an amoral economic system. An amoral economic system or “the free market” cannot guide human beings and their behavior. On the contrary, the market must actively be guided and tamed in order to ensure that it benefits communities. Supporting community-based and community-oriented businesses is one important way to achieve this end.
Memo to New York State Senators: Commercial Surrogacy Undermines the Child-Parent Relationship
With a Democratic majority in both the New York Senate and Assembly, along with a Democratic Governor, victory for the surrogacy industry is within reach. A bill that would make commercial surrogacy contracts legal and enforceable in the Empire State has been slipped into the state’s 2019 budget, buried deep on page 392.
Abortion’s Devastating Impact Upon Black Americans
Abortion cannot be allowed on economic, social, or racial grounds—to afford a higher standard of living, for the convenience of uncommitted relationships, or because a minority racial group is involved.
Pagans vs. Christians in the Modern World
Why are progressives so intent on winning control of the public square? In his new book, Steven Smith argues that they are motivated by the same battle that was waged in ancient Rome: Paganism vs. Christianity, immanence vs. transcendence.
