Current anti-sex-discrimination law is ultimately sexually homogenizing. For if we can disable the male biology of the “female” swimmer so that “she” can swim more slowly—like a girl—why not “cure” the biological “disability” of the female employee, so that she can be more able to work, like men, by outsourcing pregnancy itself... or just eliminating [...]
The founding of nations always involves a willful forgetting and subsequent divinization of the founding fathers. The Scriptures are an acid that dissolves every attempt to produce an untainted origin story, and so a new nation. Throughout his City of God, Augustine accuses the Romans of willfully forgetting their origins. The philosopher Varro, Augustine says, [...]
So, is Christianity nationalist? The Church clearly thinks the nation is essential and worthy of defense, but what is it? To answer this, we must explore the historical genesis of the modern “nation” itself. John Paul II asserted with confidence that the two natural societies recognized by the Church’s social teaching are the family and [...]
At its highest, love is not a spontaneous feeling. There is nothing spontaneous about an egalitarian community of comrades—it requires hard work and full commitment. There is nothing spontaneous even about sexual love, which is only ever satisfied by the proof that it is, at bottom, a free and deliberate choice: even among non-religious people, [...]
The truth of Pope Innocent III’s world is naturally dependent on a move out of nature and into faith. The political was a fundamental aspect of the pastoral. The movement of ascent to God passed always through the carnal, through the law, and on to liberty through grace. We are trapped within the historical, but [...]
The fundamental principle of Christian politics is that all power ought to be used for the common good. As Pope St. John XXIII put it, the realization of the common good is the “sole reason for the existence of civil authorities.” But what is the common good? The political right is in a state of [...]
The Catechism praises almsgiving as, “Money or goods given to the poor as an act of penance or fraternal charity.” It may sound like a humdrum practice, but almsgiving would have been unthinkable, strange, to the ancient, pagan world. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, it was no virtue to give to the poor. In [...]
Yes, we must fight and struggle for the ideal, but in the end the ultimate answers lie in God’s atonement and love for us, and in our love and forgiveness for others who are just as implicated as we are. Wendell Berry is a bearer of that message in his books. I have a great [...]
Russell Kirk is best described as a cheerful malcontent: ever aware that we are peering over the brink into a gulf of dissolution, yet filled with wonder and gratitude at the fact that "you and I are moral beings meant to accomplish something good, in a small way or a big, in this temporal world." [...]
The “anonymous societies”—the corporations—can never deliver what they promise; they can never bring us limited government, free markets, or private property. But most especially, they cannot overcome the division between capital and labor; that can come only by sharing in ownership, and by identifying property with responsibility. The directors of such [joint stock] companies, however, [...]
As I read Matthew Crawford's "Why We Drive," I was struck by the book, not so much as an ode to awesome driving— which it is—but as a long observation of two modes of being in the world, two political stances that I have increasingly come to identify as Liberalism and Catholicism. Why We Drive: [...]
Morality only “progresses” as a phenomenon of gift, in which what is good and worth doing is seen as good and worth doing by a subsequent generation, which takes on the morality of their fathers and repeats it, as their own morality. But this means that progress in morality is never assured. It may not [...]
From its birth, the Church worked to overthrow tyrannies and establish societies of justice. But it did this in a manner unlike any other revolutionary movement. Christianity has always redeemed politics by surpassing it, fulfilling it beyond itself. It defeats violence through peace and not with more powerful violence. My mother always told me that [...]
By an act of almsgiving, we remedy an unjust distribution of the gift of the whole earth; we remedy, for our neighbor, what disobedience to God’s plan has wrought. Almsgiving is fitting for the forgiveness of sin because it uses money, the very tool enabling unjust distribution, for the sake of just distribution. Usually I [...]