God or Government: What an Economy of “Nones” May Mean for Our Future
G.K. Chesterton may have summed up our current situation best: men who stop believing in God do not believe in nothing, but believe in anything. It seems that we’ve moved from belief in God to belief in government, and are hurtling toward an ever-growing state.
The Nones: Education without Divinity or Selfhood
If questions of ultimate meaning and purpose are shuttled to the side, as they are in so many of our schools and colleges, the various disciplines and domains of knowledge can never attain a unifying vision.
Too Many Abraham Lincolns
Like Abraham Lincoln, a growing number of our young people are “unchurched.” As a result, our “us vs. them” politics functions as a substitute for religious observance, membership, and devotion. If there were more authentic religious practice in our society, there might be less of the bitterly partisan politics that divide our country.
How the Rise in Unreligious Americans affects Sex and Marriage: Comparative Evidence from New Survey Data
Permissive sexual attitudes and practices have not stimulated the religious revival many Christians believe the extremes of Sexual Revolution will inspire. There is no evidence of it in the data. On the contrary: Christians seem to grow more complicit—or at least more quiet about their misgivings—by the year.
The Rise of the Nones
The rise in numbers of people with no religious affiliation reflects the emergence of a new faith rather than a loss of faith altogether. As America’s religious norm changes from Christianity to therapeutic deism and spiritualized progressivism, we will find more people challenging longstanding protections of human dignity and religious liberty.
Assisted Suicide: The Ethics, the Laws, and the Dangers
The people most harmed by this agenda are seriously ill people hearing from society and physicians that death by overdose will end their problems; other patients suffering from a reduced commitment to care; people with disabilities who are next in line to be seen as a “burden” on others; and lonely and depressed people of any age, seduced by the message that suicide is a positive solution. Adapted from a lecture delivered in June 2019 at the Vita Institute, an educational program for pro-life leaders sponsored by the University of Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture.
Johnny Tremain: One of My Favorite Books
Johnny Tremain is a liminal secular-religious book. It challenges its secular readers to have a deep enough conception of the secular to encompass dying for the sake of freedom. It challenges its religious readers to deepen their pieties sufficiently to encompass the aspiration for freedom which is written in the human frame. It shows that the constitution of liberty is engraved in the human form itself.
Renewing Reason in Our Local Communities
If we want to rebuild our country, we must rebuild our local communities. To rebuild communities, we must rebuild a culture of reasoned discourse.
Hannah Arendt: Thinking Pariah
Hannah Arendt has been unjustly transformed into a political partisan for the liberal causes that are in vogue today. Letting Arendt speak for herself recovers her intellectual independence as someone who defined herself apart from and against the political traditions of her day—including progressive liberalism.
A Storm Is Brewing in the Americas
A sexual orientation discrimination case could upend religious freedom for all the countries in the Americas in the near future . . . and nobody knows about it.
El Paso, the President, and the “Invaders”
Is it any surprise that shooter Patrick Crusius called his attack “a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” when the president himself uses this language?
A Call to Renewed Fidelity
Jake Meador calls Christians to a humbler approach to healing the political and social ills of our time.
On Residential City Streets, People Are More Important Than Parking
Whole blocks in densely populated cities like New York are designed primarily for the movement and storage of vehicles. These massive amounts of land would be better used as community parks.
Diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria—Too General and Too Much Harm
The diagnosis of gender dysphoria prematurely puts people on a path to transition while trivializing and dismissing contributing factors such as alcohol and drug abuse, sexual fetishes and co-existing psychological disorders. The trans “treatment” being idolized today should meet the same fate as lobotomies, tooth pulling and colon removal—tossed on the historical rubbish heap of debunked horrific experiments perpetrated on innocent, hurting people.
Ferris Bueller’s Vacation Vocation
John Hughes’s classic film, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, confronts current schemes of “free college” with a perennial human problem: What is God calling you to do?
Between Gods and Men: Natural Law and Religious Pluralism
Only natural law stands “between gods and men.” It employs human reason and observation, yet it admits of a divine creator behind nature—and therefore something inherently normative about naturally given ends. Without this intermediary, neither conflicts between divine law and human law nor conflicts between different religions can end in anything other than continuous conflict.
Immigration: Can We Talk About This?
How do we determine the right level of immigration? Assuming the optimal number of immigrants per year is neither zero nor infinite, what is it? Five hundred thousand? One million? Two million? Five million? If we can start our discussion about immigration from a shared set of ideals, then we can begin the laborious task of determining the levels and types of immigration that will allow the continuation of the American experiment.
When Impressions Supplant Reality: The Reign of Ironic Memes
With the help of memes, ironic satire has upended public morality, and without sound morals, hyperbole and reality, irony and sincerity, become indistinguishable.
Social Science Is Not Enough
All the science in the world does not answer the deepest questions of political importance. Pretending that questions of political priority are merely technical or scientific questions is the lie of modern times. Conservatives must relearn this lesson in order to defend essential public goods like marriage and the family.
On Conservative Women’s Conspicuous Absence from Political Discourse
If we are wondering why conservative women are not “showing up,” we should start by revisiting the concept that women’s nature is uniquely oriented toward private, family-oriented pursuits—and asking whether it’s worth holding onto.
Pro-Lifers Should Be Wary of Empty Pro-Life Rhetoric
Pro-life Democrat Michael Wear is right to be concerned about the 2020 Democratic candidates’ radical positions on abortion. But Wear’s suggestions for those candidates are long on political expediency and short on actual pro-life conviction. Pro-life voters shouldn’t let themselves be taken in by the deceptive “messaging” he recommends.
The Misery of Democratic Socialism
Bernie Sanders has openly declared “democratic socialism” as his guiding political and economic vision. Yet democratic socialism is incoherent as a philosophy and toxic as a way of economic and civil organization. It inevitably collapses into the abusive and destructive twentieth-century socialism we are familiar with. We should reject it unconditionally.
Judaism, Natural Law, and the Achievement of David Novak
David Novak is the only prominent Jewish natural law thinker in the world today. His work will be essential for that part of the Orthodox Jewish community that wishes to engage with our changing culture. In particular, for a defense of Orthodox Judaism in the modern world, it matters immensely that we understand the Jewish view of sex and sexuality to be a matter of mishpat, in the rational realm, the realm of natural law.
Can We Justify Bringing Children into This Dark World?
BirthStrikers protest climate change by vowing not to have children. Christians are called to a different response—a courageous one, built on hope rather than despair.
