Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
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.

Body Literacy Is the New “Sex Ed” 

By and
Read More

Learn more about the Human Person: get your free eBook today!

Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Twin babies

We Are Real Parents, Too: Our Adoption Story

By
Some people don’t consider adoptive parents to be the “real” parents. While it is undeniable that biological parents give their children their genetic composition, the parents who raise them leave an enormous mark on children’s character and spiritual makeup. Over many years, adoptive parents influence their children’s education, the habits they develop, the affections they form, and their beliefs and values. In this way, adoptive parents become indispensable to the identity of the child.
Austrian Village

Revelations from a Hidden Life

By
The hidden life of Franz Jägerstätter offers us an example of how to love our fellow citizens in a time of partisan antagonism and division.
Trans person with pill

Insuring Rights for “Wrong” Bodies

By
As a recent British court decision correctly affirmed, the puberty blocking treatments being given to gender-dysphoric young people constitute experimental medicine. There is neither demonstrated efficacy nor evidence on long-term outcomes, and the risk of serious harm and irreversible damage is real. The same standards of medicine should be applied to gender dysphoria as other medical issues.
Praying hands

Avoiding the Delimiting of Hope

By
Against the failed hopes of the Enlightenment, scientism, and modernism, Josef Pieper calls us to embrace a hope that transcends the physical and political world.
Woman writing in journal

Writing a Rule of Life: A Timeless Tool for Decision-Making

By
I may not live in a monastic community like St. Benedict, but I live among others in my own sort of domestic monastery, and I am fully invested in these members’ flourishing. My Rule of Life helps me flesh out what it means to thrive both personally and as a family.
Doctor with needle

The COVID Vaccines Are Not “Morally Compromised”

By
The use of HEK 293 or similar cell lines in no way perpetuates the grave injustice of abortion or implies approval of abortion. To call a cell line, a vaccine, a railroad, a medication, or any other physical thing morally compromised is simply a category mistake, because good and evil are characteristics of the human will, not of physical things.
Netflix mug in front of laptop

The Netflix Effect: Corrosive Storytelling and the Human Person

By
The Netflix adaptation of The Queen’s Gambit and the original version are based on two radically different visions of the human person. They bring the reader or viewer to one of two endpoints: either we recognize the importance of making the best choices and inherit a position of moral responsibility, or we face the despair of living in a world without moral agency.
Parent and baby fist

Baby Is a Punk Rocker: On the Givenness of Life

By
Excessive efforts to control the givenness of our children’s lives reveal our doubt that life is a good gift in itself. They also show a vision of human flourishing that is dependent upon material prosperity, personal achievements, and social status.
Christmas Tree closeup

The True Meaning of Christmas: Accept No Substitutes

By
The Christmas message is one of joy, even “great joy,” but not superficial joy. Christmas confronts us with the sobering claim that humankind is in a state of sin—a state from which we cannot save ourselves. Hence the need for a savior, and hence the joyful Christian claim that God himself offers the salvation by coming to live among us.
Nativity Scene

Chesterton’s Christmas

By
In “The God in the Cave,” G.K, Chesterton explains that when Christians celebrate the Nativity, they are celebrating an event that changed the course of history and permanently transformed the DNA of human society.
Boy seeing girl in mirror

The Road to Sexual Revolution: Carl Trueman and the Modern Self

By
According to Carl Trueman, focusing myopically on problems with sexual morality often results in misguided responses to the sexual revolution. Instead, we must grapple with “a much deeper and wider revolution in the understanding of what it means to be a self.”
Father & Son Fishing

To Control “Toxic Masculinity” and Heal the Family We Must Appreciate the Differences between the Sexes

By
To combat “toxic masculinity,” the APA suggests teaching boys to express their emotions and insecurities more openly. They say components of traditional masculinity such as stoicism, self-reliance, and competitiveness deter men from forming close relationships with other men. But if men really are born less “nice” than women, then our task is not simply to strip away negative social constructs. It is time we stop talking down to boys as if they were dim-witted girls and offer them opportunities to build character and provide meaning to their lives.
Doctor with crucifix

Why We Plan to Get Vaccinated: A Christian Moral Perspective

By , and
It is not possible to properly love a person and act so as to unnecessarily jeopardize their health. If by the minimal burden of wearing a mask, we can potentially protect others from grave illness, then it seems we have a moral obligation to wear a mask. The same can be said for COVID-19 vaccinations. If by being vaccinated we can protect others from illness, then we have a corresponding obligation, given our Lord’s command to love neighbors, to be vaccinated. Vaccinations not only protect me, but also protect other vulnerable members of society.
Happy family at home

Pandemic Parenting: Lessons Learned

By
The end of the pandemic is now in sight. Let’s hold on to the good things we have learned and the good habits that we have established. That means no phones in the bedroom, a good night’s sleep, and more time together as a family. If we can do those things—if the end result of the pandemic is a strengthening of the family—then there may be a silver lining to this cloud.
Hands in Circle

Liberalism as Christian Personalism?

By
For a political order supposedly built on faulty philosophical foundations, liberalism has been surprisingly resilient. Political theorist David Walsh argues it is the political expression of the Christian epiphany of the person that has been differentiated by modern philosophy. Yet Even in Walsh’s defense of liberal modernity, the menace of Luciferian possibilities flickers at the edge of vision.
Large Family

The Domestic Kenosis: A Response to Ross Douthat from the Mother of Eight Children

By
I was looking forward to my one or two children, and a life of ongoing validation through the achievement-acclaim-advancement sequence to which school had accustomed me. Is large family life an icon of the Lord’s emptying of himself on our behalf? No more, I believe, than any Christian life deliberately modeled upon His example.
Doctor reading to child

Faustian Medicine: Uncovering the Humanistic Soul of Medical Education

By
Medicine isn’t opposed to what makes us human. At its best, it’s a practical application of the ideals of humanistic education, and its goal is to express and enable those things that distinguish us as human beings. Those practicing medicine need encouragement to cultivate a true understanding of health and healthcare.
Doctor and young child

Vaccines and Doubly Remote Cooperation in Evil

By
Neither the Pfizer nor the Moderna vaccine poses any significant moral concern. Any moral issues with both are so remote and minor that they should prevent nobody from getting either of them.
Heart Hands

How St. Katharine Drexel and My Odd-Couple Parents Taught Me to Fight Racism

By
What I learned from St. Katharine Drexel was that the first act is simply to see the truth. To really use our eyes and intellect and heart to see another as a fellow human, given dignity by God, is no simple act—but it can be done. And then to step toward those who are not being accorded this dignity and to offer it to them, to reach out the hand of charity, takes a monumental act, a decision often of serious self-sacrifice.
Mask with syringes

Is Receiving the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine Ethical?

By and
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine’s remote and limited interaction with abortion, coupled with the command to love thy neighbor, makes it a candidate for ethical use.
Baby

Gene Editing and Planned Personhood

By
The future of germline editing includes practical risks, but the question of whether it will happen should hinge not only on whether it can be safely done. Physicians must carefully consider their role in relation to their patients, which is different from that of a scientist working with specimens in a lab.
Crucifix

The Impact of Psychological Man—and How to Respond

By
Only by modeling true community, oriented towards the transcendent, can the church show a rapidly destabilizing world of expressive individuals that there is something greater, more solid, and more lasting than the immediate satisfaction of personal desires. The second in a two-part essay.
Psychology

The Rise of “Psychological Man”

By
The notions that human flourishing is found primarily in an inner sense of wellbeing, that authenticity is found by being able to act outwardly as one feels inwardly, and that who we are is largely a matter of personal choice not external imposition have become common intuitions that lie at the heart of our society’s many ills. The first of a two-part essay.
Child

The Lincoln Proposal: Pro-Life Presidents Must Take Ambitious and Bold Action to Protect the Constitutional Rights of Preborn Children

By , and
Americans need not accept an interminable status quo of indifference toward the rights of the child, due either to the timidity of our political elite or to the presumption of our judiciary class. The ‘Lincoln Proposal’ offers pro-life presidents the clearest way to confront Roe v. Wade’s jurisprudence of violence and doubt and to protect the constitutional rights of preborn persons.

Get your free eBook for The Human Person

"*" indicates required fields

Get your free eBook for Sexuality & Family

Get your free eBook for Politics & Law

Get your free eBook for Education & Culture

Get your free eBook for Business & Economics