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A vision of control based on ambition, education, and income has come to dominate professional-class perspectives on having children, but we should reject these mistaken cultural pressures and remember that truly abundant life is achieved through giving and receiving love.
The best way to decide whether to say yes to the job offer in front of you lies, as is so often the case, on the other side of more questions.
A new critical commentary on Lewis’s classic 1943 work provides a treasure trove of interpretation and supplementary material. Lewis’s warnings about the consequences of jettisoning natural law—what he referred to as the Tao—remain as trenchant today as they were when delivered during the Second World War.
In their new book, Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley provide a rousing exhortation for Catholics to unapologetically live out their faith. Unfortunately, the book contains too many generalizations, overstatements, and imprecisions to be a thoughtful guide to Catholic politics. Any serious Catholic politics must recognize that the problem of pluralism cannot be solved by dominating non-Catholics and imposing our view of the good on them.
A great irony of the Jewish and Christian faith traditions: One must be willing to accept suffering and sacrifice for a greater purpose that transcends one’s particular material and sensual needs and desires. Counter-intuitively, it is these transcendent qualities of faith that eschew utilitarian aims for a greater purpose that create the circumstances for greater material well-being.
A Seattle coffee shop owner’s refusal to serve “these people” stands in stark contrast to artists’ cases.
A new book by David Dalin tells the fascinating stories of America’s Jewish Supreme Court justices.
A desire to be protected from the meaning of our body has led only to a need to be protected from the ravages of reality.
Claire Fox’s book, “I Find That Offensive!” is a well-written, important, even brilliant contribution towards understanding the significance of current campus conflicts for society as a whole. Sadly, the picture she paints is bleaker than Fox herself realizes.
We need offensive cartoons, obnoxious cartoonists, and offended sensibilities. Without them, society stagnates and tyranny reigns.
To take offense does not free us from further argument or criticism. Instead, offense demands ongoing criticism between partners in ethical discourse as a recognition of their fundamental human equality.
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.
The new Alabama IVF provider immunity law, recently praised by former President Trump, will have pernicious national consequences on parents’ rights to hold IVF providers accountable and will negatively affect Republican unity over pro-life issues.
This moment, among other things, may call for something as banal as looking around, embracing and underscoring the figures and images that capture what is enduringly good about normal American life.
Loving one’s neighbor is a moral imperative. How best to do so, however, is more complex than just recklessly citing this principle as immediate justification. All my point amounts to is a plea for caution. 
Faithfully living what we claim to believe as Catholic Christians shapes the future. And the fact is, we can no longer afford a sclerotic Church, a comfortable Church, a get-along Church. We need to be a confessing Church, not just in our diocesan structures, but in the pews and family homes of every parish.
I won’t resort to the “be yourself!” platitude or argue that anyone should unleash the waterworks on a first date. However, I will suggest that the relationships (particularly romantic ones) that alleviate despondency cannot be cultivated while adhering to manifestos and maintaining derogatory views of the opposite sex. And that applies to both women and men. 
The post-conversion challenges facing Christians arose when they reentered society as baptized people and navigated the conflicts raised by their new convictions. This process demanded a culturally discerning spiritual life.
What should be at the forefront of everyone’s mind is the question, “How does all this technological tinkering affect the kids?” We are only beginning to be able to answer that question.
The truth lurking inside the great morass of opinions, questions, and fears about the human condition is that a confluence of factors leads to greater personal, familial, and communal flourishing.
If the stories can change, it stands to reason that they can improve—or deteriorate. Responsible cultural elites of the Left and Right alike would do well to consider not only what claims they make explicitly, but what kinds of stories underlie those claims, and whether these are the right stories to tell.
Self-interest in a democracy is not necessarily an evil. It only becomes an evil when democratic government grows so intrusive in ordinary life that self-interest can only be interpreted as a kind of dissent from a general—but now all-pervasive—good.
We must be clear that nothing in the search for the truth entails that we recede in any way from the surety that we have with us, now as ever, the standards for judging evil ends to be truly evil.   
It’s a good day for sorrow, a habit sustaining our decency, humanity, patience, and courage for all the other days yet to come. All days bring their challenges, and there is much in our day to bemoan and condemn. Fair enough, but to have the courage and steadfastness needed to continue on, day in and day out, our sorrow serves us well.