Among American conservatives it seems to be common knowledge now that marriage is on the rocks. According to the Pew Research Center, just over half of American adults 18 and older are now married. This is a record low, and most indicators suggest that marriage is continuing to decline. In many demographics, co-habitation and illegitimacy … Read more
So-called same-sex marriage is not yet the law of the land, although in its U.S. v. Windsor case handed down on June 26, 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court nevertheless recognized it as truly a marriage in those jurisdictions where it has been legalized by some official action. How the high court could ever have legalized … Read more
What kind of madness has gripped the educational establishment? For decades, colleges and universities have churned out educrats trained in brown shirt tactics to rid the public schools of stories that have formed, inspired, and entertained students of all ages from time immemorial. These educational “experts” are hell-bent on destroying stories that cultivate our appreciation … Read more
America is a pro-marriage country. After debating the value of matrimony for several decades, Americans have come down firmly in favor of tying the knot. Cue the wedding bells. Some readers may be scratching their heads at this point. That is understandable. No reasonable person could claim that the institution of marriage is healthy in … Read more
There are some people—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for … Read more
Conservationists understand the culling of a population is sometimes necessary, particularly when the habitat can no longer sustain the species. Nature steps in, sometimes man, and helps the species by killing some of its members. And even if local populations sometimes need culling, biologists measure the success of a species by its growth and argue … Read more
Renowned historian, James Hitchcock, has long been recognized for his books and essays on U.S. politics, Roman Catholic intellectual life, and the controversial reforms of the Church’s sacred liturgy. A man of deep faith, he belongs to the great tradition of other Catholic historians such as Lord Acton and Hilaire Belloc; but unlike these predecessors, … Read more
Readers should need no introduction to The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha. Infected with a madness focused on the bygone era of knight errantry, Don Quixote leaves home to enact a new golden age of chivalry. As Don Quixote says to his loyal squire: “Friend Sancho, I would have you know that I … Read more
It is a small detail, but a revealing one, as the small details tend to be. Michael Novak in the final chapter of his personable memoir tells the story of his first meeting with John Paul II. Friends of Novak know that Wojtyła counted him as his friend too. But somewhat surprisingly they did not … Read more
The scene is from C. S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. The callow young sociology professor, Mark Studdock, an atheist and a social climber, has been detained in a cubicle deliberately fashioned with odd annoying angles and not-quite-right pictures on the wall. His detainers aim to break down in him any last sense of the inner … Read more
For a generation, some Catholics in America believed that the Gospel injunction to help the poor meant to help them through government. Joined to that was a distaste for the WASP-dominated business culture of postwar American prosperity, even though Catholics had enjoyed the fruits of that prosperity along with other Americans. The long tradition of … Read more
Football is a deeply offensive sport. It is violent and triumphalist, and teaches young children that however nicely they play the game, winning still matters. More terrible still, a football team is a roiling cauldron of unvarnished masculinity. Hardly anyone even pretends to want women on the field. Football is an affront to everything progressives … Read more
Miley Cyrus’s gyrations on the Video Music Awards are hardly new. In fact, Miley is getting whupped by the black community for a white performer once more taking a cultural artifact from the black experience. Some have gone so far as to call Miley racist for taking on-stage twerking into the white mainstream. You probably … Read more
Natural selection triumphs: Jane Austen has displaced Charles Darwin … on the British ten-pound note. Last month on July 24th, the Bank of England announced that the image of Jane Austen would replace that of naturalist Charles Darwin on the British currency note. Without irony, the Bank remarked that the selection of the 19th century … Read more
If we are going to save our culture, it is important that Christians change their approach toward homosexuality. Fighting the GLBTQ (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) agenda in the legislatures and courts will not succeed as long as the GLBTQ activists define the debate. We must treat same-sex attraction and sexual identity disorders (the so-called … Read more
It would be a mistake to think that Post-Christianity is a return to paganism, purely and simply. Certainly its environs include numerous strains of paganism—New Ageism, eco-feminism, “new cosmology” mysticism, etc.; and one’s post-Christianity may be amalgamated with such strains. But the post-Christian denizen is marching to a different drummer. He may be unaware of … Read more
On June 19, the US District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan ruled in favor of a high school student named Daniel Glowacki, who had charged that his high school teacher, Jay McDowell, had violated his constitutional right to freedom of speech. He was granted one dollar in compensation. The court’s verdict, in vulgar … Read more
In a recent address, Archbishop Chaput articulated how much we depend on the residual religious capital of earlier times, but once the capital is spent, “we may not like the results, because the more we delete God from our public life and our private behavior, the more we remove the moral vocabulary that gives our … Read more
Arthur Cardinal Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster, was such a strong voice against the Axis that when he died in 1943, King George VI expressed frustration that protocol prevented his attendance at the Requiem. When King George V and Queen Mary had attended the Requiem for the exiled Empress Eugenie at the Benedictine abbey in Farnborough in 1920, a … Read more
For Catholic parents with intelligent high school children, this can be a trying time. A good many ostensibly Catholic universities have simply become indistinguishable from the mass of U.S. colleges. Take Georgetown, for example, which the New York Times gleefully reports has become a gay-friendly campus. During the month of “OUTober,” described by the Times … Read more