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Pillar

The Human Person

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.

The Invention of Happiness and the Palliative Society

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pain meds

The Invention of Happiness and the Palliative Society

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Sound religion overcomes and cures pain and suffering when it can justly be solved, but sound religion notes the inevitability of suffering, the moral inadmissibility of some “solutions,” and does not think pain renders a good life impossible. Suffering can be redeemed and caught up into a pattern of goodness, beauty, and purpose; even into a flourishing life.
Catholic Church

Bishop Barron, the Religious Liberty Commission, and the Transpolitical Mission of the Church

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To say that a bishop may rightly engage in political discourse—particularly on matters touching religious liberty—is not to deny the risks. The danger is real: that the Church will be seen as merely another “stakeholder” in public life, her sacramental character blurred into mere “advocacy,” her religious mandate mistaken for partisan ambition.
mother and children

Why Have Children? The Global Population Decline and Human Happiness 

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Happiness is not an achievement; it’s a gift. Children are a blessing. Forget your smartphones, ambitions, and quibbles with your neighbors. Take the risk, open your heart, and the boundless love of a child will move you to tears.  
Mother's Day

Mother’s Day and the Foolishness of Speech

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As a mother, I am coming to understand more concretely—and thus more deeply—what self-emptying love must look like, and thus I am coming to appreciate Christ's coming more deeply.
down syndrome

Accepting Our Children, Accepting Ourselves 

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Keeping the person at the center of concern maintains our focus on his or her good rather than on our own fears and insecurities. And, each time we practice accepting another in the fullness of their fragility, we come to a healthier, more honest acceptance of ourselves, too.  
climate change

Cass Sunstein’s Sledgehammer Approach to “Climate Justice”: A Christian Response

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It is undeniable that the Church calls Christians to aid those who suffer. But real demographic and political realities frame this responsibility.
patriarchy

The Problem of Patriarchy

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Regressing to patriarchy’s more material view of the family will only exacerbate our culture’s spiritual challenges.

A Closer Look at Transgender Pronouns within the Military

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So long as the military permits the use of transgender pronouns, it has two basic choices: require their use or leave that use optional. Either choice has consequences for military readiness, given aspects of American society in general and military culture in particular.

Catholicism and Immigration: A Rejoinder to Cory and Sweeney

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Nowhere do I say, nor would I say, that differing prudential judgments about immigration should be “shielded from objective moral scrutiny.”  In no way would I place this area of public policy “outside the realm of things one can objectively morally evaluate.”

Pope Francis and Accompanying Each Other Along the Path to Truth

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Many people—young people especially—are eager for caritas in veritate, and the pope sought to teach it to them through many of the themes of the pontificate: accompanying others, recognizing the concrete circumstances that we fallen human beings can find ourselves in, and always being witnesses to God’s infinite mercy. 

Pope Francis: A Candid Assessment

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Francis was much more interested in solving pastoral problems than in theological doctrines. But his responsibility was to safeguard the Church’s doctrine and to cherish and promote its theological reasoning. It is a cause of enduring sadness that he failed to do so.

Pope Francis: A Pontificate of the Heart

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Rather than emphasizing the church as a sacramental reality imbued with the presence of God, or a conception of the church as a pilgrim people, Pope Francis voiced a preference for the church as a field hospital with a battlefield task: Heal the wounds! Start from the ground up. Encounter those on the margins. Accompany those who feel left out. 

Being There: Pope Francis’s Death and the Future of the Catholic Church

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Believing in something like the Catholic Church and her deposit of faith presupposes a non-contestable core that is insoluble to the political waters that seem to suffuse everything these days. And that, it seems, is sufficient unto the day.

Commemorating—and Choosing Again—the Freedom of Redemption

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In these next days we celebrate our deliverance; in so doing we remind ourselves of our meaning, purpose, and dignity. But more: we offer hope for the “multitude” who would return to Egypt, return to slavery, simply because of its luxury and comfort, which seems to them better than the bread of life.

Attending the Person: Twenty Years after John Paul II

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For John Paul II, the category of “person” relates to everything that matters to the human being. His pontificate, to my mind, is best understood as the pontificate of the person.

IVF and the Language of Gift: A Theological Commentary on a Recent Executive Order

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This IVF executive order is anything but pro-life, and it is most certainly not pro-family. It is to be condemned in the strongest terms, and that condemnation must authentically inform Catholic life and family policy and practice. I pray fervently that the process of policy consultation that will soon come as a result of this executive order leave room, at the absolute minimum, for religious and conscience exemptions. But this is the bare minimum.

Christian Bioethics in a Secular World: In Search of Ethical Common Ground

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Beyond a mere set of rules and regulations, a bioethics shaped by Christianity does have something to say to those who suffer—and a person to say it to, One who has suffered alongside us. It is my hope—as it is Cherry’s, I imagine—to see bioethics transformed by the love and mercy made possible by a personal knowledge of Christ. 

A Theology of Health

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While the MAHA critique is correct, there is plenty of room for thinking and engaging about what will replace the impoverished vision of health that got us into this mess. Tyler VanderWeele, and the vision he lays out in A Theology of Health, should be at the center of those conversations. 

The Euthanasia of Ivan Ilyich: Recovering Good Lives and Deaths in the Age of Assisted Dying

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The direction of our culture is increasingly toward “death pods” where we will die alone, because we, like Ivan, have refused to really live together. Resisting such a culture of solitary and uncared for assisted dying will take legislation, but it will also require that we spend some time with Ilyich and try to recover the goodness of a good life and of a good death. S

What Does It Mean to Be a Woman? An Interview with Dr. Abigail Favale on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

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Feminism is a very fractious world. There’s a lot of different visions of what’s wrong and how we fix it. But all of the modern strands can trace their roots back to The Second Sex.
mother and baby

Making Sense of America’s Maternal Mortality Crisis

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Pro-life state laws both pre- and post-Dobbs prevent the intentional killing of preborn human beings, not essential obstetric care such as the treatment of pregnancy complications before, during, and after childbirth. Any misunderstandings to the contrary on the part of physicians probably stem from rampant misinformation about abortion laws.
Orthodox church

The “Finest in Disorganized Religion?” Orthodox Christianity Endures

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While Orthodoxy’s “multipolar” context arguably can foster temporary frictions, across centuries it has also lent itself to an oddly flexible resilience, not always easily legible to Western perspectives.
Cross ontop of a keyboard

Emerging Tech and Religious Freedom

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As lawmakers across the country increase their scrutiny of emerging technologies, tech-savvy religious organizations will have to navigate an increasingly contested boundary line between the requirements of law and the demands of faith.
angels

On Angels, Demons, and Artificial Intelligence

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In order to understand and evaluate claims about artificial intelligence, we need a satisfying theory of mind that can account both for the intelligent capacities of human beings and those of actual and possible beings that are significantly unlike us. 
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