An Anxious Author: Hope and the Spirit of Joseph Bottum
Why bother with American culture? Bottum recommends despair.
Timeless Beauty: Conservatism’s Modernist Problem
Conservatives who reject modern architecture have reasons to do so. Traditional architecture is predicated on the ideal of beauty as an objective reality, while modernism exalts subjective preferences.
What Can a Modern Philosopher Teach Us About Natural Law?
As a philosopher, Locke was both historically great and uniquely ambivalent. This combination provides extraordinarily fertile ground for uniting modern and pre-modern insights that seem opposed.
Aristotelian-Thomism in the Modern World
Our modern intellectual context is profoundly at odds with genuine Aristotelian-Thomism. If we want to infuse the public discourse with sound philosophy, we must soberly recognize the obstacles before us and confront them in the spirit of devotion to truth. The first of a two part series.
“Is This the Upshot of Your Experiment?” Hawthorne and Bioethics
By revealing the agonizing human cost of scientific obsession, Hawthorne reminds his reader that potential good must never override basic consideration of one’s fellow man.
Covetous Envy: The Forgotten Deadly Sin
Modern rhetoric of income inequality is driven by covetous envy that betrays America’s tradition of applauding those who succeed. Caritas, humility, gratitude, and goodwill toward others are a healthy society’s answer to the ancient curses of envy and pride.
If a Company Can Be African American, Can’t It Be Religious?
A business owner brings his values and his entire self—his faith no less than his race—to his daily work. The government shouldn’t force him to violate his conscience.
We Are Not Just Our DNA: The Ethical Dangers of Three-Parent Embryos
The creation of three-parent embryos is not an innocuous medical treatment—it is a macabre form of eugenic human cloning.
Stanford, Marriage and Abortion Controversies, and the Mission of a University
Trying to silence others because one fears what they might say is no way to learn. And it is no way for a university to be a university.
Declaration Man: How Justice Clarence Thomas Earned His Enemies
For Justice Clarence Thomas, the foundation of all our law lies in the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, beginning with human equality.
Lady Edith and Abortion Rights
For many women, the social, practical, and personal reasons for having an abortion simply trump the life of their child.
Blind Resentment
The struggle against Catholicism in today’s culture is not particularly about religion. It is a revolt against reason and reality. Many have internalized such resentment that they are unable to see truth.
Why Liberty Isn’t Enough
It’s important to talk about liberty, but not in isolation. Our language should reflect the truth that reason, justice, equality, and virtue make freedom possible.
The Culture of Dishonesty: Abortion, Divorce, and Obamacare
Americans’ acceptance of President Obama’s lies reveals how dangerously comfortable we have become with dishonesty. It will take a profound renovation of our culture to restore truthfulness to its proper place and establish political freedom on a more secure foundation.
Republicans for (Career and Family) Choice
Republicans should not try to tell women what they or their families need. The best way to defuse the work-family problem is by sympathetically acknowledging its reality and promising women that they will work to open a wider variety of educational and professional alternatives for them.
Conservatives and Women
Contemporary politicians are in a delicate position. If they don’t seem properly sympathetic to the challenges American women face, they are blamed for them. Yet there is no neat solution to these competing demands. The first in a two-part series.
A Rational Defense of the Humanities
If all literature is essentially bound by its historical period, then studying the “great books” of Western civilization has little value. But if there are certain eternal questions that are essential to human existence, such a study is invaluable.
Confusions About Totipotency: Stem Cells Are Not Embryos
The ability to both produce all cell types and to organize them into a coherent body plan is the defining feature of a human organism. All stem cells lack essential elements supplied by the egg cell and cannot develop into a fetus.
Dorothy, We’re Not in Kansas Any More
Legislative battles are heating up across the United States on the issues of surrogacy contracts and the regulation of assisted reproduction. If we are truly concerned for the welfare of women and children, we must oppose such practices.
What’s at Stake at the Bakery: How Property Rights Got Sexy
State lawmakers should make it clear that religious and moral reasons are rational and legitimate, and that property owners may act or refrain from action in obedience to conscience.
Gender, Discrimination, and Marriage
In the name of equality, same-sex marriage seeks to codify gender discrimination. But marriage welcomes everyone: husband and wife, father and mother, grandfather and grandmother.
