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The Inalienable Right to Life: An Update on Assisted Suicide in the United States and Canada

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We must act now to prevent assisted suicide from gaining a stronger foothold in the United States.

Leo Strauss and the Pursuit of Knowledge: A Reply to Paul DeHart

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Leo Strauss’s statements on philosophy do not deny that knowledge is possible. Rather, they emphasize that philosophy—while motivated by awareness of one’s own ignorance—is a way of life teleologically ordered toward knowledge.

The Fourteenth Amendment and Masterpiece Cakeshop: Equal Citizenship, our Inclusive Republic, and Anglo-American Common Law

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The government cannot impose creedal and exclusionary limits on occupational freedom by compelling particular citizens to provide goods and services contrary to their beliefs, unless those citizens have such a monopoly market power as to exclude other citizens from the market.

Minority Stress Is Real, but Wedding Cakes Don’t Cause It

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New research points to “internalized homophobia” as the problem, not external discrimination.

Religious Exemptions Aren’t Special Privileges

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Why are Christian bakers and florists less worthy of accommodation than groups who would engage in nearly identical behavior for equally expressive, but not necessarily religious, purposes?

Equal Property Rights for All, Including Christian Wedding Cake Bakers

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Just as governors, abortionists, and sexual-identity activists enjoy legal protection for their property rights, so do religious business owners.

The Christian Baker’s Unanswered Legal Argument: Why the Strongest Objections Fail

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The Supreme Court is about to decide whether a baker has a First Amendment right not to be compelled to design and create cakes celebrating same-sex weddings. The baker’s best legal argument is simple, and it survives the best objections filed by the ACLU and Progressive scholars.

Making the Case for Complicity-Based Religious Liberty Accommodations

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Two Yale law professors say religious liberty should not be accommodated in “complicity” cases such as Masterpiece Cakeshop and Arlene’s Flowers. Their argument fails to recognize that such accommodations are a traditional and necessary part of the American legal framework.

American Muslims, Lot’s Wife, and the Christian Baker

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Several progressive Muslim organizations have signed an amicus brief supporting the same-sex couple in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. This not only distorts Islamic teaching and anthropology, it also fuels the increasingly powerful movement of militant irreligious orthodoxy.

Consent is Not Enough: Harvey Weinstein, Sex, and Human Flourishing

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What Harvey Weinstein is accused of is wrong not only because the victims did not consent but also and more importantly because of what he chose. Sex expresses self-gift, which is why it is such a violation when something that should only be a free gift is stolen by force.

Capital Punishment, Catholicism, and Natural Law: A Reply to Christopher Tollefsen

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Aquinas taught the principle that a punishment ought to be proportionate to the offense, where death is a proportionate punishment for the gravest crimes.

St. John Paul II Did Not Change Catholic Teaching on Capital Punishment: A Reply to E. Christian Brugger

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If E. Christian Brugger is right, then the Church has been teaching grave moral error and badly misunderstanding scripture for two millennia. Nothing less than her very credibility is at stake.

Traditional Catholic Doctrine on Capital Punishment is Irreversible: A Reply to E. Christian Brugger

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E. Christian Brugger is wrong: neither scripture nor tradition could justify a reversal of the Church’s millennia-old teaching on capital punishment

Hobby Lobby Billionaires, Skeptical Scholars, and the Museum of the Bible

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Candida Moss and Joel Baden sound an alarm about the Green family, owners of Hobby Lobby and founders of the Museum of the Bible. The real target here, though, is not so much the Greens as the evangelical Protestant view of the Bible that they embrace.

Porn Is the Missing Piece in the Louis C.K. Story

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Pornography rewires its viewers’ brains, distorting the way they interpret the behavior of those around them and making them believe that unacceptable behavior will be welcomed.

Doubting Thomas (Aquinas) on Private and Public Killing

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There is a genuine tension, not just in Aquinas but in Church teaching more generally, between claims about the intrinsic goodness, sanctity, and inviolability of human life, and claims about political authority to kill. The second in a two-part series.

A Philosophical Case Against Capital Punishment

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Arguments against the death penalty can be made not only on the basis of theology but also on the basis of natural law philosophy. The first in a two-part series.

The Fault Lies in Ourselves: Coriolanus at the Royal Shakespeare Company

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Seeing Director Angus Jackson’s Coriolanus should be uncomfortable for anyone who loves republican government, regardless of political leaning.

Michael Novak: A Model for Social Scientists

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The “real human person” was the persistent subject of Michael Novak’s life’s work. Novak wanted real, gritty, ordinary persons, in ordinary life, and he wanted a political and economic order for those real, gritty, ordinary persons.

Embryology and Science Denial

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The HHS has recently—and rightly—described life as beginning at conception. Dr. Richard Paulson’s denial of this claim contradicts the standard scientific position, and his arguments against that claim are fallacious and inaccurate.

Considering Our Options: Deepening Religious Freedom, Witness, and Argument in the Public Square

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Christian witness must go deeper than simply asserting our right to our “sincerely held beliefs.” Igniting the religious question is the best way to restore reason to a public square.

The Impoverishment of Law and the Loss of Ordered Liberty

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In their new book, Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis make a strong case for pluralism and ordered liberty, while John Corvino drafts a blueprint for a comprehensive despotism that would consume the preconditions and legal safeguards for ordered liberty. Part two of a two-part review essay.

Debating Liberty: Why You Should Read the New Book by John Corvino, Ryan T. Anderson, and Sherif Girgis

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The implications of John Corvino, Ryan T. Anderson, Sherif Girgis’s well-argued debate reach far beyond the latest round in the culture wars. They go to the foundations of the American experiment in ordered liberty. Part one of a two-part review essay.

Antonin Scalia, Republican Schoolmaster

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Love of country and love of the Constitution—a simple and pure patriotism matched with a sophisticated historical sensibility—run through a new collection of Justice Antonin Scalia’s speeches.