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… Genesis tells us that man was created “male and female.” The [...]
“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 famous and recognizable in Western literature. That beginning stanza captures so much of the human condition and [...]
How shall the widow’s horror be represented? It gave her the ghastliness of a dead man’s bride. Her youthful friends stood apart, shuddering at the mourners, the shrouded bridegroom, and herself; the whole scene expressed, by the strongest imagery, the vain struggle of the gilded vanities of this world, when opposed to age, infirmity, sorrow, [...]
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… Readers of Jane Austen’s novels recognize the plot that informs [...]
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 lurk many more monsters to slay and unspeakable [...]
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 the Supreme Court’s sexual “right of privacy” cases, which [...]
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 and universal truths that represent a Perennial Philosophy, that is, the sum of the world’s accumulated wisdom over [...]
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 they need to do this before the shock [...]
Judges and politicians constantly talk of the importance of respecting precedent. But It is not unusual for the Supreme Court to overturn its own precedents. What does legal history say about the importance of precedent in modern jurisprudence? Responding to President Donald Trump’s nomination of federal appeals-court Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, Maine [...]
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? In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway portrays the character of Frederic Henry as a [...]
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 [...]
A genuinely ordered marriage is predicated on producing something more beautiful than the mere sum of its two parts, in the form of a third and synthesizing part: a child. Indeed, what they produce together is something new, something worthwhile, something beautiful. After all, two chords played separately are still not as beautiful as two [...]
Conservatism is in many ways a philosophy of belonging. It appeals to the nation as a communal home, a vessel for culture, language, custom, tradition and all the vestiges of identity garnered from generations of shared history. Recent discussions about conservatism have wondered how it can appeal to young people. These discussions necessarily emphasize the [...]
For Jane Austen, happiness in general is the goal of human action done according to morality, a code of conduct according to which every person has value; and happiness in marriage is the result of each spouse valuing and pursuing the other’s happiness above all else… In our time, according to one of several divergent [...]