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Picture of John F. Doherty

John F. Doherty

John Doherty is Director of Finance of The Witherspoon Institute.

Cardinal Newman

The Magisterial Minimism of John Henry Newman 

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Inconsistencies in official religious teachings are frequently only apparent. 
Capitol building and a church representing separation of church and state

Coercion and Religion 

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Religion needs the power of government, but not in the way some think. 
Halloween decorations

Is Our Growing Fascination with Halloween Dangerous? 

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The recent growth of the celebration of Halloween may not simply reflect nostalgia for an enchanted past. 
Karl Marx

Disruption and Despair: The Dark Logic of Critical Marxism 

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Carl Trueman has delivered an invaluable explanation of Marxist critical theory, and of why it resonates with so many in our troubled times. 
church and state

Separate but Complementary: Tocqueville’s Counsels for Church–State Relations  

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Some today think religion and politics should be more intertwined. Alexis de Tocqueville would have thought just the opposite. 
John Wesley

The Next Great Awakening 

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An interdenominational religious revival, like the one John Wesley led, might be what we need to heal our civil society. 
patriarchy

The Problem of Patriarchy

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Regressing to patriarchy’s more material view of the family will only exacerbate our culture’s spiritual challenges.

The Dark Night of Disenchantment

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Many religious people lament that the contemporary world has hidden God from their sight. But what if that spiritual darkness is precisely where God is waiting for us?

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.

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.
Karl Marx

The Perils of Revolutionary Aristotelianism

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The fundamentally Marxist philosophy of Alasdair MacIntyre has less to teach conservatives than some have claimed.
drug use

The False Promises of Drugs: Joseph Ratzinger on True Human Excellence

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The problem with drug use is not just its grave danger to our bodily and psychological well-being, nor that it constitutes a radical assertion of self-will, but that it is a flight from the adventure of the moral life
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.
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.
Dawson

Religion and Revolution: Christopher Dawson and the “Great Awokening”

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Like all secular revolutionary movements of the modern age, wokeism is a religion in denial. We will only put an end to the cycle of violent political revolution if we return to the Christian religion that gave birth to our civilization.
Robert E Lee

Propriety without Principle: The Cautionary Tale of Robert E. Lee

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Robert E. Lee perhaps tried to be a gentleman, but his moral principles were weak. Therefore, when the flood of war came, he compromised with evil, then piled sin upon sin, as the rebellion’s corrupting logic swept away more and more of his moral foundations.
the self

In Search of the Self

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Our culture’s crisis of the self is a crisis of faith in our personhood; its cause is our ignorance of the God who best reveals what a person is.
antebellum South

The Complicated Legacy of the Folkways of the American South

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David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed appropriately decries the antebellum American South’s practice of slavery, while acknowledging the South’s production of Americans who have also served the cause of freedom and truth.
Edith Stein

The Vocations of Woman: The Feminism of Edith Stein 

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If our society is to answer the question “What is a woman?” we will have to think more about how women can integrate their professions with their femininity, without stifling it, and about the value of the virtues that women on average exemplify better than men. Considering Edith Stein’s thoughts on these questions is an excellent way to start.
crosses

A Kingship Not of This World

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Few instances in the life of Christianity’s founder exemplify his rejection of the use of force, even against those who break faith, than his treatment of the greatest apostate from Christianity, Judas, whose betrayal Christians remember today
Crucifix

The Religion That Remade the World

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Tom Holland raises many important questions about the connection between Christianity and contemporary Western civilization. All Westerners, be they Christian or not, would do well to consider his insights.
theism

Liberalism and the Politics of Theism

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If religious believers want to protect politics from atheistic materialism, their political theory should presume at least that God made human nature good and free, and that evil comes rather from our misuse of nature. Genuine liberalism, Augusto Del Noce argues, is such a theory.
Critical race theory

Critical Race Theory for the Rest of Us

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In his book All One in Christ, Edward Feser provides a succinct but comprehensive treatment of Critical Race Theory, its logical flaws and lack of basis in social science, and the Catholic Church’s alternative solution to racism: love for each person as made in God’s image and purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ.
Francis of Assisi

Francis of Assisi, Father of Modernity

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Francis of Assisi teaches us that those who want to embrace the joys of this life must also embrace suffering. Our forgetfulness of this truth could explain the current crisis of our civilization.