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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.

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

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Public Discourse

Property and the Regulatory State at the Supreme Court

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The Supreme Court’s conflicted rulings on whether the government must compensate property owners for burdening their rights and interests raises questions about the value of private property in American life. The first in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

God and the Profits: Religious Liberty for Money-Makers

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The Bible says “You cannot serve both God and mammon.” The Constitution doesn’t.
Public Discourse

Are We Guilty for Our Religious Belief?

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Is religious belief wrong, and are religious believers morally culpable for their false beliefs?
Public Discourse

We Don’t Need to Redefine Marriage to Fix Policy Problems

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Good public policy can meet the needs of all Americans without redefining marriage.
Public Discourse

The Supreme Court’s First Assault on Marriage

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The Supreme Court first put marriage on its track of decline forty-one years ago, when it ruled that states could not limit the sale of contraceptives to unmarried couples.
Public Discourse

Liberalism’s Logic and America’s Challenge: A Reply to Schlueter and Muñoz

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The Founders’ vision of the “common good” was not the pre-modern natural law conception of an objective human good, but a conception of “mutual advantage” shaped by the social contract framework. This logic of liberalism has driven our country to its current political and cultural problems.
Public Discourse

Sustaining American Liberalism in Principle and Practice

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While we should reject misguided claims that our founders adopted political voluntarism, we should follow suggestions for strengthening civic life—and thereby sustain American liberalism—through local government, families, churches, and other civic associations.
Public Discourse

Natural Law Liberalism Beyond Romanticism

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To reject the presence of natural law in documents of the Founding era is to embrace both cynicism and romanticism.
Public Discourse

Why We Can’t Just “Lighten Up” Over the HHS Mandate

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Preserving the freedom to witness to the truths one believes, not merely avoiding cooperation with evil, is what’s primarily at stake in the HHS mandate debate.
Public Discourse

Deciding Who Gets Religious Freedom: The Latest HHS “Accommodation”

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In the latest proposed version of the HHS mandate, the government presumes to say which employers get religious freedom and how much they get, but all religious employers are obligated to live out their beliefs and should have the freedom to do so.
Public Discourse

Bad Science and Failed Freedom Protections in the HHS Mandate

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The latest proposed amendment to the HHS mandate still draws on empirically unsound data and violates religious freedom.
Public Discourse

Simple Justice: Kids Deserve School Choice

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Rather than cave to self-interested protests against school choice from teachers unions, we should do what we can to make Catholic schools a viable school option for low-income children.
Public Discourse

Is Religion Outdated in the Twenty-First Century?

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Religion isn’t outdated simply because some people claim that we can only know what the natural sciences tell us. Philosophy and theology are the next steps in our search for truth about nature, human nature, and God.
Public Discourse

An Unrecognizable America

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If the HHS mandate is enforced, our government may provoke a schism in the American Catholic Church and will reduce faithful Catholics to second-class citizenship.
Public Discourse

Law’s Logic at the End of Life

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To its detriment, Howard Ball’s new book on end-of-life law focuses more on the emotions and biases of the law’s defenders than on law’s history and content.
Public Discourse

Lessons from France on Defending Marriage

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Unlikely characters, including gay men, are leading the French people in protest against redefining marriage. A repeating refrain is “the rights of children trump the right to children.” Americans should follow their example of mobilizing across party lines.
Public Discourse

Let’s Talk About Just War

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In a country where we oscillate between the extremes of realism and pacifism, learning the history of the just war tradition is important. A new book by David Corey and J. Daryl Charles offers us an introduction.
Public Discourse

The HHS Mandate and Judicial Theocracy

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If we are to preserve our First Amendment rights, judges must refrain from telling plaintiffs challenging the HHS mandate that they’ve got their theology wrong.
Public Discourse

A Man for This Season, and All Seasons

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There is only one Thomas More: A man of tender nobility, subtle intellect, and forceful conviction, all rooted in profound fidelity to the larger commonwealth of Christendom outside and above Tudor England.
Public Discourse

Jefferson’s Robust Views of Religious Freedom

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Notwithstanding his unorthodox views of Christianity, Thomas Jefferson staunchly adhered to the rights of all religious believers, Christian and non-Christian alike, to free religious exercise.
Public Discourse

Beyond Wishful Thinking: A Response to Schlueter

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“Natural law liberalism” is a chimera that cannot and does not exist in the American tradition.
Public Discourse

Conservatives, Women, and Votes

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Conservatives need to expand their favor with women voters by investing in female candidates and spokespeople, and by reframing their social policies in pro-woman and pro-family terms.
Public Discourse

Moral Neutrality, Marriage, and the Supreme Court

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A recent ruling in the United States District Court in Hawaii reveals a rational basis for the Supreme Court to rule on a morally neutral basis that marriage can be enshrined in law.
Public Discourse

Sustainable Liberalism

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The solution to the political and moral crisis of our time does not lie in abandoning liberalism or in defending Lockeanism. It rests in the recovery of natural law liberalism—a sustainable public philosophy that is true to reason, to nature, and to Christian belief.

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