Religion
Ray Hodges’ ruminations on the morality of same-sex marriage are reasonable and presented with an even temper. Just so must be the tone of any dialogue on controversial matters. Unfortunately, his argument is a wholly erroneous construct, collapsing under the weight of misapprehensions, categorical non sequiturs, and an a priori conclusion. The flaws emerge right…
Stanley Aronson writes reasonable, interesting columns for the Providence Journal, but I often get the impression of an underlying scientism. By that relatively new coinage, I mean the tendency — a system of belief, really — to treat scientific answers as complete grounds for defining one’s life. So, in context of an essay about doctors’…
Among the factors that drew me to the Roman Catholic Church is that it essentially rejects the construct that insists that faith and reason are opposing sources of knowledge. They’re not; they blend and overlap and are ultimately inseparable. On those grounds, and with consideration of the times in which we live, Rev. Joseph Lennon,…
Founder of First Things and one of this country’s preeminent theologians, Father Richard Jon Neuhaus has passed away. From the National Catholic Reporter. From the early 1970s forward, Neuhaus was a key architect of two alliances with profound consequences for American politics, both of which overcame histories of mutual antagonism: one between conservative Catholics and…
Being from an AP report, the headline is rapidly submerged in lest-you-think-this-is-good-news “context,” but it’s worth noting, nonetheless: Iraq’s Christians, a small minority in the overwhelmingly Muslim country, quietly celebrated Christmas on Thursday with a present from the government, which declared it an official holiday for the first time. … In his homily on Thursday,…
My teens and early twenties were, in a word, turbulent — mired in self-destructive behavior and emotional flights. Typical. Oh so typical was my pushing the world away in order to create an explanation for my feeling of isolation. In my impatient mind, the world had promised me much and delivered little. The fruits of…
Rev. David Lewis Stokes’s reflections upon the failed exhumation of Cardinal Newman is a rewarding read: What really makes Newman our contemporary was his life-long sense that at the heart of modernity churns a moral vortex that promises to consume us all. Writing in 1875, Newman captured the century and a half to come: “To…
The Bush administration is entirely right to permit healthcare providers to refuse tasks that they find objectionable: The outgoing Bush administration is planning to announce a broad new “right of conscience” rule permitting medical facilities, doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other healthcare workers to refuse to participate in any procedure they find morally objectionable, including abortion…
It’s strange that this, from Rod Dreher’s argument for the centrality of religious social conservatives to the Republican Party, should have the air of something controversial: Times change. Today, the greatest threats to conservative interests come not from the Soviet Union or high taxes, but from too much individual freedom. Look around you: Americans have…
The left’s investment in identity politics has proven to reap rewards. In battling the concept that people should develop their senses of self in such a way as to deemphasize a relative superficiality like ethnicity, the planners and plotters and goers-along cleared the field for such results as this: Political and sociological analysts in several…