John Adams wondered why men cannot live together “naturally” at peace, with the justice of their relations emerging immediately from the operation of reason in each individual. As elaborated thus far, natural law teaches that legitimate government is circumscribed by liberty in a dual sense: It derives from the consent of equally free individuals, and [...]
The West shall shake the East awake While ye have the night for morn. — James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake 企者不立；跨者不行； 自見者不明；自是者不彰； 自伐者無功；自矜者不長。 其在道也，曰：餘食贅行。 物或惡之，故有道者不處。 — Lao Tzu, Tao te Ching, Chapter 24 […]
Our cultural unwritten constitution has been damaged by decades of conflict and abuse. It will not be restored through adoption of one or even several reforms. Nor will our operational constitution be “fixed” through even fundamental changes in formal law. Lacking an appropriate constitutional morality, those who govern will continue to do so through quasi-law, [...]
Undoubtedly trying to shock many of his readers—most of whom understandably associated him with radicalism in poetry and the Bloomsbury group in London—T.S. Eliot exclaimed rather baldly in the late 1920s, “I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.” […]
Philip Zimbardo, a former president of the American Psychological Association, observed that the American soldiers who committed atrocities at the Abu Ghraib prison were not inherently evil: “The line between good and evil is permeable. Any of us can move across it… I argue that we all have the capacity for love and evil—to be [...]
The new Ben-Hur is a terrific movie. It is exciting, suspenseful, filled with clashes of spirit, interest, and personality, and offers a story of brotherly love, conflict, revenge, and redemption. Religious faith and the spirit of forgiveness are at its core, though not front and center. It is precisely the kind of movie people in [...]
I was greatly heartened to read Paul Gottfried’s excellent essay in The Imaginative Conservative in which he lambasts so-called “conservatives” for their abandonment of all that has always been meant by conservatism. Why he wonders is “nation-building abroad,” which is nothing but a clumsy euphemism for imperialism, a “conservative” value? And why is the sacrifice [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Fr. James Schall as he contemplates the similarities between the death of Plato and the death of one of Plato’s more recent scholars, Eric Voegelin. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher But there is another sort of old age too: the tranquil and [...]
Look: No one ever promised for sure that we would sing. We have decided to moan. In a strange dance that we don’t understand till we do it, we have to carry on. […]
It’s quite easy to forgive those who experience an attack of nausea upon hearing the phrase “Catholic Social Thinking.” In light of the misuse from which that phrase has suffered over the past half-century alternative responses are all too likely to indicate either that a person has not been paying attention or is lacking in [...]
Once I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a large book sitting on a table. Its cover was a detail photograph of a roof corner. I was caught immediately, like love at first sight. A detail of a roof was all it took to make me a life-long fan of Antoni Gaudí i Cornet, the [...]
One of the biggest mistakes that we can make is to believe that holy matrimony has anything whatsoever to do with a secular understanding of “marriage.” Apart from the fact that the increasingly meaningless “marriage” label is affixed to both things, they could not be more different. […]
You might wonder where this phrase comes from—the law of the jungle—which we take to mean lawlessness, spelled out in a fine turn of phrase. Rudyard Kipling thought otherwise; in fact, he makes quite a lot in a book for kids about something serious. Jungle is another name for forest. It is the world in [...]
Prediction: If Hillary Clinton wins, within a year of her inauguration, she will be under investigation by a special prosecutor on charges of political corruption, thereby continuing a family tradition. For consider what the Associated Press reported this week: The surest way for a person with private interests to get a meeting with Secretary of State Clinton, [...]