November is a month for counting our blessings. When I want to appreciate how fortunate I have been in my life, I sometimes play a little game. I go to a mainstream media site such as the Huffington Post, and imagine what my life might have been like if I had been raised by people … Read more
The recent 2013 Virginia off-year gubernatorial election quite understandably attracted considerable national attention. As a northern Virginia resident since 1982, I have followed, and have often been locally involved in, a number of these Virginia elections, including this one. A few observations on it from the standpoint of a grass-roots worker may add a perspective … Read more
It was sixty years ago that the Hungarian émigré historian, John Lukacs, published his first book, The Great Powers and Eastern Europe, a masterful treatment of the subject, whose conclusion, including an elegy on the lost world he left behind, has haunted me for years. Surveying the wreckage of that shattered and divided world, he … Read more
A man dressed as a woman entered a women’s locker-room at a college in Washington State. This locker-room at Evergreen State College is used not just by co-eds but also by little girls who use the college for programs. In a subsequent police report the transvestite was accused of “sitting with her legs open with … Read more
Conservatism at bottom is resistance to the technocratic project, the modern attempt to turn the social world into a sort of universal machine for the maximum satisfaction of preferences. That project has been growing up for a long time. It comes out of an understanding of knowledge and the world with its roots in the … Read more
Casting broad generalizations about the state of American Catholicism is a hazardous business. Yet from where I sit in the pew, pulpits are experiencing the phenomena of Sherlock Holmes’ hound that doesn’t bark. More specifically, I am getting a sinking feeling that in this age of ideological political partisanship, bishops and priests are succumbing to … Read more
“Common Core is a state-led initiative.” This sentence is among the most repeated pitch lines of those selling Common Core. It is an effective sales pitch, but is it true? The answer lies in the maze of money and regulation tying federal and state departments of education together. Let’s start with the money. The money … Read more
The Catholic Church’s social teaching is erected on the belief in the basic dignity of the human person. The Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church is replete with references to human dignity with regard to social, political, and economic life. The encyclical Pacem in Terris by Pope John XXIII provided a catalog of … Read more
In the UK there is a ban on all prisoners from voting in elections. This applies to all prisoners who have been convicted, i.e. are not on remand awaiting trial or detained without conviction in psychiatric hospitals. The ban includes European, Parliamentary or local elections and any referendums that might be held, such as on … Read more
In October, 1919, a heavily “progressive” Congress passed the Volstead Act enforcing the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting, for almost all purposes, the production, sale, and distribution of alcoholic beverages. There are two things everybody has learned from Prohibition. First, it is wrong to try to legislate morality. Second, you cannot do it, for Prohibition failed. But … Read more
[A political party is] a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavours, the national interest, upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed. —Edmund Burke All too many people in the mainstream press, and even among the Republican Party faithful, have been expressing extreme relief that Republican Party leaders “compromised” … Read more
Sex and the institutions, customs, and restraints related to it are basic to social order. That claim shouldn’t be controversial, and it’s odd that it has become so. Older political philosophers such as Aristotle, who viewed man as naturally social, found it self-evident to start their analysis of society with the union of man and … Read more
For decades, now, the universe of constitutional interpretation has been divided into “textualists,” who argue that the document must be read according to the reasonable meaning of its words, and those who argue for a “living” constitution, the meaning of which can “grow” over time to “meet the needs of a changing people and nation.” … Read more
The government has tremendous power to obtain information about the citizenry. The latter, however, often has difficulty obtaining information about government activity. This “information asymmetry” threatens the continued exercise of religious freedom. To address this problem, religious freedom advocates must diagnose the source of this asymmetry and take concerted action to counteract it. Examples abound … Read more
A nasty Norwegian diplomat at the UN frequently badmouths the Holy See. He wonders why Holy See diplomats are allowed into the room during negotiations. He says outright that the Holy See ought to leave. This has happened more than once. It’s amusing a Norwegian would say such a thing. The development of Norway is … Read more
After six years and hundreds of celebratory confections, it wasn’t the economy, the stiff competition, financing, or any of the other usual road bumps of building a new business that caused Sweet Cakes by Melissa—a husband-and-wife bakery in Portland, Oregon area—to close its doors at the end of the summer. Instead, it was the nationwide … Read more
Recently, as readers of Crisis may have heard, our administration at Providence College retracted an invitation to a Professor John Corvino, who afterwards said in disgruntlement that he’d been looking forward to speaking at a Catholic college like ours, to persuade young people that the homosexual life was good for the individual and for the … Read more
To follow the news today is to get the impression that public life, in the sense of rational discussion oriented toward some reasonable understanding of the common good, has come to an end. Everyone notices the partisanship, the bad faith, the indifference to truth, and the substitution of entertainment for hard news. Catholics in particular … Read more
Law is inevitably informed by morality, but it is not the same thing as morality. When we forget this, when we insist that what is wrong must be unlawful, or that it must be lawful to punish every wrong, we undermine the rule of law. Robert Bolt teaches this lesson memorably in A Man for … Read more
Last week’s marathon speech-fest (it wasn’t really a filibuster) from Senator Ted Cruz probably won’t do much to change the dynamic of politics in Washington or to stop Obamacare from becoming the last brick in the wall of social democracy separating Americans from their traditions of self-reliance and local community control. But, to someone interested … Read more