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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.

On the Pleasure of Hate 

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hate

On the Pleasure of Hate 

By
Much ink has been spilled on charting the roots and causes of hate and its diverse manifestations. Yet in all these intellectual analyses and sociological investigations, one cause has largely escaped notice: the simple pleasure of hate.  
Catholic Church in Jerusalem

The Church, the Jews, and the Development of Doctrine 

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What is settled is that the Jewish people are beloved by God, that Catholics are spiritual Semites as they are grafted into Israel for their very existence, and that Catholics are committed to listening and learning from the Jewish people as they enjoy God’s covenantal fidelity and love. 
Fatherhood

Generation, Priesthood, and the Nature of Fatherhood

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Catholic men are called to follow the Lord Jesus, to live not lives of domination that demand submission from others but lives where their strength and talent are offered in self-sacrifice for those God has given them to serve. The virtuous mean between those extremes is the Way of the Cross, the path by which you find your life in losing it, the way by which you enter into joys you didn’t know existed on the far side of burdens you didn’t know you could bear.
LDS Church

Moral Agency and Sustainable Liberalism: Rauch’s Proposed Liberal-Christian Alliance

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For believers eager to have a voice in a secular liberal society or simply to find peace and a home in such a society, and thus to avoid dispiriting “polarization,” Rauch’s appeal appears to resonate with a surprising power. 
homemaking

The Surgeon and the Homemaker 

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How might our society change if we understood parenting as a skilled occupation?
American Protestant church

Low Church in High Places: The Fate and Future of American Protestantism

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To be sure, there remain some true-believing via media Protestants who are morally and theologically conservative and continue to attempt to strike the balance between high and low. But whatever their future, they will not be resuming their place at the commanding heights of the culture.
Council of Nicaea

Standing the Test of Time: Conciliarity and Remembering the Council of Nicaea 1700 Years Later

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The Christian community is emboldened to press forward with confidence in discerning what is true and good, through the guidance of the Spirit.
DEI

DEI in Retreat? 

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If the DEI label is losing traction and institutions are substantively evolving, what, if anything, will replace DEI?
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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Bishop Barron's participation in the White House Commission is not in service of a legislative agenda, but of a deeper witness: that religious liberty is not the product of political will, but the recognition of an antecedent truth about the human person. For this he is uniquely well-suited.
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.
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