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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 Catholic Church and Care for Migrants  

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Beyond Roe: A Global Roadmap for the Pro-Life Movement

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We have reached a tipping point. Either abortion will be taken out of UN policy altogether, or it will be enshrined as an international right.

Could A Preemptive Strike on North Korea or Iran Be Morally Justified?

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If mutually assured destruction no longer seems effective in dealing with the threat of nuclear attack by North Korea and Iran, what military options remain and what moral principles can guide their employment?

Religious Discrimination in Canada

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Canada takes pride in being a progressive nation, but our government is relying on the same tired excuses for religious discrimination that the United States Supreme Court dismissed more than fifty years ago.

Notre Dame Swallows the Pill

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The University has announced it is to be the sole funder, unaccompanied proprietor, and director of distribution of what it has solemnly declared for years to be an immoral service. But the Holy Spirit is not a consequentialist. God does not want us to weigh up pros and cons of adhering to the moral truth. And the greatest respect we can show others is to bear faithful witness to the truth.

Germain Grisez, Christian Philosopher

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The whole of Grisez’s account of this sense of Christian philosophy repays study, not least as an exploration of the shape that philosophic wonder first takes in a Catholic educated by a warmly believing household; and then of the place of audacious questioning in a Christian faith firmly held for love of God and in hope for God’s Kingdom.

Alexander Hamilton: Revolutionary Conservative Lawyer

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A new book illustrates how Alexander Hamilton used British legal traditions and the American judiciary to give a distinctive constitutional form to a new republic.

Can We Stop Fighting Over Schools?

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Most other nations with advanced levels of universal schooling provide public support to faith-based schools with no evident harm to their social fabric and with considerably less conflict over schooling. The time has come for the United States to adopt principled pluralism as the fundamental and equitable structure of our education system.

Orestes Brownson, Being Catholic, and Being American

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The writings of Orestes Brownson can help contemporary Catholics make sense of the American Founding.

The Libertarian Case for Drug Prohibition

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Freedom isn’t just the bare ability to do something; it is the ability to act under the influence of properly functioning cognitive faculties. If you value freedom, then you should oppose the legalization of recreational drugs.

Transgenderism: A State-Sponsored Religion?

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Gender dysphoria is a serious mental health issue. By contrast, transgenderism is a belief system that increasingly looks like a cultish religion—a modern day Gnosticism denying physical reality for deceived perceptions—being forced on the public by the state.

LOL: No Laughing Matter for Catholic Universities

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In order to be considered a university at all by those who fancy themselves the arbiters of what counts as knowledge, the Catholic university must abandon its fundamental truth claims and its proper relationship with those entrusted with the proclamation of that truth.

Swamp Thing: A Qualified Huzzah for the Party Establishment

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Even when its nomination process is broken enough to give us such a man as Donald Trump for our president, the party establishment has shown a remarkable capacity to fill the voids created by his inattention and to guide many of his most important policy decisions.

Christian Rights: Did Pro-Life Advocacy Turn Conservative Evangelicals into Human Rights Advocates?

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A new book is an essential resource for anyone who wants to understand conservative evangelicals on their own terms. It traces the ways in which pro-life politics has made the Christian Right of 2017 a very different entity from the Religious Right of the 1970s.

Grace Builds Upon and Doesn’t Destroy Nature: On First Things, Baptism, and the Natural Family

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We need not parrot old arguments, but we should avoid giving countenance to dangerous and unproductive ones. Being novel, contrarian, and clever is no substitute for the politics of prudence and the sober pursuit of truth.

The Mortara Case and the Limits of State Power: First Things Should Disavow Fr. Cessario’s Defense of Pius IX in the Mortara Case

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Many people do care—and care a lot—what the editors of First Things think about Christian-Jewish relations, and this time the galloping statism of First Things is doing great damage in the real world. Robert T. Miller calls on R.R. Reno to disavow the position Romanus Cessario takes on the Mortara case and to reaffirm the journal’s historical commitment to the freedom of religion as understood in liberal states.

Can Liberalism Change?

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In a paradoxical new book, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla correctly identifies the defects in contemporary liberalism and identity politics but cannot free himself from them.

An Open Letter to the People of Iran

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The letter below was written by a bipartisan group of past Chairs together with the current Chair of the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF). They praise the people of Iran for their courage and expressing solidarity with them. In addition, they call on the US government to support the protestors in Iran and to send a clear signal that human rights and the Iranian government’s treatment of dissidents will be at the top of the agenda in any future dealings between the US and Iran. This letter is a response to nearly a week of demonstrations across Iran. What began as a protest against high food prices and rampant unemployment has broadened into a political movement demanding leadership changes and greater freedom and human rights. The government has responded with violence: more than twenty protestors have been killed, and hundreds have been arrested.

Jefferson’s “Master Epicurus” and the Nature of the American Regime

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While the American regime is often criticized as Hobbesian, the letters of Thomas Jefferson provide evidence that it may be more accurately described as Epicurean.

Who Are You? Alt-Right “Identitarianism,” Violence, and the Intellectual Roots of Western Civilization

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By making our common humanity irrelevant to the question of identity, Richard Spencer sets himself in diametric opposition to the intellectual roots of the “Western” civilization to which he would lay claim.

What’s Wrong with Rod Dreher’s Straussian Narrative of the American Constitution

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Because he accepts a Straussian framework that sees modernity rather than Christianity as the major turning point of Western history, Rod Dreher underestimates the influence of Christian and classical thought on the American founding.

Resisting the Fortress of Solitude: What’s Wrong with First Things’ Anxious Anti-Capitalism

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Young people today, especially the ones who are serious about religion and look to the editors of First Things for guidance, must resist the allure of an intellectual Fortress of Solitude where they can sit and feel superior to everyone. Griping about the state of society is a waste of time. Part two of two.

Leo Strauss and the Pursuit of Knowledge: A Reply to Paul DeHart

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Leo Strauss’s statements on philosophy do not deny that knowledge is possible. Rather, they emphasize that philosophy—while motivated by awareness of one’s own ignorance—is a way of life teleologically ordered toward knowledge.

The Fourteenth Amendment and Masterpiece Cakeshop: Equal Citizenship, our Inclusive Republic, and Anglo-American Common Law

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The government cannot impose creedal and exclusionary limits on occupational freedom by compelling particular citizens to provide goods and services contrary to their beliefs, unless those citizens have such a monopoly market power as to exclude other citizens from the market.

Minority Stress Is Real, but Wedding Cakes Don’t Cause It

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New research points to “internalized homophobia” as the problem, not external discrimination.

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