Ethical Principles for the Just Allocation of a COVID-19 Vaccine
Given a government’s mandate to preserve the common good, the goal of a national strategy for vaccine allocation should be to mitigate morbidity and mortality by ending the pandemic in the most efficient and rapid manner possible. This would better protect both the individual good of each citizen and the common good of the commonweal.
Why WAP Matters
The record-smashing success of WAP is a warning to parents. You need to know what your kid is listening to. You need to have the courage to limit your kid’s exposure to the most noxious elements of American culture. You need to find a healthier, brighter, truer culture to share with your daughter or your son.
Isolation Bookshelf: Hail to the Chief
Can the American people and their representatives set aside their immediate interests and attachments and “think constitutionally” about the presidency, and about how we choose presidents? Some scholars hope so. But the passionate partisanship of the most attentive Americans, and the inattentiveness and apathy of the least partisan Americans, make this hope seem forlorn indeed.
Revisiting Chesterton and The Mystery of Capital
Allowing capital to move is exactly what generates wealth. Yes, we could freeze capital in its current location; but then we would repeat the economic decline of impoverished countries by locking up that capital’s full, invisible potential.
Josh Hawley and the Advantages of Jujitsu
Senator Hawley should turn the tables during confirmation hearings and force Democrats to defend their abortion extremism. What’s more, he should act on precedents stemming from the days of Lincoln down to our own, precedents involving the authority of the political branches to counter at times and limit the holdings of the Supreme Court.
Why Finding Justices Who Will Overturn Roe v. Wade Hasn’t Been Easy, And What to Do About It
Any effort to seat justices who will overturn Roe needs to take account of the serious political obstacles that stand in the way. We must not surrender in the face of these obstacles. But we must recognize them in order to navigate through them.
Senator Hawley’s Judicial Test on Roe v. Wade Won’t Work
Political realities can be confronted and transformed, but they cannot simply be imagined away. Unfortunately, Senator Hawley’s pro-life litmus test promises no more success in the future than it would have had in the past.
The Role of the United States in the Revitalization of the International Human Rights Project
We must not forget that there were stark disagreements over what human rights consisted of at the dawn of the international human rights project in 1948. It was the focus on a common denominator upon which all States could agree that allowed for an international human rights framework to emerge. The US Commission on Unalienable Rights is right to encourage a recommitment to this vision if we are to save the international human rights project.
Poly Parenting and the Value of the Family
The emerging discussion about in vitro gametogenesis and other types of multi-parent technologies demands renewed attention to why children do well with only two parents, and why those parents do best to procreate in the ordinary way, even with all its inefficiencies, burdens, and failures.
Making Children, Unmaking Families
Manufacturing children using the genetic material of multiple parents is not a prospect to be celebrated. It is a dystopian technology, making children, as if they were consumer goods, and unmaking the family, as if it were not essential to the common good.
Why Religious Pluralism and Religious Literacy Matter for the Future of Religious Freedom in America
To have any chance of seriously mitigating common misperceptions of religious freedom, Evangelicals must publicly demonstrate a sincere commitment to religious pluralism and its necessary counterpart, religious literacy.
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.
A Protestant Defense of the Common Good
An integral part of the Christian calling is to pursue goods greater than ourselves.
Isolation Cinema: Crazy Love
What is it that makes screwball comedies so much fun? With their manic scripts and their depiction of characters of both sexes who will say anything and do anything for love, they bring together men and women—whose senses of humor often differ sharply—to laugh at the same crazy antics, and to see what mad joy love can be. In the summer of COVID, as we stay home with our loved ones, the screwball may be just what the doctor ordered.
A World of Strange Relations: Christian Wiman’s Survival Is a Style
Christian Wiman’s new collection of poetry creates a world in which the human being is never one thing or the other—believer or unbeliever—but both at once. As the speaker in the book’s first poem, “Prologue,” puts it, “I need a space for unbelief to breathe.” Survival Is a Style creates that space.
The Foundation of Human Society: A Christian Case for Parental Authority
Parental authority is a biblical and natural concept that should be upheld by church and state alike. Any attempt to violate this parental authority apart from extreme circumstances that demand intervention on behalf of justice should be vehemently opposed in the name of Scripture and the natural order.
Why the U.S. Commission on Unalienable Rights Should Not Ignore Abortion
Despite many excellent elements, the Commission’s first report falls short where it matters most. The right to life is the most fundamental right, the one on which all authentic human rights depend. The commission may revise the initial draft of the report following a public comment period. If the foremost experts on human rights in the United States could not agree that international human rights law affords children in the womb any protections at all, how can Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his team be expected to contradict them in American diplomacy?
Why a Generation of Girls Is Fleeing Womanhood
Abigail Shrier’s new book is an outstanding investigative report on the diagnostic craze of rapid onset gender dysphoria that has swept over adolescent girls in the past decade. It is an invaluable resource for parents, educators, church and community leaders, and anyone else who cares about the well-being of young women.
The Pandemic and Practical Wisdom
COVID-19 underscores our need for practical wisdom, which allows us to pursue the human good even when we lack technical mastery of a situation and when we must make difficult decisions between competing goods.
Reconsidering the Statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln
In many ways, Abraham Lincoln has almost loomed entirely too largely in our national consciousness, since it has now become difficult to get around the acknowledgment of his greatness to discover just what it was that made him great. Jon Schaff’s new book is an attempt to do just that.
Angels, Demons, and Unbundled Religion
True encounters with demonic activity ought to make today’s neopagans reconsider whether they should do more than cultivate eclectic spiritual identities.
Hiroshima and the “Easy” Thing to Do
The just war ethic cannot justify the intentional killing of some innocents for the sake of defending the lives of other innocents because the lives of the innocent are the actual point of war. We go to war on behalf of the innocent men and women wronged by some act against their nation. We fight that war by the morality able to name that wrong as a wrong, and able to express that wrong by the means employed in its vindication.
The Epistemics of First Principles
All knowledge comes from sensory experience, including knowledge of the first principles of morality on which the natural law and moral reasoning build.
The Trouble with Industrial Policy
There are good reasons to believe that industrial policy significantly undermines rather than bolsters the common good.
