I noted recently that educated and well-placed people today tend toward a stripped-down view of man and society that redefines family, religious, and communal ties as private preferences, thereby erasing their public importance. The effect is to promote exclusive reliance on the social authority of bureaucratic and commercial arrangements. The existence and sentimentalization of non-binding private … Read more
Social issues are messy. They have to do with basic human connections, orientations, and aspects of identity. These include family, cultural community, religion, and relations between the sexes. So they have to do with basic and very complicated aspects of life that people feel strongly about. That causes problems for people who run things today. … Read more
Love, mercy, and human dignity are all wonderful things, and it’s right for the Church to emphasize them. It’s also right to take them seriously, and try to understand what they are, what’s behind them, and where they point. To do that we need to remember that on the Christian view—indeed, on any sane view—we … Read more
I recently commented on the current emphasis on marginalization as a central moral issue, and said the tendency should not be idealized. Its basic effect, I suggested, is to support the movement toward an administratively integrated system covering the whole of social and economic life, and thus the interests of the bureaucrats and billionaires who … Read more
Words like “exclusion” and “marginalization” have become central to high-end and high-visibility discussions of moral and social issues. To all appearances, those who are most visible, vocal, and well-placed now feel called upon to show special concern for those who are least so. Why is that? A common view is that our leaders, along with … Read more
Brexit and the Trump movement, with their emphasis on the decisive importance of national identity, show that explicit identity politics has spread to all points of the political compass. That’s not surprising, since identity is radically contested today. The questions relate not only to who gets placed where, or the common concerns of this group or … Read more
In public discussion today, expertise has acquired the authority once held by good sense. The change reflects a change in attitudes toward society and politics. Educated, influential, and well-placed people now want a society run by global markets, financial institutions, and public administration based on supposedly neutral expertise. As such people’s response to Brexit shows, … Read more
In a recent column I noted that tradition is not self-contained or absolute. It’s complex, so that superior, subordinate, and parallel traditions often come into conflict. Local tradition may say one thing, Church or national tradition quite another. Also, tradition is not about itself but about goods toward which it’s oriented, so it’s relative to something … Read more
We live in times of radical change, so if we want to understand what’s going on why not start with the sayings of revolutionaries? In the most basic of modern revolutionary texts, the Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels tell us that in modern industrial society “all that is solid melts into air, all that … Read more
Theory and practice are never exactly the same, in the Church or anywhere else, but they’re not separable either. So what is pastoral depends on what God and the world are like. That issue, the nature of things, is always the great dispute in religion. It usually takes the form of a dispute over God’s … Read more
I noted last month that living well is difficult apart from a definite and well-developed tradition of life. Otherwise we simply won’t know what we’re doing, and we’ll have to make up everything as we go along without any idea of ultimate results or significance, or of what we might be missing. Such claims for the necessity … Read more
Arguments based on rights seem irresistible today. Unlike arguments based on natural law, let alone those based on revealed religion, everyone seems to understand them without further explanation. So if someone wants to say abortion is bad he says it violates the right to life, and if he wants to oppose the current deconstruction of … Read more
Last month I suggested that the most effective argument for taking human nature, natural law, and natural human goods seriously is that doing so leads to a better way of life. It’s not hard to see why it should. People do not in fact invent their own ways of life. They’re too social, and the world is … Read more
Everybody favors human rights—the US, the EU, the UN, the leaders of the Church, and indeed all respectable public figures. But what are they? There doesn’t seem to be a good explanation. They are rights we have simply as human beings, but what does that mean? It might mean that each of us has a … Read more
Last month I noted that Catholics, along with presenting the Faith, should try vigorously to make natural law more visible in public discussion. But how? The very idea of natural law provokes incomprehension today. It favors principles that aren’t engineered or controlled, so they don’t fit into a technological understanding of rationality. Even worse, it means … Read more
Catholics who concern themselves with political and social issues, and non-Catholics who believe in a social order that takes natural law and human nature seriously, face trends that seem overwhelming and point toward a social order with no concern for most of what makes us human. Hence the talk about the “Benedict option,“ which seems … Read more
Catholics talk about natural law, but what’s it all about? Basically, it’s a system of principles that guides human life in accordance with our nature and our good, insofar as those can be known by natural reason. It thereby promotes life the way it evidently ought to be, based on what we are and how … Read more
We all talk about liberalism and conservatism, and about liberal and conservative Catholics, but what does it mean? Some say it doesn’t mean much at all. They say these are labels attached to arbitrary and even contradictory collections of positions. Liberals say they want lots of freedom and lots of regulations. Conservatives say they want … Read more
There has been a great deal of talk in the Church lately about a supposed opposition between rules and reality, theology and life, doctrine and pastoral considerations. Some of the talk has gone to extremes, suggesting that rules, doctrine, and organized thought matter little in comparison with the pastoral needs of the immediate situation. Such … Read more
Now more than ever, there are calls for a more pastoral Church. That’s a good thing. It’s the clergy’s job to be our pastors, and who could object to priests, bishops, and popes doing their job? “Pastor“ means shepherd, so we find what pastors should do by looking at what shepherds do, especially in the … Read more