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Search Results for: natural law – Page 5

Public Discourse

Cats and Dogs and Marriage Laws

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When we define our terms based on the results we want, rather than on the reality of the thing being defined, all hell breaks loose.
Public Discourse

Blessed Are Les Misérables: For Theirs Is the True Philosophy of Law

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Hollywood’s new musical masterpiece illustrates a classical legal philosophy, long lost to our liberal establishment, that serves as a golden mean between tyrannical legalism and libertine antinomianism.
Public Discourse

Why California’s Three-Parent Law Was Inevitable

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A California bill allowing children to have three legal parents will not help children, but instead will unnecessarily complicate their lives. The supposed need for California’s SB 1476 flowed directly from the drive to normalize same sex parenting and recognize same sex unions.
Public Discourse

The Sperm of Sea Urchins and the Directedness of Natural Processes

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Nature exhibits finality and purpose in its various activities, and chance is not, indeed cannot be, an explanation for this activity.
Public Discourse

Mandates and Bad Law

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Were the central task of government to be seen as that of aiding citizens in their own self-constitution, oriented towards real human goods including the good of religion, the HHS mandate would be seen for the unjust imposition it is.
Public Discourse

Natural Causes, Divine Commands, and Human Wellbeing

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The precepts of the natural law are obligatory not because they are commanded, but because they are necessary for our well-being. God’s revelation of these precepts is better understood as a divine reminding and authoritative inviting.
Public Discourse

God Matters: Ethical Theory and Divine Law

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The construction of an ethical theory, as a general matter, inevitably implicates philosophical theology.
Public Discourse

From Heels to Wheels: American Zoning Laws and the End of Western Public Space

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Zoning codes used to favor settlement patterns scaled for human beings. No longer.
Public Discourse

Risk, Uncertainty, and Rule of Law

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An uncertain legal landscape puts future prosperity at risk.
Public Discourse

Illegal Immigration and the Rule of Law

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Laws regulating immigration are analogous to those requiring the payment of taxes or the licensing of physicians. Granting amnesty to illegal immigrants is not in itself unjust, but it may be imprudent.
Public Discourse

Marriage and the Law of Tradition

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Custom and tradition, far from being necessarily irrational, are often the vehicles of guiding and binding reason.
Public Discourse

How the New Health Care Law Endangers Conscience

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The new health care law has endangered longstanding protections on conscience. We must act to address them or risk creating a dangerous precedent.
Public Discourse

Desires Natural and Unnatural: A Reply to Paul Griffiths

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A recent First Things article on natural law misses the mark.
Public Discourse

Law, Feelings, and Religion at the Bar in Iowa

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The Supreme Court of Iowa’s decision to redefine marriage abandons reason and replaces it with feelings as the standard of public consensus.
Public Discourse

Government Mortgage Relief: Economically Flawed and Morally Dubious

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Homeownership has long been part of the American Dream, but current government plans to keep more people in their homes reflect the influence of failed economic policies from the past and may encourage more risky decision making in the future.
Public Discourse

What We Should Do About Natural Embryo Loss

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While abortion opponents decry the deliberate destruction of human embryos, as many as half of all embryos are lost naturally. How should pro-life advocates address this problem?
Public Discourse

Pro-Life Politicians Have Made a Difference, Pro-Life Laws Work

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During the past 35 years, the pro-life movement has made real progress. The number of abortions has fallen in 12 out of the past 14 years and the total number of abortions has declined by 21 percent since 1990. These gains are largely due to pro-life political victories at the federal level in the 1980s and at the state level in the 1990s which have made it easier to pass pro-life legislation.
Priest celebrate mass at the church and empty place for text

Self-Exclusion and the Wounds of Sin: A Response to Cardinal Robert McElroy

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By its nature, the wound of sin involves rejection of the way laid before human beings by God. In rejecting the guidance of the natural law, or of revelation, human beings render themselves incapable of fully realizing the offer of friendship that God extends when he offers them a way to their own fulfillment. Sin damages the person and the person’s capacity for relationship with God simultaneously. It is thus a radical self-exclusion from the communion of those whom God has called both to fulfillment and to perfect communion with Him.
Photo of a church's roof with a cross on top

Three Responses to “Hopeful Realism”

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The evangelical embrace of natural law must continue to mature, and “hopeful realism” is a meaningful step forward in this respect. However, a postliberal would be quick to detect some slippage in the authors' statements about the most important common political good that must guide any functional society: its religious vision. Additionally, one area for further development in their proposal is a more explicit basis for how their proposal is “evangelical.”
Photo of interior of a protestant church—pulpit with three crosses behind it

Hopeful Realism: Renewing Evangelical Political Morality

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Throughout the twentieth century, American evangelicals have neglected the natural law tradition, leaving us without a serious and coherent grounding for our political deliberations and judgments. We need a theologically grounded framework that articulates our principled and prudential convictions, provides us the language with which to deliberate about them amid disagreement, and helps find commonality around real goods. We believe that a revitalized Augustinian natural law theory can help provide such a framework for evangelical Christians.
male, female, symbols

Anthropological Fallacies

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Body-self dualism, and its social manifestation in expressive individualism, underlie the rejection of our given human natures. Rather than seeing ourselves as somehow inhabiting bodies that are used as mere instruments, we should see ourselves as incarnate, bodily beings embedded in communities and bound by natural and supernatural laws.
Supreme Court building

Supreme Court Nominations: A Primer to President Biden

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Public Discourse has hosted arguments about the Court since the publication’s inception. Here, from our archives, are some essays which remain timely, and which might provide some needed perspective on the role of the Court, originalism, and the role of morality and natural law in the Court.
Public Discourse

The Best Defense Is a Good Offense: C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man

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A new critical commentary on Lewis’s classic 1943 work provides a treasure trove of interpretation and supplementary material. Lewis’s warnings about the consequences of jettisoning natural law—what he referred to as the Tao—remain as trenchant today as they were when delivered during the Second World War.
Ten Commandments

God and Public Reason

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Who would deny that liberalism is falling apart, that the center is not holding, or that a vindictive and evangelistic progressivism is afoot? If so, the natural law cannot but feel like feeble comfort. Still, some of us are unwilling to reject public reason or the hopefulness of John Courtney Murray, for we never assumed his optimism was naivete.
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