In the cases of Officers Derek Chauvin and Garrett Rolfe, politicians, the media, and Black Lives Matter would not allow any charge that did not include the word “murder.” If the two were not police officers, no prosecutor would have charged them with anything but manslaughter. Have they thus been denied the equal protection of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Despite all the unfounded fear on the left and all the equally unfounded euphoria on the right, there will be no wholesale revamping by the Supreme Court of the liberal social order that is now deeply rooted in our culture and among our people. The conservative justices' ethos of evolution over revolution will forestall any [...]
Even before the spectacle of Christine Balsey Ford's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the hearing for President Trump’s nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, was characterized not by political acumen, wit, cunning, or prudence, but by partisan obstruction, lawlessness, tantrums, hysteria, ignorance, frenzy, and anger. Protestors screamed vulgarities and trite slogans, proving [...]
A recent essay proposes Aristotle to have “opened a path” to today’s radical individualism and relativism. In order to evaluate this thesis, we must turn to the Great Tradition of the “perennial philosophy” and ask what the great philosophers taught about virtue, justice, friendship, and the nature of man… There is a story about [...]
Is it not refined cruelty to keep alive, in self-loathing, a man who is a grave danger to the innocent and a grisly horror to himself? And to do such a thing in countries long admired for the justice of their laws?… To perceive truth, we require images. As G.K. Chesterton put it, all [...]