The police body-camera video confirms what the autopsy reports show: Derek Chauvin and his fellow 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. Along with the tens of billions 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 man [...]
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 an [...]
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 judge [...]
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, Chaucer, [...]
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 rage. There [...]
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 him, [...]
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 H.L. [...]
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 life [...]
In December, the Supreme Court decided not to hear a case that proposed to extend the Court’s sexual freedom cases to wife-swapping. In Coker v. Whittington, two sheriff’s deputies in Bossier Parish, Louisiana, and their wives agreed to swap spouses, and each deputy began living with the opposite deputy’s wife. Invoking his office’s code of [...]
Why should the sins of the guilty cause suffering to the guiltless? If God could prevent such suffering of the innocent victims of sin but refrains from doing so, isn’t he also to blame? Isn’t he in some way an accessory to the sin? In other words, how can a good God permit bad things [...]