Guiding Youth to the Good Life
So many young adults today are desperate for guidance but surrounded by adults unwilling or incapable of providing it. Richard Morley Myers’s Thinking About Happiness reminds us that while the ignorance and fashionable errors of our generation may pass, the wisdom of the classics will endure.
Amidst Disputes in Bioethics, Hope for Human Flourishing
A new book by Christopher Kaczor is an accessible resource for those who want to understand current debates in the field of medical ethics.
Was Jesus a Socialist?
Lawrence Reed’s Was Jesus a Socialist? is both a great introduction to why socialism fails and an engaging challenge to Christians to let go of utopian myths.
Virtue at the Origin: The Classical Foundations of the American Republic
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas Ricks has produced a thoroughly researched and engaging book on the intellectual world of the American founders. We who live in a highly partisan age can hope, as Ricks does with mild optimism, that we can return to virtue to cope with the problems of modern-day factionalism.
A Healthy Secularity Is Possible: A Response to Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley
Catholic citizens can hope for a society where the faith is more broadly shared, but we cannot escape the responsibility of political deliberation about our society as it is—riddled with its pluralism and confusion—not as we would have it be. A healthily secular society can acknowledge the freedom of the Church and a positive role for the Church in society, understanding that the state is rightly focused on natural norms and goods, not supernatural ones.
Building a Catholic “Civilization of Love”: A Response to Nathaniel Peters
Why must a “serious Catholic politics” tolerate a regime that worships the profit motive and carnal pleasure but recoil from one that worships the Blessed Trinity? Why is it sophisticated to ask the state to recognize truth of supply and demand but simplistic to ask that the state recognize the truth of the sacraments?
It Is Right and Just Offers Inspiration, Not Serious Catholic Politics
In their new book, Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley provide a rousing exhortation for Catholics to unapologetically live out their faith. Unfortunately, the book contains too many generalizations, overstatements, and imprecisions to be a thoughtful guide to Catholic politics. Any serious Catholic politics must recognize that the problem of pluralism cannot be solved by dominating non-Catholics and imposing our view of the good on them.
The Unsoundness and Imprudence of “Common-Good Originalism”
After decades of struggle, the conservative judicial project has finally produced a possible working majority of five originalists on the Supreme Court. There are plenty of reasons to wonder how consistently they will coalesce in practice and how willing they will be to revisit wrong precedent. But trashing Antonin Scalia’s originalism and replacing it with Josh Hammer’s idiosyncratic, results-oriented version isn’t likely to help matters.
