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A great war was fought. Slavery was abolished. Still, on this fourth and fifth of July, 168 years after Frederick Douglass gave voice to feelings of alienation from white American pride and patriotism, recent events compel us to recognize that such feelings persist.
In staying out of the legislative fray, the Fifth Circuit humbly recognized the limits of its due process jurisdiction. Now it’s up to the Supreme Court to do the same.
Understanding homemaking as a craft that produces beautiful (if intangible) results should hopefully encourage young men and women who are thinking about caring for a home and/or children. For the young mother or father overwhelmed by all there is to do and feeling incompetent in the face of the multiple—often conflicting—demands of house and children, it may help to know that homemaking is a skill to be developed over time.
It seems the utopian impulse and the dystopian nightmare are never very distant from one another. If we are to love Big Brother, as Winston Smith does at the end of Orwell’s novel, all our other loves must be intruded upon, damaged, even sacrificed entirely. The case for freedom begins with the case for love.
Religion is a basic good for all human beings everywhere, therefore religious freedom is a universal human right. It is neither unfair nor parochial, but a requirement of justice.
The recent election clearly shows that the Poland of today is no longer the Poland of the 1990s or even of the early 2010s. It raises the question whether Poles have sustained the kind of culture necessary to build a market society based on authentic freedom and the truth about the good, one with a robust civil society to support both the logic of the state and the logic of the market.
There is a case for cursing the darkness. But it is better to light a candle, and better still to light many.
The country is divided. Many people support Donald Trump, and many revile him. Whatever is decided on his eligibility, or his criminal culpability in federal and state prosecutions, large numbers of people are going to be very unhappy.
Christmas hope is grounded both in the reality of Christ’s first advent and also in the reality that he will come again to fully establish the peace his princely rule has promised. This is one of the great paradoxes of the faith: Christ has come, and he is coming. The kingdom has arrived, yet we pray “Thy kingdom come.”
Much work must be done to restore the proper understanding of personhood—what it means to be human—in societies that permit euthanasia. This work will take not just years, but decades and possibly even longer than that.
Surely one way of fending off the Right, a way that does not involve waiting for a charismatic savior, is to reject policies that are destroying American cities. There is not an iota of criticism of such tendencies of the contemporary Left in Brown’s book; yet she would like to assure us that the next leftist charismatic leader will be animated by an ethic of responsibility.
Government may be able to provide material assistance, but it has failed to address the deeper causes of poverty. Worse, it has discouraged the most important defenses against poverty in America—work and marriage.
In Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, Peter Heather wishes to dismantle some of the conventions that have governed how the story of Christian history is told.
The principal irony of Juneteenth is that slavery was still a legal institution in the United States on June 19, 1865—if not in Texas because of the Emancipation Proclamation, then certainly in Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery would not be blotted out until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. This would not, however, be the only irony in the history of American emancipation, and certainly not the last.
In Sacred Foundations, Anna Grzmała-Busse argues that the secular nation-state derives much of its structure from the Catholic papacy when it was at its peak in the Middle Ages.
It is through deep feeling that we see truth and beauty. Spiritually emotional people are fully conscious of their object, fully immersed in it. Someone who is profoundly sorrowful can see life’s purpose more clearly than any practitioner of science and technical skill who is devoid of feeling.
Prose is not poetry, yet it has its own rhythms; and the writer’s meaning—conveyed not in bare words alone but in emphases, inflections, punctuations—can be clarified by speaking and hearing it as well as by seeing it. But reading well aloud takes practice.
My reading of the current economic and geopolitical situation is that at least in the short term, the United States will control enough pressure points to make life seriously difficult for the Chinese semiconductor industry.
The Greeks lost their marbles, and the British could kindly return them. Bad arguments why the British must return them do not gainsay the fact that they may. Such magnanimity, moreover, would put into practice one of most unexpected innovations in human history: St. Paul’s understanding of grace.
When it comes to premeditated murder, compensation is not available. As much of human history attests and as the biblical witness affirms, it is the one crime that carries a mandatory death sentence. To suggest or argue that the ultimate human crime should not be met with the ultimate punishment is a moral travesty because it fails to comprehend the nature and meaning of the imago Dei, and thereby undermines the common good.
Aristophanes suggests that, like so many political matters, there are tradeoffs involved in the absolute versus relative wealth debate. There is no obvious, universally desirable solution: different societies will tolerate different levels of inequality and might be willing to sacrifice different levels of absolute wealth. Nonetheless, the warning from Aristophanes’ Poverty is clear: absolute equality means absolute destitution.
As the American story enters its fifth century, the list of those who have earned the right to be called fathers and mothers of our country grows ever longer. As we retell our national story to each generation, we will of course continue to argue about whether some of the characters were really heroes or villains—a debate that is part of every nation’s storytelling. But unless we can recover a certain generosity towards those who came before us, we will find ourselves with nothing to pass on to those who come after.
Articulating and responding to common misconceptions concerning the ethics of abortion will help to clarify and advance the debate, moving past misleading slogans to engage in a forthright and respectful public dialogue in the wake of Dobbs, and seeking to build a genuine culture of life that supports the needs of both women and children.