Morality

Oscar Wilde: “Gay” Icon or “Homophobe”?

It is time to whisper the truth that dare not speak its name. In short, it’s time to face the real facts about Oscar Wilde and his real views on homosexuality... It was with a queer...

Can Morality & Religion Lead to Happiness?

The problem with the notion that one should do good because doing good leads to happiness is that, well, what if it doesn’t? Throughout human history, the greatest thinkers and theologians have each proposed a state of...

What Does God Think of Tattoos?

If it is undignified to execute someone, whatever the crime may be, as some would now propose, is it unworthy to turn the human body into a human billboard? And if the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, are such decorations embellishments or defacements?

Conscience in Montaigne’s “Essays” & Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”

Despite the number of times the witches repeat “Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” Macbeth testifies to the objectivity of natural law and universal knowledge of good and evil known to conscience and written on the heart and mind of all persons...

Black & White, But Gray All Over: Two Films by Graham Greene

Graham Greene’s morality tales are complex, subtle, and intricate. They horrify us not only in the puzzle of solving the crime, but in the more profound puzzle of good and evil, death and damnation, life and love, sin and salvation...

When Feelings Became Facts: Rousseau, Burke, & Today’s Outrage Culture

Edmund Burke understood that the individual’s own natural reasoning would never be as deep or profound as the wisdom of our ancestors, bequeathed to us through tradition and custom. He believed that looking inwards, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau advocated, would precipitate our demise...

Gambling and the American Mind

More and more Americans, all of them convinced that their side is losing, try to rig the game in their favor. No longer willing to play fair, they want only to win... Born on October 4, 1809 and orphaned...

What Is a Progressive?

For many ethical progressives, there is an absence of active malice. They are most likely to see their own condescension as a kind of empathy for the less fortunate. Their goal is to help the poor and working classes escape the forces that progressives see as oppressing...

When Will the Shooting Stop?

The gun control debate has reignited with the recent Florida shooting. Despite the passionate commentaries on all sides, no one seems to be able to answer the question of when the shootings will stop. As much as...

How Evolution Means the Death of the Soul

The premise that the soul does not exist has practical consequences in society. If there is no soul, then there is no final destination where evil is punished and good rewarded forever. Morality itself becomes irrelevant... Evolutionists...

Jane Austen’s Morality of Marriage

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...

War and Leadership

Winston Churchill, who is the subject of Martin Gilbert's work, comes out of it all a towering public figure—an inspiring wartime leader who never lost his confidence in the darkest hours of the war, a man of enormous vitality and energy, unsparing of himself, but who never...

How America Became the “Pressure-Cooker” Nation

The left is politicizing our calming safety-valve institutions—the national anthem, marriage, statues, even leisure—damning them as expressions of an oppressive regime that must be overthrown. But these institutions need to be defended in order to relieve the pressures that are mounting and tearing society apart...

The Moral Imagination of “Leave It to Beaver”

Leave It to Beaver was very much a medieval morality play, in which the character of the Beaver repeatedly succumbed to temptation, suffered the consequences, and was guided back on the path of virtue... Russell Kirk defined...