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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.

Solidarity, Communion, and The City of God 

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St Augustine's conversion

Solidarity, Communion, and The City of God 

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What is the nature of human dignity? What is it to act justly towards another human being? For Augustine, the answer is that justice towards another human being is a matter of recognizing God’s image in them, and all that follows from that, the deep solidarity and communion that arises from this.
SCOTUS

The Accused in This Republic 

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If evil deeds tend to tear us apart, our fidelity to the Constitution helps us to stand united. 
American founding

Retrieving Scholastic Consent Theory 

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Communal consent is usually necessary to authorize civil leaders to make governmental decisions for the whole community, and that this is a demand of general justice on the part of the purported authorities themselves. 
American flag and cross

On the Republic and Its Soul  

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We change a culture by first changing ourselves; by knowing our faith, trusting God, and then actually living and defending what we claim to believe, whatever the cost.
American flag closeup

The Man Who Invented Conservatism 

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Young conservatives can learn a great deal from Flynn’s account of Meyer’s life.
explicit material

Congress Shall Make No Law Abridging the Freedom of … Pornhub? 

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Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, but Congress should make a law abridging the freedom of Pornhub. 
protective parent holding sad child

Parental Rights at the Supreme Court: Protecting Children from Government Orthodoxy 

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The latest elite orthodoxy threatens children’s minds, bodies, and family relationships. It is time for the high court to clarify that parents—not the government, unions, or advocacy groups—are the primary decisionmakers for children’s education, upbringing, and care.
conservatism

Conservatism without a Movement? 

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Commitment to America as a whole must come one of two ways—as a “community of communities” in which one’s sympathy for the nation comes channeled through a commitment to locality; or through ideological abstraction. 
St. Augustine

Augustinian Lessons on Spiritual Authority in Church–State Relations 

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If Augustine’s two cities can’t be neatly mapped onto the modern distinction between Church and State, how can his thought help illumine Church-State relations?
Vatican conclave

The Social Dynamics of Papal Elections 

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The Holy Spirit is still reliably and certainly at work in aiding the selection of the successor to the Chair of Saint Peter. That the process of getting there often leans on friendships, acquaintances, impressions, hope, and trust should not concern us. We’re human, after all. It couldn’t be otherwise. 
labor unions

Conservative Unionism and the Problem of Coercion 

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Pro-union conservatives have raised real questions about the tensions latent in conservative thought. But they haven’t shown how unions can resolve those tensions.
Democracy

Democracy without Religion Is Dead: Part II

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The most important benefits the Christian religion can give to democracy is the awakening of conscience, the substance of ethics, and the rehumanization of society. It gives human freedom guidance, and the human spirit of toleration and forbearance. And it is the Christian religion that teaches a true equality—that of human dignity, on which an imperfect yet a more just society can be built.
Democracy

Democracy without Religion Is Dead

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In a traditional society people are bound, as if by a chain, but democracy breaks the chain, delinking all from all. The tight bonds in traditional societies attach and oblige men to a variety of people and institutions outside of themselves, turning them outward toward others and toward the society around them.
church and state

Separate but Complementary: Tocqueville’s Counsels for Church–State Relations  

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Some today think religion and politics should be more intertwined. Alexis de Tocqueville would have thought just the opposite. 
judges

Filling the Dwindling Judicial Vacancies 

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McConnell will be the deciding vote for fifteen more months. That’s the countdown for a retirement-eligible judge who wants to be replaced by a conservative. 
school choice

Why Is School Choice So Controversial? 

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Whether state and federal governments will support school choice remains to be seen; there seems to be considerable political pressure in both directions. But on the social level, while we may continue to criticize each other’s school choices, increasing numbers of families seem unwilling to bypass choice.
Trump

Trump v. CASA, Inc. and Constitutional Hardball 

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President Trump plays extreme hardball by American standards, some of it blatantly authoritarian. Conservatives lose credibility when they deny this. But Trump’s election and reelection were, in part, a reaction to decades of undemocratic progressive change in the courts, bureaucracy, and public education—itself a kind of hardball. Liberals who deny or downplay these phenomena only feed populist anger.
UNC Chapel Hill/The University

Colleges Get Their Comeuppance . . . and Then Some 

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While Trump’s ham-fisted assault on higher ed was justified, that doesn’t mean his tactics are—or that this will end well. 
Justice Sotomayor

Changing the Subject: Hidden Assumptions in Justice Sotomayor’s Defense of Gender Transition Medicine  

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Justice Sotomayor’s analysis depends on many assumptions that she does not articulate or defend. This lack of clarity leads to unnecessary confusion and inconsistency. In more ways than one, Justice Sotomayor is changing the subject.  
Calvary

The Natural Law Is Not Enough. The Natural Law Is All We Have. 

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We must rely on natural law, even as we confess that it cannot bear the full weight of moral resolution. Why? The natural law is not enough, yet the natural law is all we have as denizens of a fractured age. 
Marx

A Guide to the Horrified and Mystified 

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“Reason and revelation,” “God’s creation and the natural order of things,” “the biological nature of human beings,” and “Natural Law”: these are Mahoney’s lodestars and the criteria by which he judges not just ideology’s falsehood but its destructive evil. 
US, Iranian, and Israeli flags

How to Start Another Unconstitutional War 

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Why should we be faithful constitutionalists on matters of war powers in the first place (as opposed to being hard-headed “pragmatists”)? Why should we care about the Constitution, about this violation of it, by this president, at this time?   
PEPFAR

We Can’t Fix the Deficit by Taking Medicine from the Poorest of the Poor 

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Over the past few decades, we have seen incredible progress in the fight against HIV, hunger, and other infectious diseases. We could choose to either accelerate that progress and demonstrate American greatness, or to shrink back from the moral responsibilities that love places on us. 
child on a computer

(Toward) Three Cheers for the Supreme Court  

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Here’s to the good ruling protecting children from pornography. 

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