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Search Results for: natural law – Page 39

Racism, the Legacy Museum, and the Costs of Self-Deception

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When we lie to ourselves about the moral status of other human beings, we not only unjustly injure other people, we also injure ourselves and our culture. We transform ourselves into a people who believe the lie. The costs of self-deception are internal and reflexive as well as external and consequential.

Don’t Blame the Founders for Our Civic Disintegration

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Leslie Rubin’s brilliant study argues that the fault, dear America, lies not in our stars but in ourselves—our repudiation in the past century of the moderate liberal philosophy of Federalists and Anti-Federalists alike, which was steeped in Aristotelian wisdom about favoring the decent republican virtues of a middle class.

What #MeToo and Hooking Up Teach Us About The Meaning of Sex

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Reflecting on the experiences behind #MeToo teaches us that something is deeply broken at the heart of the sexual revolution.

The Strange Case of William Shakespeare and Donald Trump

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Stephen Greenblatt’s new book is broad-ranging, accessibly written, and nominally dedicated to an interesting topic: tyranny in the work of William Shakespeare. Unfortunately, too much of the author’s energy is dedicated to expressing disdain for a particular contemporary politician in a way that detracts from his declared purpose.

An Exchange on Happiness, Freedom, and Spiritual Formation

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How should we understand hierarchies, markets, freedom, happiness, anthropology, and spiritual formation? Three Christian thinkers respond to each other.

Learning to Hate our Sin without Hating Ourselves

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The current debate about gay Christianity traces back to a centuries-old dispute between Protestants and Catholics about the doctrine of man and the doctrine of sin. Roman Catholics do not regard involuntary desire for sin (concupiscence) to be sinful. Reformed Protestants do.

What It Means To Love Our Country

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Loving America well means taking her seriously—working to preserve what is lovely about her and to fix what is not.

Masterpiece, Marriage, and Bigotry: The Court’s Ruling Is More Robust than Many Acknowledge

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State officials and judges cannot comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Masterpiece simply by articulating facially neutral reasons for decisions that punish people for acting on the understanding that marriage is a man-woman union.

Why the Hippocratic Oath Still Matters

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The Hippocratic Oath offers physicians of any generation guidelines, proscriptions, and prescriptions about how to be a good physician. We may not agree with all of its conclusions, but if we unthinkingly dismiss them, we do so at our own peril.

Jonah Goldberg vs. Patrick Deneen: Is Liberalism a Blessing or a Curse?

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Jonah Goldberg’s new book is a poignant reminder that we should never allow discouragement to swamp our sense of gratitude. As Americans, liberalism is our patrimony. Even recognizing the drawbacks, we should maintain a proper respect for that heritage.

Can States “Confess” Religious Belief? Should They?

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The confessing state exceeds the limits of its authority, either by acting to no good effect, or by acting contrary to good effect. Thus, the confessing state seems inappropriate as a matter not simply of prudence, but of principle.

Free Speech and the American Experiment

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The noble impulse to purge the public square of offensive and insulting language quickly degenerates into censorship of unpopular viewpoints. By contrast, the American experiment is founded on the view that a people capable of governing themselves are worthy of the trust that the First Amendment places in them.

Patrick Deneen, The Little Sisters of the Poor, and Libertas Idiotica

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We are not Hobbesian atoms of self-will, not until liberalism makes us so. Human beings have ever been human by virtue of their relations with others, and by virtue of the bonds of duty and memory that these relations imply.

Prisoners in the American Cave

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Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is a provocative attempt to explain what’s wrong with our culture, how this came to be, and what might be done about it. Although his historical account of liberalism is unpersuasive, he offers a prescient analysis of the current moment and insightful prescriptions for constructive action.

The Catholic Church, the State, and Liberalism

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According to previous papal teaching, a Catholic confessional state is the ideal, even if in most modern situations it’s not a practical possibility, and prudence would steer us away from it. That teaching continues to be normative for Catholics.

California’s New Sexual Orientation Bill Is Bad, but It Wouldn’t Ban Books

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Social conservatives are right to oppose proposed legislation that would ban therapy to help those experiencing unwanted same-sex attraction or gender identity confusion. But they’re wrong to say that the bill would ban books.

The First Amendment Didn’t Separate Church and State—Christianity Did

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It was Christianity, not modernity, that separated church and state. It was modernity, not Christianity, that sought to bind them back together. And, at day’s end, the American order has more in keeping with the Christian apostasy than with either antiquity’s sacral political orders or modernity’s rejection of the claim that there exists any domain outside the jurisdiction of the modern state.

The Dual Legitimation Crisis: Elitism, Populism, and Political Power

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Because liberal Western democracies are ostensibly rooted in the theory of popular sovereignty, elite disdain for the people creates another legitimation crisis—one that many fail to recognize. It is not simply that the people have lost confidence in the elites and their governance, or that the elites struggle to speak for (and even to) the people. Disdain for the people also unmoors elite authority.

Conservatives Should Care about Institutional Racism

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Contemporary America faces continued racial discord that throws into question our mutual seriousness about the natural rights tradition and our commitment to the demands of republican citizenship. In an effort at self-scrutiny, conservatives should ask ourselves what our first response is in the face of evidence of institutional racism, and then ask ourselves what it should be.

Ross Douthat, Pope Francis, and the Future of the Catholic Church

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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.

The Physician-Assisted Suicide Movement Is Gaining Ground in Two Major Ways

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The foundation is being laid for widespread legalization of physician-assisted suicide.

In Defense of Originalism

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Originalism is the commonsense, traditional American approach to constitutional interpretation, not a contemporary conservative invention.

Does Faith Reduce Divorce Risk?

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Religious belief and activity—particularly prayer—matter in important ways. They make a deeply practical difference in how husband and wife interact with each other in daily life.

Madeline L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, and Christianity: Moving Beyond Collectivism and Individualism

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The Christian quest for the common good is not reducible either to the simple aggregate of individual goods or to the promotion of the needs of the collective at the expense of the one.
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