The dominant secular culture portrays the world of In vitro fertilization (IVF) and surrogate pregnancies as a great advance for mankind, even as it generates a stream of horror stories beyond the imagination of Greek tragedians. Not a week passes, it seems, without a new disturbing permutation to this culture. “Surrogate offered $10,000 to abort … Read more
Even the most steadfast egalitarian institution betrays itself in practice. Can anyone deny the vicious and habituated struggle made by the public schools to achieve the social utopian schemes of a darkened age? The grandfather of public education, John Dewey, had a great hand in effectively purging the Great Western Tradition, human nature and the … Read more
Ireland is on the verge of making abortion legal in some circumstances and the fault can be laid directly on the doorstep of a tiny handful of misguided pro-lifers ten years ago. Ireland is vitally important to the international pro-life movement. Ireland remains one of the few nations in the world where abortion is illegal. … Read more
While perusing a secular newspaper this morning, my eyes fell upon an opinion piece entitled, “Who will teach our boys to become men?” The author bemoaned the plague of gun violence among boys, but he did not suggest a way in which this type of violence could be mitigated. This is not surprising for a … Read more
Suicide and the legalization of physician assisted suicide seem to appear in headlines more and more. Elected officials such as Peter Shumlin, governor of Vermont, increasingly favor legalization of physician assisted suicide as “the right thing to do” with promises that “we are going to get it done.” Mainstream media addresses suicide positively. Consider the … Read more
These must be trying times for Garry Wills. In 2001, he wrote a book blasting the papacy, Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit. But ordinary Catholics did not take up Wills’ call to turn St. Peter’s into a Congregationalist meeting house. Instead, when John Paul II died in 2005, some 5,000,000 people came to Rome to … Read more
The Body of Christ is in critical condition. The “two lungs” of the Church—the East and West, the Orthodox and Catholics—have largely failed to draw breath together since the Great Schism in 1054. Similar to an autoimmune disease, one body has fought itself. It is time, as Blessed John Paul II states in his encyclical, … Read more
Aristotle, that common sense fellow, defined justice as giving to each his due. That definition admits of equality in inequality, in obvious ways. The indulgence we allow a child we deny to a grown man; the familiarity with which we treat the paperboy might offend the elderly woman in church. Each person is equally deserving … Read more
How should a conservative interact with popular culture? We live in a time when popular music mocks religion, prime time television depicts homosexual relations and multi-generational groupings as “the new normal,” films depict literal orgies of gory sadism, and all promote narcissistic nihilism with a snarky self-confidence expressed in gutter language. How should we respond … Read more
“Our Town is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante’s Purgatory). It is an attempt to find a value above all price for the smallest events in our daily life.” So wrote … Read more
Sex is too central to human life to avoid as an issue or to stand outside and describe objectively, and it touches us too closely for people to discuss calmly. Those qualities make it an ideal issue to settle through authoritative traditions. Functional societies do so and life goes on. If such traditions are lacking, … Read more
Often today, we hear of Christians and other religious people engaged in struggles in the U.S. just to be able to project expressions of their faith into the public domain. Thus, for years now we have witnessed secularists of various stripes—those with a particular animosity toward anything religious—conduct a veritable assault on Christmas. The reports … Read more
Are you worried about massive immigration both legal and illegal coming from south of the border? The problem might be taken care of all on its own. So says Weekly Standard writer Jonathan Last in his very good new book on population and demography. Last tells a story that would interest any New Yorker who … Read more
Now that the military has finally surrendered in the face of relentless feminist pressure to allow women into combat, one might as well chalk up yet another battle in the culture wars won by the progressive Left. The rather cynically amusing thing about it is the tone of the articles in the mainstream media that … Read more
If you’ve been with us for the first two parts here and here, you’ll recall the three waves of attack against the family—(1) the assertion that marriage enslaves, (2) that children are a burden, and (3) that sexual difference is a fiction. How to respond? I’d like to conclude our short history by reflecting not … Read more
The second wave also accepted the Marxist premise that justice demands strict material equality. Next, the wagging finger turned from men to children. If women wish to have sex with men (so the thinking went), they should not be punished with unwanted offspring. For the most part, artificial contraception was seen as the first ring … Read more
The progressive cultural elite has long perpetuated prejudices against the family that, unchallenged, lead to its ruin. Among several I cite three: (1) the assertion that marriage makes men and women less free; (2) the assumption that children are a burden; and (3) the insistence that sexual differentiation is a fiction. These three ideas represent, … Read more
A most remarkable scene unfolds in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s great drama, Faust, in which Dr. Faustus labors to translate the opening sentence of St. John’s Gospel. It is important to note that at this juncture of the play the translator’s mind is in a state of confusion. Faust has rejected the true meaning of the … Read more
This year marks an auspicious anniversary—forty years of nation-wide abortion on demand since Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. These cases declared a right to abortion that was more permissive than the law of any state. A woman could take the life of her unborn child for virtually any reason at any time. The … Read more
Connecting with people you’d like to have known is a nice hobby, and I can claim to be just three handshakes from Abraham Lincoln and, remarkably, only five documented handshakes from George Washington, which is rare since as president he preferred to bow. Recently at the opera during an intermission of “Turandot,” I put several … Read more
