The first pillar of a decent society is respect for the human person, which recognizes that all individual human beings have dignity simply because of the kind of being they are: animals whose rational faculties allow them to know, love, reason, and communicate. It also recognizes that human beings are persons, members of the human family who flourish in a community that respects their fundamental rights and who long to discover transcendent truths about the nature of reality.
If life is sacred, food must be sacred too, since it makes life possible. And the higher the order of life which is given up to be food, the more sacred the food. That’s why vegetables are harvested, while animals are sacrificed. That’s why the Catholic Church considers the sacrifice of the Mass, when God offers his body as food for our corporal and spiritual nourishment, the source and summit of the Christian life.
All “dissidents” and men of good will need to give serious thought to the ways they might resist the regnant ideological lies all around us. In this task, Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies will remain indispensable for what might be a long time to come.
The pitfall of standard anti-racism is its simplistic attribution of all such disparities to systemic racism or racist policy. Simplistic analysis suggests simplistic solutions, some of which may be detrimental to black people. Heterodox thinkers challenge simple diagnoses and solutions, steering us toward constructive endeavor to achieve genuine progress.
While both presidential candidates have changed their views on abortion over the past decades, their actions in recent years clarify the direction that they would likely take while in office. President Trump has maintained a consistent pro-life record in office that affects the regulations of various executive agencies and American leadership on the world stage. On the other hand, former Vice President Biden has moved to support his party’s current position of actively promoting federal funding for the abortion industry and cementing abortion as a constitutional right.
In an era of new options, more choices, greater temptations, high expectations, consistent anxiety, and endemic uncertainty, nothing about the process of marrying can be taken for granted—even among those belonging to a faith that has long encouraged it. In an era of independence, intentionally becoming interdependent seems increasingly risky.
The American Journal of Psychiatry has issued a major correction to a recent study. The Bränström study reanalysis demonstrated that neither “gender-affirming hormone treatment” nor “gender-affirming surgery” reduced the need of transgender-identifying people for mental health services. Fad medicine is bad medicine, and gender-anxious people deserve better.
Our culture’s deep ingratitude is the long, nihilistic outworking of the logic of modern thought itself. When human experience is reduced to only will and power struggle, there no room for gratefulness. Those of us who have not renounced cosmic order and the providence that brings that order to fulfillment, by contrast, know that all things willed or permitted by God work for good. Thus we should be grateful—profoundly grateful—for everything.
While autonomous vehicles sound freeing at first, they also have the potential to increase passivity and decrease human agency.
Given a government’s mandate to preserve the common good, the goal of a national strategy for vaccine allocation should be to mitigate morbidity and mortality by ending the pandemic in the most efficient and rapid manner possible. This would better protect both the individual good of each citizen and the common good of the commonweal.
Senator Hawley should turn the tables during confirmation hearings and force Democrats to defend their abortion extremism. What’s more, he should act on precedents stemming from the days of Lincoln down to our own, precedents involving the authority of the political branches to counter at times and limit the holdings of the Supreme Court.
Political realities can be confronted and transformed, but they cannot simply be imagined away. Unfortunately, Senator Hawley’s pro-life litmus test promises no more success in the future than it would have had in the past.
The emerging discussion about in vitro gametogenesis and other types of multi-parent technologies demands renewed attention to why children do well with only two parents, and why those parents do best to procreate in the ordinary way, even with all its inefficiencies, burdens, and failures.
Manufacturing children using the genetic material of multiple parents is not a prospect to be celebrated. It is a dystopian technology, making children, as if they were consumer goods, and unmaking the family, as if it were not essential to the common good.
To have any chance of seriously mitigating common misperceptions of religious freedom, Evangelicals must publicly demonstrate a sincere commitment to religious pluralism and its necessary counterpart, religious literacy.
An integral part of the Christian calling is to pursue goods greater than ourselves.
Christian Wiman’s new collection of poetry creates a world in which the human being is never one thing or the other—believer or unbeliever—but both at once. As the speaker in the book’s first poem, “Prologue,” puts it, “I need a space for unbelief to breathe.” Survival Is a Style creates that space.
Parental authority is a biblical and natural concept that should be upheld by church and state alike. Any attempt to violate this parental authority apart from extreme circumstances that demand intervention on behalf of justice should be vehemently opposed in the name of Scripture and the natural order.
Abigail Shrier’s new book is an outstanding investigative report on the diagnostic craze of rapid onset gender dysphoria that has swept over adolescent girls in the past decade. It is an invaluable resource for parents, educators, church and community leaders, and anyone else who cares about the well-being of young women.
COVID-19 underscores our need for practical wisdom, which allows us to pursue the human good even when we lack technical mastery of a situation and when we must make difficult decisions between competing goods.
True encounters with demonic activity ought to make today’s neopagans reconsider whether they should do more than cultivate eclectic spiritual identities.
The just war ethic cannot justify the intentional killing of some innocents for the sake of defending the lives of other innocents because the lives of the innocent are the actual point of war. We go to war on behalf of the innocent men and women wronged by some act against their nation. We fight that war by the morality able to name that wrong as a wrong, and able to express that wrong by the means employed in its vindication.
All knowledge comes from sensory experience, including knowledge of the first principles of morality on which the natural law and moral reasoning build.
Even according to Protestant traditions with the gravest views of sin, fallen human beings do not get everything wrong when thinking about morality. Since Scripture itself affirms that the created order reveals God’s moral law, Christians should not turn their backs on natural law for the sake of promoting biblical teaching.
Roe v. Wade is no secondary issue. It is not something to be pushed to the side of the nomination process. Roe is central. Roe is a window into the constitutional worldview of a would-be justice. It is a measure of their sense of what a justice should be. That is why I say today that I will vote only for Supreme Court nominees who have explicitly acknowledged that Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided. Adapted from a speech given on the floor of the Senate by Senator Hawley on June 30, 2020.
Thirty years after its publication, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People has shaped our culture in significant, lasting ways. Yet many of the upper-middle-class, successful Americans who cultivate Stephen Covey’s habits fail to apply his most essential, all-encompassing principle—the one that guided his entire vision of the good life.