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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.

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Neuhaus’s hope is the greatest example he gives us today, especially those who feel their status as exiles more keenly than they expected. Fifteen years after his death, Christians have yet to find a more coherent proposal for how to think about political action in their pluralistic society.
This is not an easy time to be a bishop, especially as the DDF fosters confusion, but every bishop is called to lead the faithful into a deeper relationship with Christ through the Church. This requires heroic charity that embraces the sinner while being truthful to the Gospel. Jesus never blessed sin, and neither should the Church. His love for each of us is a love that calls us out of sin, which requires a recognition that some things are incompatible with the blessing of the Church.
Though Christmas is a religious holiday, secularists should appreciate its great contribution to Western Civilization: the lesson that all men are equal in their fundamental human dignity.
We stand at the dawn of a new era in an important realm of constitutional law. As we step into this new dispensation, Agreeing to Disagree will serve well as a road map and guidebook to what comes.
If religious believers want to protect politics from atheistic materialism, their political theory should presume at least that God made human nature good and free, and that evil comes rather from our misuse of nature. Genuine liberalism, Augusto Del Noce argues, is such a theory.
I hope more Republicans join us in supporting this legislation. I hope Democrats join us, too. The greater our numbers, the stronger our message to the Biden Administration: this Christmas, foster children deserve a warm, loving home, not a cold night on a homeless shelter cot.
As we close out this year and approach the next, we should remember that gratitude is not an incidental or secondary civilizational value. It is the backbone of a free and decent civilization. Those who embrace barbarism love destruction and revolution because they have been trained to detest everything that came before them. But just as the heroic and imperfect Americans who came before us moved history through reflection and choice, we can write the American future by recommitting our educational institutions to gratitude.
Much work must be done to restore the proper understanding of personhood—what it means to be human—in societies that permit euthanasia. This work will take not just years, but decades and possibly even longer than that.
I am quoted extensively in Ms. Przybyla’s piece based on responses I made to inquiries she directed to me by email. So that readers can assess for themselves the fairness and integrity of Ms. Przybyla’s reporting, I will here post, in its entirety, the communications between us.
The primordial failing of the UN Declaration’s proponents was that they drank too deeply from the well of postwar optimism. While they were rightly horrified by the brutality of the Second World War, they rebuilt neither with a tragic sense nor with due attentiveness to human limitations. Instead, they rebuilt with comic ambitions.
To be sure, there remains an enormous cultural task to soften the hearts and minds of voters about the dignity of unborn human life and the need to accompany pregnant women in distress. But voters, especially those that consider themselves moderate on abortion, should acknowledge the full implications of the bargain they have struck. 
The war in Ukraine is tragically costly to the Ukrainian nation. And success has not been, and will not be, within easy reach for Kyiv. But there is no reason to think that this defensive war does not satisfy the principles of just war tradition, and, in particular, the complicated principle of reasonable success.
I am not sure a commitment to ideas or “ideologies” as such is at the root of our problem. If anything, public debate today has little patience with ideas, directed instead toward the very motives and character of the people one likes or dislikes.
By using such a broad understanding of disability, and therefore limiting conversation about other social, environmental, or economic factors, the state can both absolve itself of needing to provide real policy solutions and proclaim itself the protector of a victimized class.
Without supposing that politics will (or should) become a philosophy seminar, we can do better than this. And if our candidates wanted to think about how they might make a better impression this evening, or later in the general election campaign, they might consider turning to a small philosophical classic that is celebrating its 100th birthday this year. 
The analogy between individual and political constitutions illustrates the fact that no legal order can be fully encompassed by written instruments, and so it must be elaborated by reference to its underlying historical and philosophic dimensions.
Moore’s book reveals the precarious slope on which life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness rest: there needs to be a firm belief that a better life tomorrow is within our reach. If we lack that belief, the backsliding into mundane conformity and the demand for a government of autocratic direction can easily undo all that the past few centuries have bequeathed us.
All hyperbole aside, the underlying ethic is clear: a leader of men, a representative of our ethical ideals, must dress according to the dignity of his office. Anyone—officeholder, leader, and layman alike—must dress with great dignity when executing actions of moral importance.
The revolutionary priests bear more responsibility for the Church’s present hardship. They did not merely violate canon law; they did so for the sake of revolution. Now the Church is suffering under a dictator that that revolution produced. This should serve as a cautionary tale to would-be revolutionaries of all political stripes. To make revolution is to set in motion unpredictable and destructive forces from which one may not escape.
Surely one way of fending off the Right, a way that does not involve waiting for a charismatic savior, is to reject policies that are destroying American cities. There is not an iota of criticism of such tendencies of the contemporary Left in Brown’s book; yet she would like to assure us that the next leftist charismatic leader will be animated by an ethic of responsibility.
I’ll certainly offer advice—my best account of what seems reasonable in the situation. But it is only advice: everyone who writes needs to make an independent assessment about whether the guidance I offer is sound.
Government may be able to provide material assistance, but it has failed to address the deeper causes of poverty. Worse, it has discouraged the most important defenses against poverty in America—work and marriage.
It is a natural thing for southerners to be drawn to Lee’s memory and to look up in admiration at a statue in his likeness. But the fact remains: such statues say to black Americans, in the voice of the unreconstructed white majority, “We’re back in charge, and don’t you forget it.”
In the past fifteen years, we’ve published articles on the moral, cultural, religious, and political issues of our time, including the most controversial and sensitive; but we have done so in a manner of which we can be proud, respecting the intellect and personhood of our readers, interlocutors, and intellectual contestants.

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