The exercise combines elements of a rite of passage with characteristics of an endurance contest, pitting attendees against overheated (or overcooled) auditoriums, crowded lobbies, middle-aged men who don’t use Flomax, and small doorways unable to accommodate large crowds.

Also today, Santiago Ramos argues that appealing to Kant will not settle our arguments about sex:

This diversity is the reason why Kant’s pure reason would seem attractive for a situation like ours. But practically speaking, the Kantian approach will yield abstract moral injunctions that can be endlessly refined but don’t give us an adequate way “into” them, a way to appropriate them for our lives.

The sexual revolution promise that women could “have it all” has always been oddly paradoxical: It encouraged women to find their best selves by aping men and conforming to traditionally male valuations of worth and relevance.

Larry Poland, Abraham Cooper, and Yitzchok Adlerstein voice concerns about the portrayal of Jews in the TV series The Bible:

Even if the role of Caiaphas and company must remain prominent to be true to the Gospels, how they were presented in this series remains disturbing to many Jews. Simply put, they are the most “Jewish” Jews of the series. Everyone else looks like imports from Texas.

The modern era dreams of an end of politics. In its classic form this involves an apocalyptic act of revolutionary will. The French Revolution was colored by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s vision of perfect democracy, the fusion of the free individual with the general will.

Also today, from our June/July issue, Brian Doyle on being confirmed:

All I could see of His Excellency was the far east and west edges of his purple robes. You never saw anything so purple in your life, and the cloth was some shimmering fabric that reflected light in remarkable ways, so that staring directly at even the edges of the rippling brilliance of his robes was mesmerizing, which is probably the whole point, robewise, when you think about it.

Women of less means than Jolie are collectively throwing up our hands. How can we, the working poor, afford weeks of preventative therapy, surgery, and breast reconstruction to prevent breast cancer? Will our insurance cover this? Can cancer-free breasts be saved, or are they eventually bound to kill us?

Also today, Wesley J. Smith on euphemistic language in political debates:

The assisted suicide movement certainly isn’t alone in deploying euphemisms as a political tactic. We all have examples we can name. The “right to an abortion,” rarely used, would be accurate. The ubiquitous “right to choose” and that sound bite of all sound bites, “choice,” are inaccurate because their intent is to hide the subject of the decision.

In the March issue we published “Homosexual Marriage, Parenting, and Adoption,” written by Gilles Bernheim, Chief Rabbi of France. Or so we thought. It turns out that Rabbi Bernheim plagiarized some portions.

Also today, Pete Spiliakos on Kermit Gosnell and the American media:

The current conservative broadcast media is not the answer—or at least not the answer to this particular problem. They inform the maybe one-third of the public that regularly consumes right-leaning media. Much of the time the conservative media put a conservative audience–friendly spin on stories that the mainstream media already cover.

Surveillance adds the dimension of unsettling intentionality to the vulnerability to technology most people already feel. The problem is not only this power granted little by little to a system of connectivity that increasingly draws us into itself but also what it, as a metaphor for God, begins to do to the contemporary imagination.

Also today from the same issue, Carl R. Trueman laments the loss of tragedy:

Christian worship should immerse people in the reality of the tragedy of the human fall and of all subsequent human life. It should provide us with a language that allows us to praise the God of resurrection while lamenting the suffering and agony that is our lot in a world alienated from its creator.

If Kierkegaard’s Christianity creates dilemmas for the secular, it has proven equally vexing for his fellow believers. Kierkegaard was scandalized by the state of Christianity in his day, especially as expressed by the official Lutheran Church of Denmark.

Also today, Mark D. Tooley on Christian leaders and immigration reform:

These church leaders who are prioritizing their churches’ teaching about marriage ought to be commended. Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission laudably said he would not support legislation with the same-sex recognition.

Traditionally, marriage and family in turn opened out to the community. As Wendell Berry says, “Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community.” Even today, married couples “say their vows to the community as much as to one another.”

I cannot tell you what we talked about; I don’t remember much of it really. Mostly, I spent time simply looking at him, wonderingly. Where did this man come from? When did I first meet him? When did this man become the man he is, and why did I not know it before now?

Also today, Wesley Hill remembers reading Dallas Willard:

What we need, Willard argues, is to hear the Sermon on the Mount afresh, not as mere “law,” aimed only at reforming our behavior, but as instruction on how our hearts may be renewed. Jesus, Willard says, “does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love.”

He was a major figure in forcing human rights issues onto the U.S. foreign policy agenda, made an invaluable contribution to the moral delegitimation of the Soviet Union as ambassador for Presidents Carter and Reagan to the Madrid Review Conference on the Helsinki Accords in the early 1980s, and then worked himself into a heart attack negotiating a nuclear arms reduction pact with the USSR.

Also today, from our May issue, David Bentley Hart analyzes the problems with natural law:

Even if final causality in nature is demonstrable, does it yield moral knowledge if there is no clear moral analogy between natural ends and the proper objects of human motive? After all, our modern narrative of nature is of an order shaped by immense ages of monstrous violence.