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church

A Surprising Generational Rift in the Christian Reformed Church

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In their denominations and elsewhere in the church, some progressive Baby Boomers have been caught by surprise at younger people not sharing their cultural values. But should they have been surprised at this generational rift in the church? Looking at how different generations have been formed morally, socially, and culturally may help address this question.
newborn baby

Illusions of Control and the Ableism of Big Fertility

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Children are not a means to the end of adult happiness or fulfilled longings. They are human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity. Refusal to accept that we are not ultimately in control means asserting our control over others.
Europe

Pierre Manent’s Multifaceted Defense of the European Nation-State

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Pierre Manent has been a penetrating critic of the European Union, a measured but firm defender of the nation-state, and a Catholic thinker who has made signal contributions to the understanding of the Church’s role in European history, and to the understanding of many of its eminent thinkers. 
religious persecution

The Complexity of Compassion: A Review of Knox Thames’s Ending Persecution

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Thames’s recent book is a thought-provoking and enlightening read for anyone interested in international religious freedom and the failures and triumphs of America’s contribution to it.
constitution

“Oh Say Can You C?” Compromise, Consensus, Consent, and the Constitution

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Each of these books presents valuable and insightful contributions to ongoing conversations about the role of the Constitution in contemporary American political life.
Statue of liberty

Society and Spectacle

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A self-governed people are not merely those who are allowed to vote. More than that, a self-governed people direct their own judgments, attention, choice, and emotion.
American flag

With Malice toward None

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If today we are tempted to gloat or despair, curse or mock, it would be far better for ourselves and our children to quietly pray or study, rake the leaves, invite a neighbor to dinner, play a game, or work in the garage: all the things that a self-reliant, free, and sober people do.
IVF clinic

Reclaiming Personhood in the Public Debate over IVF

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As we consider the future of our debate over IVF, we must go deeper than the political questions facing us and ask ourselves fundamental questions about how we view one another.
poetry

Revisiting Auden

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Despite Professor Jacobs’s forceful defense of this book, my opinion remains unchanged. Buy Auden’s Collected Poems, regularly visit his poems from the 1930s, then patiently scour the rest of his work for more gold.
man reading fiction

The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature

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By educating our sentiments—by wedding feeling and form, appetite and intellect—good literature moves us to love and hate what we ought to love and hate.
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

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.
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