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.

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

We can be Christians first, for the sake of the country we love. 
The definition of “personhood” isn’t an issue we can push off much longer; technology will make us face it sooner than some might prefer.
Being bound is a gift, not a curse.  
For all its failures and drawbacks—and there are many—American culture’s focus on individual freedom is intoxicating and infectious.
We are using our genius to degrade ourselves into nothing much at all, and the existential results are anxiety and shame at how small we have become. 
If the witch crazes of recovered memory and multiple personalities are making a comeback, perhaps now aided by social contagion online, we would do well to gird ourselves with a sound understanding of psychiatry’s vulnerability to misdirection—and of the harm it can do to the souls under its care.
Can We Restore Hope in Women’s Healthcare? 
If Sinclair Lewis were writing today, would his Babbitt look markedly different?
The Church has a long tradition of generous care for migrants, while allowing room for legitimate regulation.
Lent ought to be the training ground for how to approach things of value with proper reverence. In other words, Lent retrains our loves.
Ben Sasse’s recent announcement reveals to us both goods and virtues that show in his dying a glimmer of light, a stirring of hope, and the possibility of spring even in one’s final winter.
We cannot expect to preserve a liberal democracy until each generation learns to embrace its civic responsibilities.
We can value the strengths and perspectives of those with disabilities and their loved ones while affirming objective reality and universal human dignity.
Why Young People Are Avoiding Dating ... And What We Can Do About It 
A culture that teaches girls to silence their pain, medicate their cycles, and dismiss the body’s signals is a culture that will inevitably reap infertility, despair, and declining birthrates. A culture that teaches body literacy, by contrast, will raise young people who see their fertility as a vital sign of health and an essential part of their future.
If the goal of medicine is to protect and restore life, then our efforts and investments should flow to therapies that treat the sick, not to technologies that eliminate them before they are born. 
There appears to be an intractable choice between family separation, on one hand, and a nation that does not enforce its own laws or protect its own borders, on the other. How to proceed? 
We do not need experts to tell us how to get our kids out of the machine.  
Henry Ford sought to mainstream anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States. In a 1925 address, Coolidge decisively broke with Ford’s movement. 
What place smartphones have in our future is uncertain, but whatever it is, all generations should be alert to the problem.
It would be perverse to charge all fulfillment theology with antisemitism. Many reject Christian Zionism for the plausible (but unfounded) reasons described in Mattson’s piece, and many are clearly philo-Semitic. But it might not be a bad idea for some of them to ask what W. D. Davies and other theologians started asking in the 1970s: “How did Christian Europe come to hate Jews?” 
What we need is a restoration of virtue in our land, in order to tame the strong gods and ensure that their power serves the good—so that the return to reality is marked not by domination, but by integrity, not by chaos, but by character. 
Before we indulge in more time online, it is worth considering whether the images flashing on that screen are ultimately pointing us toward the humanity and healing power of Christ or a disfigured version of the kind of body a technocratic culture wishes us to have.
We are not machines and cannot be well formed by them either. Human formation should be primarily human—even if it’s easier and faster to dole out our questions to a machine.

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