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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.

Nein: On Barthian Ethics

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babies

The Pronatalism of Silicon Valley

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The pro-family approach recognizes that marriage and family formation are the basis for overcoming the birth dearth in the United States. By encouraging family formation, we ensure that children are born into environments where they are most likely to thrive and nurture their own love for children.
Robert E Lee

Propriety without Principle: The Cautionary Tale of Robert E. Lee

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Robert E. Lee perhaps tried to be a gentleman, but his moral principles were weak. Therefore, when the flood of war came, he compromised with evil, then piled sin upon sin, as the rebellion’s corrupting logic swept away more and more of his moral foundations.
ethics advice column

Ask Chris Tollefsen: An Ethics Advice Column

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All three questions raise many more issues than I’ve been able to address, and I thank my writers for their rich and thought-provoking submissions.
premature baby

What is an “Artificial Womb”? A Response to Katy Faust and Samantha Stephenson

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It is vital that physicians and patients alike demand that bedrock concepts of the human experience like birth remain clearly defined and our most vulnerable patients remain protected. To that end, we must be clear-eyed about the unique ethical challenges that AAPT will pose.
euthanasia

Assisted Death and The Economist

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The American experience with assisted suicide should persuade Great Britain and other countries that the slippery slope to broader killing is disturbingly genuine.
homemaking

When We Outsource Every Hard Thing, What Do We Lose?

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Popular culture tells us it is often more efficient to outsource routine household tasks than do them yourself. This leaves an important question unanswered, however: efficient at what? 
Israel

Anti-Semitic Students and Jewish Isolationism

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From the river to the sea, human flourishing will only be advanced through a nuanced and empathetic attitude to both sides. Radical stances that dehumanize one side, turning its babies into colonizers and marking them as legitimate targets for attack, do not advance freedom or justice. Quite the opposite.
multigenerational household

Multigenerational Living: A Step Back to Healthy Communal Life

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The love that rebuilds civilization comes when we live together. This is an opportunity to make a serious, radical, countercultural sacrifice of one’s own selfishness, a sacrifice that can change the family culture. It is not an easy decision or an easy life. But it is good.
the self

In Search of the Self

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Our culture’s crisis of the self is a crisis of faith in our personhood; its cause is our ignorance of the God who best reveals what a person is.
abortion pill

Women Deserve to Know They Can Reverse In-Progress Chemical Abortions

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Abortion pill reversal is a potent reminder to those who profit from abortion that, if given the option, many pregnant mothers want assistance that will help them choose life.
Summer camp

Summer Camp: An Ailing American Institution

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The original rationale for summer camp is more valid than ever. Young people are struggling with mental health, addiction to technology, disconnection from the body, isolation, and many other painful realities. Summer camps cannot fix these problems. But for many adolescents, the experience of traditional summer camps might help them see that life is about more than accomplishment, and that is a start.
Dante's inferno

On the Cooling of Our Love

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Acedia is a path to mediocrity; it leaves glories unrealized. A man may accomplish much, but if his soul is cooled to the higher beauties of life, he lives an unfulfilled one. The soul must hear the call to ascend the ladder of love and rest in the beauty for which it was made: God. Only in him does the soul find fulfillment and the beauty of an ordered life.
pregnant woman

Three Abortion Stories for a Post-Dobbs America

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Dear reader, as you step away from my story, I have two requests: first, believe women when they tell you about sexual violence. And second, recognize that abortion coercion is real. 
Ultrasound

Pivoting to Unwanted and Coerced Abortion: A Manifesto

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While we continue to seek ways to extend robust legal protection to prenatal children and to persuade our pro-choice brothers and sisters that such laws are necessary to forge a truly just society, we should all be able to come together to stop unwanted abortion. 
baby feet

Artificial Wombs, Artificial Love

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When we reject suffering and seek to replace it with artificiality, we miss our invitation to submit to the conditions under which love flourishes. We also lose sight of the meaning and purpose of our existence, which is not to pursue our own comfort and convenience, but to love God and our neighbor, even when that involves sacrifice and hardship.
Coffin

Dying Alone

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Enabling “the good death” begins with reviving attentiveness. We must first attend to the dying in our own communities. Care for the dying, in turn, enlivens reflectiveness on our own death. To advocate increased attendance in the death chamber is not meant to scare, nor to set up a macabre museum. It is instead a reminder that all men are mortal and that one’s eternal destiny is of the utmost urgency. It is instead a way to reintroduce and refine the art of dying well. 
creation

Mere Humanity: An Ecumenical Anthropology for Human Flourishing

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Human flourishing does not require escaping the cares and travails of this world, but rather, it imbues them with significance in the light of the Eternal One, in whom we live and move and have our being.
Jerusalem

Dispatch from a Country Living Sanely 

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Israelis celebrate their writers, artists, scientists, jurists, industrialists, and statesmen who fought wars of life and death. And of course there are other ways to serve—caring for the mentally ill, for abandoned children, for the elderly and sick. I am grateful for all of these exemplars. But for me, it will always be specifically the young men and women who go to the army intending to return (many, alas, do not return) to their studies when their missions are done. These people go on to have families, large ones, and jobs of all kinds, and different hobbies and interests and vocations. Their commitments are ordered by a conscious dedication to the Lord of all flesh.
Decadence and desire

Decadence and Desire

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If young people are taught to look at history only through the lenses of power and oppression, they will conclude that power and oppression are everything. Conversely, let them be introduced first to the genuinely great historical deeds, philosophical ideas, literary creations, and works of art of which humans have been capable. Then they will discover the ideals that moved our predecessors.
ethics advice column

Ask Chris Tollefsen: An Ethics Advice Column

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Indeed, a person in such a crisis seems like he or she has a deep need for truthful communication. Once more, not every truth needs to be communicated. But the important truths that they are loved, that their life is of value, and that they have much to live for, can only be convincingly imparted by one whose trustworthiness is manifested by his or her unwillingness to speak falsely. The beginning of a clinical relationship seems to me precisely the wrong time to lead by saying what one thinks is false.
Ralph Ellison

What Is Ideology?

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The attraction of subjecting oneself to ideological thought, then, is a new form of something very old: the desire to escape the limitations and uncertainties of the human condition of knowledge and action by availing ourselves of a greater-than-human power.
free-range children

Free-Range Kids and the Parental Compass

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Constant supervision thwarts a child’s ability to develop important qualities such as resourcefulness, self-awareness, and perseverance. But independence with a strong inner compass, a compass that is oriented toward the safety and trustworthiness of healthy family relationships, helps children eventually carry that attached compass away from home and eventually calibrate it for themselves.
assisted dying

Is the Fight against Assisted Dying a Lost Cause?

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Canada’s infamy has led many to rethink their support for assisted dying, no matter how strong the purported safeguards may be.
risk

Building Resilience in a High-Risk World

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Risks are essential to human flourishing. By taking measured risks—to our sanity, our financial stability, our perceived safety—we explore the limits of our ability to withstand discomfort, a posture that then allows us to care for others. In this way, well-ordered risk-taking is fundamentally others-oriented.
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