When Christianity enters a society, it provides an understanding of inherent and equal human dignity that lifts up those whom that society has considered unworthy. But what happens when Christianity recedes? Christian human dignity is not founded on maximizing fairness or autonomy, but on the fact that all human beings are made free and in the image of God. If it becomes detached from that principle, then human dignity no longer makes sense.
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Norman Rockwell, Mooreeffoc, and the Delight of the Commonplace
Norman Rockwell’s famed realism and attention to detail take that which is commonplace, and make it once again both startling and delightful. He aims to make us see the world that is really here, but that we so often take no notice of, precisely because it’s so familiar to us that we don’t bother to see it.
The Forgotten Friend: (Re)Discovering Mary Midgley
Mary Midgley, the lesser-known friend of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch, was a deliberately multidisciplinary thinker. She was convinced that moral philosophers must relate various bodies of knowledge to one another if they are to achieve an adequate understanding of human life, human motivation, and human success or failure. Midgley, writing from the margins of the discipline, was the first to present a positive proposal for the kind of moral philosophy recommended but never developed by Anscombe, Foot, and Murdoch: a naturalistic moral philosophy, grounded in the character and needs of the human animal.
Reviving Protestant Natural Law
About a decade and a half ago, a groundbreaking study reinvigorated Protestant moral thought. It is time for an appreciation and renewed application of these eternal truths.
Why I’m Not Afraid to Bring More Children into a Broken World
My generation feels obligated to constrain our footprint in the name of social justice. I reject this. I cannot promise my children perfect comfort or safety in the world. But I can make their world—our home, our lives, our family—a mooring when everything else is guaranteed to be perpetually confused.
The Bookshelf: Reading in the Faith
My ignorance of many important things gnaws at me, as does the consciousness that the rest of my life is not time enough to learn what I want to know. Lately my thoughts have turned to authors with whom I have some acquaintance but want to know better—specifically those philosophers and theologians who have shaped and transmitted the Catholic faith through the ages.
The Difficulties of Teaching about Divorce in an Anecdotal World
The greatest challenge to my teaching is the relativist, anecdote-dominated view of knowledge many of my students have absorbed by the time they enter my classroom. Too many of their teachers embrace the view that relativist, subjectivist, and ultimately personal experiential knowledge is the only kind available to us—or at least that it trumps other kinds of knowledge.
Liberalism Has Become a Dirty Joke
Conservatives may hope that liberalism’s better angels prevail. But the ravages of ideological liberalism, especially the damage done by the sexual revolution to family and community, require active redress. Conservatives, drawing on the wisdom and traditions we have sustained (and which have sustained us), must help our culture relearn essential parts of being human.
Did the Civil War—or Lincoln—Break the Constitution?
Did Lincoln regard the Constitution as “broken” and therefore in need of replacement? Or did he believe that the Declaration of Independence represented America’s aspiration to end slavery, and infused the Constitution with this same aspiration?
Fandom and the Great Books
The canon wars are over, and the canon lost. But the canon’s defeat might not be a bad thing for readers and teachers who care about great books, because it allows us to offer franker, more interesting, and more compelling reasons to read them.
Recovering the Soul of Psychiatry: A Conversation with Johns Hopkins’s Dr. Margaret Chisolm
“I want to give people hope, people living with mental illness as well as family members of people living with mental illness, that not only can they survive their illness, but they can also reach their greatest potential. Sometimes, in fact, they reach their greatest potential not despite the illness, but because of the illness.”
January 6th and Our Fatal Defenses of Political Violence
We are increasingly becoming afflicted by the who/whom logic of Lenin. For Lenin, when it comes to political aggression, what matters is who performs the action and upon whom it is performed. But, in reality, the whom you attack is a who in reality. Just as you are a self, so too are they a self.