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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.

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Christmas hope is grounded both in the reality of Christ’s first advent and also in the reality that he will come again to fully establish the peace his princely rule has promised. This is one of the great paradoxes of the faith: Christ has come, and he is coming. The kingdom has arrived, yet we pray “Thy kingdom come.”
Offered daily through the liturgical prayer of the Church, the Magnificat invites every Christian, through Jesus, to see the Holy Spirit in the rare expression of the woman from whose flesh our Savior took his own. The Magnificat is Mary in her own words. It inspires study and imitation of the scriptures by presenting Mary as a gift and invitation, a mother of prayer and listening for all.
Those of us who think the stakes in our cultural conflicts are high, whichever side of those conflicts we are on, frequently find ourselves furious. But what are we angry about? Our responses to that question have to do not just with the latest news, but with deeper intuitions about the nature of the human person and its relation to the moral life of our society.
Even the most extensive attempt to shape “what we will get” will always fail to eliminate the contingency, particularity, and irreducibility of the person, whose concrete individuality will likewise always transcend whatever power we attempt to exercise over it.
Civility is an important but secondary virtue. It cannot sustain itself. We can find hope for a healthier culture in a rather surprising place. 
Trump's reelection provides reason for pro-lifers to be cautiously relieved, though still apprehensive.
With respect to love, the loneliness epidemic is real. And that affects not just romantic relationships, but friendships as well. At the end of the day, life is a gift, and the center of life is who you love. That doesn’t start happening when you’re in your mid-thirties. It starts happening now
In their denominations and elsewhere in the church, some progressive Baby Boomers have been caught by surprise at younger people not sharing their cultural values. But should they have been surprised at this generational rift in the church? Looking at how different generations have been formed morally, socially, and culturally may help address this question.
Children are not a means to the end of adult happiness or fulfilled longings. They are human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity. Refusal to accept that we are not ultimately in control means asserting our control over others.
Pierre Manent has been a penetrating critic of the European Union, a measured but firm defender of the nation-state, and a Catholic thinker who has made signal contributions to the understanding of the Church’s role in European history, and to the understanding of many of its eminent thinkers. 
Thames’s recent book is a thought-provoking and enlightening read for anyone interested in international religious freedom and the failures and triumphs of America’s contribution to it.
As we consider the future of our debate over IVF, we must go deeper than the political questions facing us and ask ourselves fundamental questions about how we view one another.
Technology does not merely present the real, like our bodily senses; instead, it re-presents, reproduces, copies, or simulates the real. This has concerned techno-conservatives for millennia, ever since Plato’s proposal to ban all “imitative arts” from his ideal city-state, and it is a concern naturally heightened in the era of AI deepfakes.
We may not be privy to Screwtape’s letters on the understanding of the meaning of the possessive pronoun “my” in “my embryo,” but judging from jurisprudential trends, we would be able to hazard a very good guess.
Living in a prosperous bourgeois society is not necessarily a problem; living with a bourgeois attitude on the inside is.
Christopher and Richard Hays have presented plausible arguments supported by biblical warrants for welcoming sexual minorities into church membership and leadership. Yet their mercy trajectory approach falls far short of building a coherent, convincing cumulative case to support their vision of blessing same-sex unions in the church.
Gen Z's turn toward church may be unexpected, but it is actually rooted in the most natural drive of all: a desire for marriage and family. Young men are looking for truth and responsibility—and, ultimately, meaning. For most men, throughout history, a primary source of meaning has been marriage and children.
Today we might instinctively look at Nazi criteria for death as utterly baseless, but at the time seasoned medical professionals regarded them as reasonable. To have a sense of history is to grasp the arbitrariness of such criteria. When it comes to killing patients, there is no way to get the criteria just right because the stamp of medical approval sends a social message that there is a category of persons who should not exist.
Is government by consent irretrievably lost? I maintain that the principle of consent is not lost and that we can rebuild a different sort of social contract theory from amid the ruins.
While serious people can debate the underlying ethics of whether the death penalty is just, our country has proven that it is unable to carry out executions in a way that protects justice.
Consciousness is not simply a phenomenon that can be arbitrarily dispensed with or suppressed at whim: it is a critical element of the human experience, particularly in the last chapter of one’s earthly existence, during which one comes face to face with the mystery of suffering and the meaning of life.
Most Americans will not begin adopting avelut practices in any kind of wholesale manner. But it offers insights into the human condition that may nonetheless be helpful—about the timing of the grief cycle, the need to honor the departed free from distraction, and how communities might adopt robust mourning structures to support those who are suffering. 
As the experience of many nations around the world shows, constitutions are easily dissolved, and constitutional order lost, when citizens allow their leaders to violate their charter to achieve partisan goals. When that happens, the delicate system of checks and balances usually gives way to an oppressive one-party rule. 
If we are to understand how it is possible for someone to pursue the subjectively satisfying in such a way as to disrespect a good possessing a morally relevant value, we have to realize that in man live two mighty tendencies that are incompatible with value-response: pride and concupiscence.

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