Easter reflections are supposed to be lighthearted and joyful. But I’m gravely concerned by the unkindness in the name of kindness so evident in our cultural moment. Our society appears determined to return to the mastery and enslavement of Egypt. We have become forgetful of human limits, do not stand in awe of God’s acts, and so we have become cruel. Jewish and Christian holy days remind us of the need for mercy if society is to overcome its hatreds.
Author: R.J. Snell (R.J. Snell)
Against Conservative Rationalism
Humans are frail creatures, depending on much beyond our control. Those who do not recognize this have never seen their father watch the clouds, or had livestock die, or waited as the ultrasound searches for a heartbeat that will never be heard. God is good, and he loves what he has created, but we are dust, and he allows the winds to blow.
The Road to Sexual Revolution: Carl Trueman and the Modern Self
According to Carl Trueman, focusing myopically on problems with sexual morality often results in misguided responses to the sexual revolution. Instead, we must grapple with “a much deeper and wider revolution in the understanding of what it means to be a self.”
Barbaric Dogmatists and the Revolution
In the current moment, we critique and demand, but from a negation; we know—or some think they know—what they don’t want, but it is quite unclear if they know what they do want. And since they have rejected moral norms it is impossible for them to give a rational justification for their wants and dislikes. Theirs is an exercise of will, for they have exorcised the logos, and mere will—willfulness—remains.
Questions on Abortion: A Dinner Invitation to Nicholas Kristof
The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof addresses the debate over abortion from an external point of view, for he has not attempted to understand or imagine the pro-life position from the standpoint of someone who holds that view. If he’d like to try seeing it from within, Mr. Kristof is most welcome to join us for dinner and conversation at the Witherspoon Institute.
Ingratitude, Mob Violence, and Providence
Our culture’s deep ingratitude is the long, nihilistic outworking of the logic of modern thought itself. When human experience is reduced to only will and power struggle, there no room for gratefulness. Those of us who have not renounced cosmic order and the providence that brings that order to fulfillment, by contrast, know that all things willed or permitted by God work for good. Thus we should be grateful—profoundly grateful—for everything.
Education and the Restoration of Moral Agency
Many students today lack a real formation in moral order and agency. Few adults have taught them what a worthwhile life looks like and what they could do to achieve it. University educators must give students access to authoritative moral claims, even as they allow them to judge and decide for themselves.
Alone Together, or Just Alone? Social Conservatives Are Right
Social conservatives are not just moralizing when they reject so much of what passes for liberation in our time. It’s not that we’re against self-determination, but rather that we are for the flourishing and well-being of persons, and thus we insist on fostering the institutions that are essential to this task.
Pandemics and the Agency of Citizens
While medical experts’ job is to save lives from the coronavirus, it is the responsibility of citizens to ask and decide what makes a worthwhile life. There is more to life than mere living; our own self-respect as responsible agents, who govern ourselves under the law (human and moral), ought not be so easily jettisoned.
The Coronavirus Has Unveiled a Deeper Political Disease
A crisis like a pandemic forces citizens to confront what they hold in common. But the coronavirus has revealed that many, whether boomer or millennial, do not even see themselves as citizens—as participating in and being partially responsible for the common good.
Quiet Hope: A New Year’s Resolution
Despair is the unforgivable sin, for the despairing conclude that God will not or cannot act, that the universe is fundamentally unfriendly and inhospitable to the true, good, and beautiful, and that humanity has lost the imago Dei. To judge in this way is to deny the goodness of the world and its Creator and sustainer, and that is the sin of all sins.
Free Speech Cannot Save Us
Unless they acknowledge a divine transcendence, our universities, like our culture at large, are sentenced to pointless “debate,” full of sound and fury, no matter how free our speech is. The marketplace of ideas alone cannot save education.
Coherence, Calvinball, and the Consistent Ethic of Life
A consistent life ethic (CLE) should consider the totality of an act: not simply the consequences, but also the intention, the object chosen, and the circumstances of the act. Charles Camosy deserves our respect for boldly declaring the case for CLE, but the devil remains in the details. Without agreement on those details, the consistent life ethic remains as unpredictable and random as Calvinball.
Pampering or Truth? What Makes for a Worthy Life
We stewards of the western tradition have good answers for what makes life worth living. If only we could be imaginative enough to give new voice to those ancient truths and avoid the stultifying fate of pampered souls.
The Nones: Education without Divinity or Selfhood
If questions of ultimate meaning and purpose are shuttled to the side, as they are in so many of our schools and colleges, the various disciplines and domains of knowledge can never attain a unifying vision.
It’s Worse Than You Suspect: We Can’t Think our Way Out of Decline
Given our splintered, irresolute wills, Alan Jacobs’s concept of thinking that “we can do better,” even if “we ought to,” is not enough. It’s going to take more than hope and a checklist.
A Decade of Acceleration and Resentment: The Cultural Impact of an Ideology of Equality
If there is one thing that the prophets of egalitarian ideology cannot abide, it is the true and sincere believer in normativity—the person who judges that we are, each and every one of us, beholden to exercise our freedom in keeping with a higher law.
Rob Rieman, Joseph Pieper, and the Existential Poverty of the West
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.
Ross Douthat, Pope Francis, and the Future of the Catholic Church
When it comes to the Catholic Church, there’s a quiet sense that the Vatican thinks in centuries, that a thirty-year crisis will hardly matter in time. Perhaps this time is different. But we don’t know, and Ross Douthat is honest enough to leave us hanging, waiting for the next installment of the Church’s story to be told.
Power, Preference, and Morality: On Alasdair MacIntyre’s Latest
Despite the frustrating sense that much of its argument is asserted rather than demonstrated, there can be no doubt that those involved in the cultural disputes of our day ought to know Alasdair MacIntyre’s new book.
Betraying Liberal Education: A Response to President Paxson of Brown University
Today’s universities are allergic to making substantive claims about what it means to live well in a good society. But liberal education, rightly understood, is a long, arduous apprenticeship of self-mastery.
A Bridge to Nowhere: Fr. James Martin and the Catholic/LGBT Divide
Fr. James Martin, SJ, has attempted to build a bridge between the Catholic Church and the LGBT community, but by shirking the difficulty of confrontation, he has traded genuine encounter for a thin and generic substitute.
Swastikas and Safety Pins: The Grim Heritage of Identity Politics
A war of every group against every other is the sine qua non of identity politics. The peacefulness of classical liberalism is rejected root and branch, for war is the goal.
Rebuilding Cultural and Intellectual Life: An Invitation to Witherspoon’s Summer Seminars
The Witherspoon Institute’s summer seminars help the university accomplish its purpose: to teach students to work together to pursue truth with humility and dedication.
Against Pious Nihilism: C.S. Lewis on Natural Law
For many, the Narnia stories were their first exposure to the goodness of God and his creation. While they called us to move “further in and further up” to things that were more real and solid than these Shadowlands we now inhabit, they did so by calling us to attend to the traces of the divine already present in the created order.