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In Defense of Amy Coney Barrett: An Examination of Her Record

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Justice Barrett's presence has fundamentally shifted the center of the Court. For decades, conservatives could only win by fitting their cases into the politically liberal framework of Anthony Kennedy. Now—thanks to Barrett—the path to victory is to fit it into the judicially conservative framework of Antonin Scalia. That alone is a political and jurisprudential victory, even if it doesn’t result in litigation victories in all cases.

In Defense of Amy Coney Barrett: Why She Was Nominated to the Supreme Court

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Republicans couldn’t have filled the seat without Justice Barrett. Mitch McConnell knew this, and for that reason insisted that she needed to be the nominee.

IVF and the Language of Gift: A Theological Commentary on a Recent Executive Order

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This IVF executive order is anything but pro-life, and it is most certainly not pro-family. It is to be condemned in the strongest terms, and that condemnation must authentically inform Catholic life and family policy and practice. I pray fervently that the process of policy consultation that will soon come as a result of this executive order leave room, at the absolute minimum, for religious and conscience exemptions. But this is the bare minimum.

A Physician’s Pandemic Perspective, Five Years Later: An Interview with Donald Landry

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Medicine goes back 5,000 years. Medicine is already 2,500 years old when Hippocrates articulates the Oath, and it hasn't even started the infancy of its science. So for millennia, the medical profession has been in service of those in need—regardless of risk.

How Our Politics Failed during the COVID Pandemic: An Interview with Stephen Macedo

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There was a fundamental failure of toleration for alternative points of view. I think some of it might be explained by the fact that it was a pandemic. For public health guidance to be effective, people have to comply. To that I would say fair enough, but it’s also equally important—or more important—to have confidence that the policies are sound. People complying en masse with unsound policies won’t do us a whole lot of good. That’s what open debate is supposed to address.

Christian Bioethics in a Secular World: In Search of Ethical Common Ground

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Beyond a mere set of rules and regulations, a bioethics shaped by Christianity does have something to say to those who suffer—and a person to say it to, One who has suffered alongside us. It is my hope—as it is Cherry’s, I imagine—to see bioethics transformed by the love and mercy made possible by a personal knowledge of Christ. 

Optimizing for Holiness: App Culture and Catholic Spirituality

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Exodus 90’s use of the “why” is particularly fruitful, turning a powerful but potentially self-centered aspect of psychology into a means of loving others. Apps like these can help users to build virtue and grow closer to God. But even with a transformed “why,” there is a tension between the Christian spiritual life and the user-centered framework built into the form of a lifestyle app, because the app offers a vision of happiness as gradually increasing control over one’s life.

Society Stays Christian Longer If It Respects Religious Freedom: New Evidence from Pew

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If Christians want America to be more Christian, they should recommit themselves to the deeply Christian principle of freedom of religion.

Patience, Docility, and Hope

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It’s Lent, again, and that’s good news. We are asked to acknowledge our moral agency along with our responsibility for distorting ourselves—without shifting blame to any other—and then to repent, in patient docility, sustained by a hope that distortion can become integrity and our sorrows turn to joy.

The Freedom of Lent

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Lent is not merely an occasion to give up chocolate or beer, do a few good deeds, and give a bit more to charity, although those are all acceptable ways to do penance. Lent is more: an intransigent insistence that humans are free and possess, in whatever condition they happen to find themselves, the dignity of responsibility.

The Deceitfulness of Wealth

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If wealth is as deceitful as Christ teaches in this parable of the sower, and we are the wealthiest society that has ever existed, then the occasion for temptation and deception is greater as well. And so we must cultivate habits of gratitude for what God has provided to us and practices of giving for what God wills.

Pornographers Before the Supreme Court

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“I know it when I see it”—But could we keep at least the kids from seeing it and knowing it? 

Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License

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Called to Liberty may prove useful for those outside the Church who seek a broad introduction to the paradoxes of freedom. Still, more is needed to recover freedom from its current drubbing by both radicals on the Left and reactionaries on the Right—a drubbing that increasingly rejects measure, moderation, and maturity. 

Wine, Medicine, and Risks to Health

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The new antagonism toward wine and other forms of alcohol seems similarly de-personal to me. It neglects the way that wine, at its best, functions in relationships: at a family meal, a wedding, a couple celebrating their anniversary, and the Eucharistic feast. And it treats what should be an individual decision—to drink or not—entirely in terms of a statistical approach to alcohol’s health risks.

Scrutinizing the Sacred

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Scruton was acutely aware that, in a society that has largely lost its religion, art can give people a sense of the timeless and transcendental. That is why he spent his life defending genuine art from those who would “do dirt on life.” However, it is also true that art can never provide the redemption that is promised by religion. The reason for this is that while art may offer us “intimations” of the sacred, only religion can reconcile us to it. 

Contra Koppelman—What Mere Natural Law Was About

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Any system of jurisprudence must find its ground in these anchoring truths that we can reliably know, because they are true of necessity. They are the principles of reason that mark the natural law, the law that underlies our positive law. And any scheme of natural law built on these grounds then cannot be, as Andrew Koppelman labels it, a mere “theory” of the natural law. It would be the real thing.

Ozempocalypse?

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It’s unclear so far what, if any, decisive or long-term impact Ozempic might have on American health. But the contours of the debate are revealing.

The Bookshelf: Recovering the Academic Vocation

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If the academy can produce teachers able to communicate to students the perfectly useless joy of learning, then it may continue to make its most valuable contribution to our civic life.

A Theology of Health

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While the MAHA critique is correct, there is plenty of room for thinking and engaging about what will replace the impoverished vision of health that got us into this mess. Tyler VanderWeele, and the vision he lays out in A Theology of Health, should be at the center of those conversations. 

The Euthanasia of Ivan Ilyich: Recovering Good Lives and Deaths in the Age of Assisted Dying

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The direction of our culture is increasingly toward “death pods” where we will die alone, because we, like Ivan, have refused to really live together. Resisting such a culture of solitary and uncared for assisted dying will take legislation, but it will also require that we spend some time with Ilyich and try to recover the goodness of a good life and of a good death.

Forgetfulness, Forgiveness, and Politics: The Case of Congress

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Congress has declined into a destructive cycle of revenge. To preserve the institution and strengthen our politics, politicians must take the risk to forgive.

Forming a Cultural Mind

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If you want a guide for revitalizing Western academia and culture, read Joseph Stuart’s masterly introduction to the thought of Christopher Dawson.

What Does It Mean to Be a Woman? An Interview with Dr. Abigail Favale on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

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Feminism is a very fractious world. There’s a lot of different visions of what’s wrong and how we fix it. But all of the modern strands can trace their roots back to The Second Sex.

In Defense of Christian Civilization

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In announcing Christianity’s incompatibility with civilization, Kingsnorth implicitly claims to have noticed a vital truth of the faith that was somehow overlooked by most of the great teachers of Christianity for most of Christian history. This is a rather dubious proposition.