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Pillar

Politics & Law

The third pillar of a decent society is a just system of politics and law. Such a government does not bind all persons, families, institutions of civil society, and actors in the marketplace to itself as subservient features of an all-pervading authority. Instead, it honors and protects the inherent equal dignity of all persons, safeguards the family as the primary school of virtue, and seeks justice through the rule of law.

The Political Potential of Postliberalism

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J. D. Vance

The Political Potential of Postliberalism

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Even if Catholic postliberalism is no longer the intellectual avant-garde, populism is poised to shape the next few years of American politics.
Washington Monument

Gratitude in an Angry Time

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Those of us who think the stakes in our cultural conflicts are high, whichever side of those conflicts we are on, frequently find ourselves furious. But what are we angry about? Our responses to that question have to do not just with the latest news, but with deeper intuitions about the nature of the human person and its relation to the moral life of our society.
Trump

What Does Another Trump Presidency Mean for the Pro-Life Movement?

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Trump's reelection provides reason for pro-lifers to be cautiously relieved, though still apprehensive.
Europe

Pierre Manent’s Multifaceted Defense of the European Nation-State

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Pierre Manent has been a penetrating critic of the European Union, a measured but firm defender of the nation-state, and a Catholic thinker who has made signal contributions to the understanding of the Church’s role in European history, and to the understanding of many of its eminent thinkers. 
constitution

“Oh Say Can You C?” Compromise, Consensus, Consent, and the Constitution

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Each of these books presents valuable and insightful contributions to ongoing conversations about the role of the Constitution in contemporary American political life.
Statue of liberty

Society and Spectacle

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A self-governed people are not merely those who are allowed to vote. More than that, a self-governed people direct their own judgments, attention, choice, and emotion.
American flag

With Malice toward None

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If today we are tempted to gloat or despair, curse or mock, it would be far better for ourselves and our children to quietly pray or study, rake the leaves, invite a neighbor to dinner, play a game, or work in the garage: all the things that a self-reliant, free, and sober people do.
IVF clinic

Reclaiming Personhood in the Public Debate over IVF

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As we consider the future of our debate over IVF, we must go deeper than the political questions facing us and ask ourselves fundamental questions about how we view one another.
ultrasound image

Screwtape on “My Embryo”

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We may not be privy to Screwtape’s letters on the understanding of the meaning of the possessive pronoun “my” in “my embryo,” but judging from jurisprudential trends, we would be able to hazard a very good guess.
constitution

Human Flourishing and Constitutional Democracy

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Paradoxically, the progressive effort to overcome constitutional limits on government power—purportedly justified on grounds of efficiency—hardly seems to have enabled government to govern well. Instead, the unwieldy and often conflictual morass of agencies and officials in the administrative state has more often than not resulted in governmental paralysis, perhaps thankfully leaving Americans as ungovernable as we have always been.
capital punishment

Defending Capital Punishment: A Response to Dennis Uhlman

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Is Uhlman’s position that all executions for murder violate pro-life principles, or only executions for which there is some residual doubt of guilt, however small? In any system run by fallible human beings, however well-intended, mistakes are possible. Is the mere possibility of error enough to reject the death penalty in its entirety? Or is his position that wrongful executions are so common in the United States that the pro-life advocate should reject capital punishment as applied in this country at this time?
Parthenon

Social Contract Theory in the Ruins?

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Is government by consent irretrievably lost? I maintain that the principle of consent is not lost and that we can rebuild a different sort of social contract theory from amid the ruins.
Israel Palestine

What Is Settler Colonialism? A Q&A with Adam Kirsch

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The only way to actually create a better future is to start with the world we actually live in and move forward—which may require “despairing” of the past, which cannot be changed.
Constitution

Give Me That Old Time Originalism

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Originalism in Theology and Law is a welcome salvo in an ecumenical and interdisciplinary conversation that has been too long dominated by originalism’s critics.
Capital punishment

Wrongful Executions and the Pro-Life Movement’s Responsibility 

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While serious people can debate the underlying ethics of whether the death penalty is just, our country has proven that it is unable to carry out executions in a way that protects justice.
Capitol building

The Patience of Conservatism

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This election will come and go, and the results will be, as usual, a mixed bag. There are better and worse alternatives, of course, and I have my own judgments and evaluations about such things, as does everyone else. Rather, I’m thinking about a mood too prevalent among conservatives in our time, one where gratitude, patience, caution, and fidelity have given way to anger, panic, urgency, and bile. Such are not conservative, nor are they good for us or our opponents, and they are likely to make things far, far worse. 
ethics advice column

Ask Chris Tollefsen: An Ethics Advice Column

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For one thinking clearly about the issue, the incrementalist approach is not only permissible, but obligatory, a matter of justice to those unborn human beings who can, but otherwise will not, be saved.
Israel flag

What Conservatives, Catholics, and All Americans Can Learn from Israel 

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As the experience of many nations around the world shows, constitutions are easily dissolved, and constitutional order lost, when citizens allow their leaders to violate their charter to achieve partisan goals. When that happens, the delicate system of checks and balances usually gives way to an oppressive one-party rule. 
Charles Maurras

The Anti-Transcendent Politics of Charles Maurras

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Many of the causes championed by the New Right are worthy ones. But a prudential calculation made in good faith, and which refuses to compromise on principle, is something quite different from the enthusiastic advocacy of positions that contradict principle entirely or the embrace of ideologies that are fundamentally anti-religious.
Ukraine war

Just War and Just Peace: A Response to Carson Holloway

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Love your neighbor as yourself—contra Holloway, the “Golden Rule” ethic makes for morally serious, honorable, and practical foreign policy considerations. What it needs, however, is an actor or agent—a willing agent—who has the moral backbone to respond. As with individuals, so it is with nations: to whom much has been given, much will be required.
The Vatican

Across the Divide: M. Ciftci and Nathaniel Peters on Vatican II, Church–State Relations, and Political Participation 

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Christians should always make the best of any pragmatic agreements they can find with non-Christians on any issue. But the evangelical reasons why we support, for instance, constitutional government should be made clear, not veiled in embarrassment by translating them into the idiom of natural law or human dignity out of a misguided concern to avoid blurring the boundaries between political and religious affairs.
The Good Samaritan

Ukraine and the Morality of Foreign Policy

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I agree with Professor Charles that a decent and just approach to politics must be informed by this elementary moral rule, even in the realm of international relations. At the same time, it is also important to note that the application of the parable to a problem like the Ukraine war is not as simple as Charles’s account suggests.  
the US Constitution

The Constitution and Its Critics

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Rana’s history prompts us to reflect on how we ought to conceive of American identity and defend the Constitution’s anti-majoritarian checks and balances in the twenty-first century.
Soviet flag

Does America Need a Sharansky?

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Unfortunately, Morson looks only at a handful of symptoms that are vaguely comparable to the pathologies of late Soviet society and concludes that the same disease is at work. He does not address the deep causes of Soviet and Russian dysfunction, all of which are absent in the United States—authoritarianism, a command economy, censorship, oppression, terror, the Gulag. 
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