Marriage

The State vs. the Normal Good of Normal People

What happens when our nation’s fundamental principles or standards are rejected? Jennifer Roback Morse’s new book, The Sexual State, is a lively and forceful examination of where we came from, where we are now, and where we ought to be on matters of human life...

Love, Ancient and Modern

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.” The opening words to Homer’s Odyssey are among the most...

“The Wedding Knell”

The whole scene expressed the vain struggle of the gilded vanities of this world, when opposed to age, infirmity, sorrow, and death... There is a certain church in the city of New York which I have always...

Proper Matches, Romantic Elopements, & True Love in Jane Austen’s Novels

Jane Austen’s heroines live, choose, and marry according to the highest wisdom about love that is ruled by principle, not convention—by the prudent mind, pure heart, and informed conscience rather than by the false prudence of the world preoccupied by money, image, lust, or self-interest...

Falling in Like: An Alzheimer Odyssey

I sometimes yearn nostalgically for that old fire in her eyes. More twists and turns await my wife and me on this strange voyage to the very ends of sanity and the edges of madness. I know—but hope she does not know—that, as in many adventures, there...

The Right to Create Your Own Universe?

The Supreme Court apotheosized the right of privacy in its now-famous words: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life"... Editor’s Note: This essay continues a discussion of...

Chaucer & the Heresy of Courtly Love

Chaucer’s satire on innovative theories of marriage and the heresy of courtly love validates the wisdom of the Church’s teaching on hierarchy, fidelity, and indissolubility... The great books or classics of Western civilization reflect the enduring ideals...

How T.S. Eliot Predicted the Coming of Male Millennials

T.S. Eliot’s poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," shows that men do not need more pleasurable escapes or more time, but loving friends and an introduction to reality. They need to listen to human voices instead of the illusive mermaids out in the ocean. And...

“Radical Marriage” & the Modern Heresies of Love

In Natalie Fenollera Sanmartin’s bestseller The Awakening of Miss Prim, Miss Prudencia Prim has accepted a position as a gentleman’s personal librarian in the small village of San Ireneo. In the course of the several months she...

Does the Supreme Court Really Respect Precedent?

Would the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh have a profound impact on the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court? In other words, would his addition to the Court eventually have a broad and historic impact equal to that of Justice...

Sacred Truths in a Profane World

One after another, the sacred spaces that our customs have protected are invaded and spoiled. That which has been assumed to be unquestionable, indeed protected from the questions that might profane it, is for that very reason subjected to question...

On Being Conservative

To be a conservative is first and foremost to defend or to conserve something good: to protect family, neighborhood, local community, and region... Louis de Bonald Of the many attempts to define conservatism in recent decades,...

Hedonism in Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms”

What was Ernest Hemingway illustrating about the emptiness of the generation in which he lived when he wrote A Farewell to Arms in 1929? If we unthinkingly pursue pleasure and live for nothing except ourselves, what are we left with?...

Why Not Wife-Swapping?

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...