fbpx

The Importance of Dignity: A Reply to Steven Pinker

From its ancient Stoic origins to its modern Kantian formulations, human dignity is an important concept for sound ethical thinking. We must distinguish dignity as attributed, dignity as intrinsic worth, and dignity as flourishing.

Social Justice, Institutions, and Communities

A successful account of social justice must affirm the primacy of communities, and institutions directed by communities, over both the individual and the state in promoting human flourishing.

Disability: A Thread for Weaving Joy

While some people resent the imperfection, the inconvenience, and the expense of persons with disabilities, others see in them an invitation to learn how to love deeply without counting the cost. God will demand an accounting. Adapted from remarks delivered at the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life.

The Unbearable Wrongness of Roe

39 years ago, the Supreme Court delivered a radical, legally untenable, immoral decision. It has forfeited its entitlement to have its decisions respected, and followed, by the other branches of government, by the states, and by the people.

Trust-Busting and Trusting in the Administrative State

The Obama administration’s efforts to regulate the cellular-phone service market through a decades-old trust-busting ideology is at odds with the courts’ more recent “new learning” approach to market competition. And there are lessons here for pro-lifers.

To Teach and Delight

Poetry establishes the polis, the ordered community, because poetry teaches men their “actual desires,” the desires that must be accommodated in any lasting and beneficial order. The second in a two-part series.

The Meaning of Modernism

Modernist poetry embodies the philosophical perspective of late liberal Western society, giving form to the conception of freedom divorced from essence, the theoretical primacy of the individual, and the broad skepticism towards any notion of a rational human nature. The first in a two-part series.

Hosanna in the Highest!

In a recent decision, the Supreme Court has held that the First Amendment provides additional and independent rights to religious organizations, beyond those to which non-religious groups are entitled.

Bullying and Civil Rights

The Obama Administration’s campaign against “bullying” and “harassment” in schools is a subterfuge to exert federal control over the minutiae of daily school operations and to impose its preferred cultural attitudes.

Religion and Freedom

Threats to religious freedom endanger the health of religious institutions, enfeebling rather than enlivening the moral content of our culture—a content that we all, believers and non-believers alike, rely upon to exercise our freedom.