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Learning to Live with Same-Sex Marriage?

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The city of Philadelphia is targeting Catholic Social Services for its policy, based on religious beliefs about marriage, of not placing foster children with same-sex couples.

Physician-Assisted Suicide and Personal Action: Responding to the Law

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We can’t afford to live without physicians who are devoted to always healing and caring, and never harming. Requesting physician-assisted suicide, like legalizing it, erodes that devotion. A refusal to ask, even on the part of those not committed to the inviolability of human life, helps sustain that devotion.

An Open Letter to Mr. George Clooney on Hate and the Southern Poverty Law Center

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Please use your influence as a major donor to persuade the Southern Policy Law Center to amend its embittering and unproductive campaigns to label any political or social issue opponent as a hate group. Although controversial, organizations that fight to protect the unborn and strengthen families are not motivated by hate. Vilifying them only worsens our toxic and polarized political climate.

Vetoing Life, Vetoing Women’s Care

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One would think that a politician like Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who aspires to national office on a message of unity and inclusion, would push his party toward common ground—like the common ground that the Women’s Care Center occupies. Why, then, would he veto this pregnancy center’s zoning request?

On Christian Liberty and Lockean Liberty: A Grateful Response to Micah Watson, Samuel Gregg, and Anthony Esolen

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If we want a different politics, ultimately we must offer a different moral imagination for ourselves, our children, and theirs.

Patrick Deneen, The Little Sisters of the Poor, and Libertas Idiotica

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We are not Hobbesian atoms of self-will, not until liberalism makes us so. Human beings have ever been human by virtue of their relations with others, and by virtue of the bonds of duty and memory that these relations imply.

Patrick Deneen and the Problem with Liberalism

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Patrick Deneen poses good questions but begs others. The second installment in the Public Discourse symposium on Why Liberalism Failed.

Prisoners in the American Cave

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Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is a provocative attempt to explain what’s wrong with our culture, how this came to be, and what might be done about it. Although his historical account of liberalism is unpersuasive, he offers a prescient analysis of the current moment and insightful prescriptions for constructive action.

Heart Religion, Tradition, and the Evangelical Chameleon

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What can keep today’s young evangelical searchers in the fold? Only the recognition that their own questing puts them squarely in the lineage of martyrs, mystics, monastics, and the whole “cloud of witnesses.”

What’s Scariest: Facebook, Google . . . or Us?

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Facebook or Google taking over the world is a distant, speculative fear. Being harassed, humiliated, shunned and unemployed are immediate fears. We increasingly live in a digital panopticon ruled as much by mobs as by the overseers.

Muslims and Christians Should Work Together to Support Family and Human Flourishing

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It’s time for Christians to partner with conservative Muslims and others who share traditional views on key social issues. And American Muslims should leave behind their lockstep alliance with the social justice left.

Racism and the Pro-Life Movement

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It is wrong to see the goals of the pro-life movement as being in competition with the need to address continuing manifestations of racism. Those who fight for life and against racism fight for the same thing.

The Merit Badge of Surrender: How the Boy Scouts of America are Succumbing to the Gender Revolution

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With the recent decision to drop “Boy” from their fabled name, the Boy Scouts undermine the very foundation for their existence and exacerbate our society’s confusion about sexual difference and gender distinction.

King Solomon, The False Mother, and Alfie Evans

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Like King Solomon, the courts in England were presented with a straightforward question: To whom does this child belong? In both cases, the true parent was unquestionably the one willing to sacrifice for the child, to safeguard his life even at the expense of never seeing him again, while the “false mother” did not care whether the child lived or died.

The Catholic Church, the State, and Liberalism

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According to previous papal teaching, a Catholic confessional state is the ideal, even if in most modern situations it’s not a practical possibility, and prudence would steer us away from it. That teaching continues to be normative for Catholics.

Conforming to Good or Evil: More Moral Lessons in the Shadow of the Holocaust

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Clear moral norms are crucial. But to be effective, those norms need to be embodied in moral communities and social practices, habituated in the virtues, and animated by a conviction that they are an essential part of human flourishing. We must create social structures and communities in which intellectual training and moral formation in the virtues can happen.

Moral Education in the Shadow of the Holocaust

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Why do some ordinary men and women commit horrible atrocities, while others resist, even if it costs their lives? Studies of the Holocaust offer a potent critique of our customary approaches to moral education.

Adapt or Die: Why Social Conservatives Need a Moneyball Revolution

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If social conservatives don’t radically alter what we are doing—if we don’t buck the current conventional wisdom and do something different—we will lose.

California’s New Sexual Orientation Bill Is Bad, but It Wouldn’t Ban Books

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Social conservatives are right to oppose proposed legislation that would ban therapy to help those experiencing unwanted same-sex attraction or gender identity confusion. But they’re wrong to say that the bill would ban books.

The First Amendment Didn’t Separate Church and State—Christianity Did

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It was Christianity, not modernity, that separated church and state. It was modernity, not Christianity, that sought to bind them back together. And, at day’s end, the American order has more in keeping with the Christian apostasy than with either antiquity’s sacral political orders or modernity’s rejection of the claim that there exists any domain outside the jurisdiction of the modern state.

The Dual Legitimation Crisis: Elitism, Populism, and Political Power

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Because liberal Western democracies are ostensibly rooted in the theory of popular sovereignty, elite disdain for the people creates another legitimation crisis—one that many fail to recognize. It is not simply that the people have lost confidence in the elites and their governance, or that the elites struggle to speak for (and even to) the people. Disdain for the people also unmoors elite authority.

Conservatives Should Care about Institutional Racism

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Contemporary America faces continued racial discord that throws into question our mutual seriousness about the natural rights tradition and our commitment to the demands of republican citizenship. In an effort at self-scrutiny, conservatives should ask ourselves what our first response is in the face of evidence of institutional racism, and then ask ourselves what it should be.

How the New Corporate Elite Sold Same-Sex Marriage to the American Public

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Darel Paul’s meticulous, courageous account of how the elites brought same-sex marriage to America deserves to be read by all who would understand where we are and where we're going.

Rob Rieman, Joseph Pieper, and the Existential Poverty of the West

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Joseph Pieper knows what Rob Riemen has forgotten: the existential poverty of the West cannot be evaded or solved through humanism, for no ersatz god gives meaning to our poetry, song, dance, and drama. Absent God, it is all vapor, lacking the goodness to which we respond in wonder, delight, joy, and feasting.