Other university presidents, provosts, and deans need to support and emulate President Morton Schapiro of Northwestern University. If they can find the courage to support somebody else standing up against the mob, they might find that they have the courage to stand up to their own mobs and discover that when there is no [...]
Far from creating peace, Edmund Burke contended, the French Revolution had generated the greatest despotism the world had yet seen, politicizing all things and enslaving the vast majority of the population. The Revolution itself was monstrous and had created only monstrous things. Of Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) four Letters on a Regicide Peace—his final work, [...]
The Marxists advocate Pride and don’t believe in loving their neighbors but in destroying their enemies. They insist that without justice, there will be no peace, but they forget that there will be no justice without love. Without love we have nothing but the systemic pride which rules the world with the spirit of [...]
A nation is a complex entity. Justice, one of its animating principles and the end of government, gives a nation direction and serves as the basis for all laws in its society. Thus, when a society no longer possesses a common view of justice it inevitably splits into faction. It often happens within societies [...]
The release of the police body-camera video confirms what the autopsy reports already showed: The officers had to subdue a large man resisting arrest, whose system was overwhelmed by the kind of drugs that routinely cause violence, and who died of a heart attack, not choking or strangulation. Officers Derek Chauvin and Garrett Rolfe [...]
At the end of the film, Farinelli’s smile meant peace. It was the peace of a man who loved, of a man who had accepted his fate, of a man who had a future, of a man who was no longer the judge and standard—despite having suffered unjustly. It was the peace of a [...]
America needs moral restoration. Without it, society just goes from bad to worse, chasing doomed utopian ideas like defunding the police, and redirecting funds to leftist groups that hate and subvert the traditional family. Trying to solve the problem of policing without moral regeneration and the rebuilding of our families, communities, and Church is [...]
In the "Oresteia," Aeschylus examines whether a city exists for proper worship of gods or whether it exists for proper cultivation of “that which is most divine in us.” Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join John Alvis, as he considers Aeschylus' views of the polity as embodied by [...]
This summer saw the resolutions of two high-profile civil lawsuits involving accusations of defamation and libel against two pillars of the media-academic complex. In the suit against hyper-liberal Oberlin College, Ohio state jurors rendered a judgment against their neighbor, the college. In the other case, a lawsuit against The Washington Post, the federal district-court [...]
Hope is not only conveyed through the images; hope rests in them. The promised visions shape a future that God will eventually make real: or, better, that he will make concrete in human time and space, for they were already real when God revealed them to me. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, [...]
Before legal codes were hammered into stone tablets, there were customs that enshrined a code of conduct for all warriors. And this code has always been founded on an unfathomable paradox: that those we kill we must also honor. It’s a familiar story. A soldier’s rage. In fairness, we might even call it righteous [...]
While the films “Longford” and “Dead Man Walking” are ostensibly about the death penalty, the real value of both films is their profound exploration of the depth of human evil. On June 7, 1998 a Texan, John William King, along with friends Shawn Berry and Lawrence Brewer, killed African American James Byrd. They beat [...]
Justice is that which breaks us out of the cycle of vengeance. It achieves a higher vision that considers motives (and not just actions), causes (and not just effects), purposes (and not just naked facts). The triumph of justice does not signify the total defeat of vengeance, but its transformation into something beneficent. Author’s Introduction: [...]
Is acceptance of the death penalty contrary to the modern understanding of the dignity of the human person? The anthropology of René Girard allows for a rereading of Thomas Aquinas’ defense of capital punishment... The Catholic Church’s recent definitive revocation of the death penalty[1] suggests that something in the zeitgeist demands a rethinking of one [...]