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Students and tech

Subcontracting Our Minds 

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As Rousseau put it, for the inhabitant of bourgeois society, it is necessary “to be or to seem.” AI will hand you the means to seem—at least so long as you are delivering the speech. It will deprive you of the ability to be.
tech and disembodiment

Technological Mediation in a Disembodied World: A Review of Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience 

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Technology does not merely present the real, like our bodily senses; instead, it re-presents, reproduces, copies, or simulates the real. This has concerned techno-conservatives for millennia, ever since Plato’s proposal to ban all “imitative arts” from his ideal city-state, and it is a concern naturally heightened in the era of AI deepfakes.
ultrasound image

Screwtape on “My Embryo”

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We may not be privy to Screwtape’s letters on the understanding of the meaning of the possessive pronoun “my” in “my embryo,” but judging from jurisprudential trends, we would be able to hazard a very good guess.
fancy car and house

Being Bougie

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Living in a prosperous bourgeois society is not necessarily a problem; living with a bourgeois attitude on the inside is.
same-sex union

Changing Minds about Same-Sex Union: A Critical Analysis of The Widening of God’s Mercy by Christopher Hays and Richard Hays

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Christopher and Richard Hays have presented plausible arguments supported by biblical warrants for welcoming sexual minorities into church membership and leadership. Yet their mercy trajectory approach falls far short of building a coherent, convincing cumulative case to support their vision of blessing same-sex unions in the church.
the globe

Ideology and Religion

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If the purpose is to change the world, not merely to describe it, as Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach claims, then here we see something of what that means: the critique of religion is not simply for the purpose of demystifying or disenchanting the world. Rather, it is part of changing the world, of tearing down the illusions by which men and women shield themselves from having to face reality.
Church wedding

Man’s Search for Marriage

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Gen Z's turn toward church may be unexpected, but it is actually rooted in the most natural drive of all: a desire for marriage and family. Young men are looking for truth and responsibility—and, ultimately, meaning. For most men, throughout history, a primary source of meaning has been marriage and children.
constitution

Human Flourishing and Constitutional Democracy

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Paradoxically, the progressive effort to overcome constitutional limits on government power—purportedly justified on grounds of efficiency—hardly seems to have enabled government to govern well. Instead, the unwieldy and often conflictual morass of agencies and officials in the administrative state has more often than not resulted in governmental paralysis, perhaps thankfully leaving Americans as ungovernable as we have always been.
capital punishment

Defending Capital Punishment: A Response to Dennis Uhlman

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Is Uhlman’s position that all executions for murder violate pro-life principles, or only executions for which there is some residual doubt of guilt, however small? In any system run by fallible human beings, however well-intended, mistakes are possible. Is the mere possibility of error enough to reject the death penalty in its entirety? Or is his position that wrongful executions are so common in the United States that the pro-life advocate should reject capital punishment as applied in this country at this time?
reading

The Bookshelf: Unputdownable

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Just as a thrilling novel can keep us turning the pages, our interest rising all the while, so a work of history, philosophy, science, or politics can startle us with revelations of the truth that make us keep reading just as urgently.
Rome

Who’s Who: Martin Rhonheimer, the Church’s Swiss Army Knife 

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If Rhonheimer’s work never gets the appreciation it deserves, he has already changed the conversation in subtle ways. Modifying Oliver Wendell Holmes’s definition of a great thinker, I would wager that 100 years after Rhonheimer passes on, whether they know it or not, Catholic philosophers and theologians “will be moving to the measure of his thought.”
motherhood

Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic

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By glorifying personal, individual choice, ironically, our society has devalued motherhood by making it just one possible choice, and a choice made by one person (the woman), as opposed to valuing personhood within the context of a larger family, community, and society.
Hartheim Castle

Euthanasia in the Castle: Inside Europe’s Museums of Nazi Medical Crimes

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Today we might instinctively look at Nazi criteria for death as utterly baseless, but at the time seasoned medical professionals regarded them as reasonable. To have a sense of history is to grasp the arbitrariness of such criteria. When it comes to killing patients, there is no way to get the criteria just right because the stamp of medical approval sends a social message that there is a category of persons who should not exist.
Parthenon

Social Contract Theory in the Ruins?

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Is government by consent irretrievably lost? I maintain that the principle of consent is not lost and that we can rebuild a different sort of social contract theory from amid the ruins.
Israel Palestine

What Is Settler Colonialism? A Q&A with Adam Kirsch

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The only way to actually create a better future is to start with the world we actually live in and move forward—which may require “despairing” of the past, which cannot be changed.
Constitution

Give Me That Old Time Originalism

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Originalism in Theology and Law is a welcome salvo in an ecumenical and interdisciplinary conversation that has been too long dominated by originalism’s critics.
Capital punishment

Wrongful Executions and the Pro-Life Movement’s Responsibility 

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While serious people can debate the underlying ethics of whether the death penalty is just, our country has proven that it is unable to carry out executions in a way that protects justice.
hospice

Consciousness and Sedation at the End of Life

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Consciousness is not simply a phenomenon that can be arbitrarily dispensed with or suppressed at whim: it is a critical element of the human experience, particularly in the last chapter of one’s earthly existence, during which one comes face to face with the mystery of suffering and the meaning of life.
Capitol building

The Patience of Conservatism

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This election will come and go, and the results will be, as usual, a mixed bag. There are better and worse alternatives, of course, and I have my own judgments and evaluations about such things, as does everyone else. Rather, I’m thinking about a mood too prevalent among conservatives in our time, one where gratitude, patience, caution, and fidelity have given way to anger, panic, urgency, and bile. Such are not conservative, nor are they good for us or our opponents, and they are likely to make things far, far worse. 
ethics advice column

Ask Chris Tollefsen: An Ethics Advice Column

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For one thinking clearly about the issue, the incrementalist approach is not only permissible, but obligatory, a matter of justice to those unborn human beings who can, but otherwise will not, be saved.
married couple

The Mystery of Marriage

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A religious attitude, even if only a general one, is essential to marriage; it is therefore no surprise that marriage is declining in the West as religiosity declines.
cemetery

Reflections on Avelut

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Most Americans will not begin adopting avelut practices in any kind of wholesale manner. But it offers insights into the human condition that may nonetheless be helpful—about the timing of the grief cycle, the need to honor the departed free from distraction, and how communities might adopt robust mourning structures to support those who are suffering. 
child at doctor's office

Evidence over Ideology: Gender-Distressed Children Deserve Nothing Less

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When it comes to children’s health, ideology should never override evidence. Children who are distressed about their biological sex need evidence-based care that facilitates their journey to adulthood, keeping them mentally and physically intact.
Israel flag

What Conservatives, Catholics, and All Americans Can Learn from Israel 

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As the experience of many nations around the world shows, constitutions are easily dissolved, and constitutional order lost, when citizens allow their leaders to violate their charter to achieve partisan goals. When that happens, the delicate system of checks and balances usually gives way to an oppressive one-party rule. 
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