Graduation exercises are a lot of things, but mostly they are boring. I challenge anyone who has ever been to a graduation to say otherwise. Im only there for one person, but all these other people expect my attention as well.

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 dont use Flomax, and small doorways unable to accommodate large crowds.

There always seems to be an inordinate amount of time and little to occupy it. In the latest instance, seating began an hour ahead of the ceremonies (one never would say festivities"), which required getting to the doorway a half hour before the doors actually opened. I could barely keep my envious yearning for a cell phone data plan in check. It nearly became full-blown jealousy, watching all those other people contentedly fill their time browsing the internet, checking Facebook, and whatnot.

The speeches are pedestrian, when not verging on nonsensical-thats when you can remember that was said. Mercifully, most are unmemorable, so they hardly do any lasting damage.

Yeah, I know, wah, wah, wah. But I speak from some experience, what with me being a two-time graduation speaker.

The first time, I spoke at the eighth-grade class promotion at the Paul Robeson Elementary School in Detroit (nowadays its called an academy). I was the only white man in the building, which I took as a compliment. I still think someone who looked like the kids themselves might have been more fitting, but whos to say, and some of the kids did attend our parish. I was flattered to have been asked. I had fun and I do recall the kids laughing, mostly in all the right places. That was a good graduation experience, if I do say so myself.

The second time was at a high school. I dont remember saying a thing. I knew many of the seniors (my second son among them) and have stayed in touch with a couple. None of them remember what I said, and one of them doesnt even remember I was the speaker.

I dont regard that as unusual. What I recall best from my own high school graduation isnt the speaker, but the suffocating odor of English Leather cologne clogging my airways. It was a new aftershave then and most of us boys ODd on it.

My college graduation speaker was Jeno Paulucci; him I remember. A multi-millionaire food industry entrepreneur, he died in 2011, age ninety-three. He was once featured in an episode of Robin Leachs Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, but that was long after he spoke to us graduates so my college hardly bears any responsibility for it.

He was best known for Jenos Pizza Rolls (sold to Pillsbury for $135 million in 1985), and before that he founded Chun King, which by the 1960s accounted for half of all prepared Chinese food sales. Well, it was called Chinese food. I never have figured out how the son of Italian immigrants got into canned Chinese food but, then, Ive never heard of anyone-Italian or not-going poor underestimating American tastes. He sold Chun King to a division of a tobacco company in 1966, four years before speaking to us.

Memorably, he told my fellow graduates and me that money did not matter. Id guess he said a few other things as well, but thats what I vividly remember, and I am pretty sure most of us believed otherwise at the time. Few of us had jobs waiting.

I was lucky. Completely unrelated to my college major, I was off to be a newspaper reporter. Thats what happens, as Mark Twain put it, when you cant find honest work. For everybody else, though, the unemployment rate was creeping ever upward that year, eventually touching a little better than 6 percent, and employers were cautious. The economy lost more than two hundred thousand jobs the month we graduated.

So, here was this guy capable of buying the entire college, faculty and all, with hardly a burp in his net worth, telling us with seeming incongruence that money actually counts for little.

Of course he was right; I remember that too. What did count then were the familial bonds forged in love and pride. The people who came to see me graduate, all the people who came to see their family member graduate, all of us were bound together for a few brief moments of affirmation and communal recognition. I regard that as enduringly significant.

Did I say it was boring? Well, yeah, gosh yes it was boring. But it was family, right?

Russell E. Saltzman is dean of the Great Plains Mission District of the North American Lutheran Church, assistant pastor of St. Matthews Church in Riverside, Missouri, and an online homilist for the Christian Leadership Center at the University of Mary. His book Speaking of the Dead is nearing completion. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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Yet Witt, like me (and probably you), lives in a world where those conventional social structures and incentives that once promoted monogamy, early (or somewhat early) marriage, and stable families full of children are receding. Dwelling on her (and our) predicament, she writes:

The long debate over Witts piece has failed to address her original question: What do you desire? She desires love, as Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry notes, but she hasnt been able to find it. This is the idea" she would like to throw away: the idea that love is what she desires.

Instead, the debate has recast Witts original question into a series of formal-ethical questions: What is right and what is wrong? What is good and what is bad for civilization? What should a free society permit, and what should it censor? Predictably, this has ended in a Kantian blind alley. This trajectory is captured by the titles of Conor Friedersdorfs two contributions to the debate: The Ethics of Extreme Porn: Is Some Sex Wrong Even Among Consenting Adults?" and Sex, Morality, and Modernity: Can Immanuel Kant Unite Us?"

Both Gobry and Friedersdorf admire the Kantian injunction to treat human beings always as ends in themselves and never as a means to something else, and they both think that this injunction can perhaps offer our pluralistic society a common ground within which to determine what kinds of sex or porn should be outlawed. But-as many a college professor who has asked his undergrads to apply" ethical theories would have guessed-Gobry and Friedersdorf do not seem to agree as to what Kantian ethics would actually disallow.

We could find a way out of this impasse if we took Witts question seriously. She is not asking whether something is right or wrong. She is asking What do you desire?" The question is a probe, a tool for going deeper: What do we desire? Perhaps we all desire some things in common. Perhaps politics could build upon a consensus of desire. Perhaps some social pathologies can best be addressed through her question.

Ours is such a radically pluralistic society that we naturally search for something that we all hold in common. Friedersdorf is especially sensitive to this fact, and no doubt this diversity is one of the most interesting aspects of life in America. And this diversity is the reason why Kants 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 dont give us an adequate way into" them, a way to appropriate them for our lives.

Instead, we could approach the issues that Witt raises with this working hypothesis: that we all desire the same goods. This approach might yield more fruit than an attempt to create working rules for coexistence. Desire is a more humane way to enter into moral discourse; it is what motivates us to think about morality to begin with. Desire is often confused with impulsiveness (action without reason behind it), appetite (natural, animal" desire for food, sex, etc.), and the passions (the feelings associated with appetite).

But desire may also be eros. Desire is our fundamental longing for, and inclination toward, happiness and the good. Ask Socrates, for whom (at least in Platos Symposium) desire begins with wanting to possess beautiful bodies, and advances toward other beauties: science, art, law, and noble sacrifice for an ideal. The issue, for Socrates, is to make sure that our desire is led to its fulfillment, that it doesnt gorge on partial pleasures.

Friedersdorf considers different moral scenarios in his piece , so here is my stab at one: Joanna has just finished college, is unemployed, and decides to take up her gainfully employed, older boyfriends offer to move in with him. She loves him, but she also needs a place to stay (and she cant go back home, for whatever reason). Is she treating her boyfriend as a means to an end? Yes. Her motivations are, at best, mixed. According to the Kantian paradigm, she is wrong.

But if we spoke with Joanna from the vantage point of desire, we could learn more about the desires driving her decision: desires for community, for order, for work, for solidarity. With the details of her experience we would have more preliminary data to work with in a political discussion. It would be a richer discussion, anyway. And it is a discussion that would presuppose something which already brings us closer: a common grammar of desire.

The day I came across Witts piece I was reading Lydia Davis new translation of Madame Bovary, and when I returned to the novel later that evening, I came across this passage, describing the Madames longing: Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back." Witt-like me, and you-lives in a world where the conventions are no longer holding us back. But the desire remains, and it remains dissatisfied. We are in a semi-anarchic situation in which we are often left on our own, without resources, to answer, What do you desire?" There is a certain extent to which we all share in Witts predicament. With a qualification here or there, I can say that Emily Witt-cest moi.

But the anarchy is only temporary. New structures and norms are being forged. Some (Reno here, Houellebecq there) have tried to discern what the future holds. But whatever the new order ends up being, its justice and goodness will be measured by the question of What do you desire?" That is, if by desire" we mean eros, and if by asking the question, we mean asking for fulfillment, joy, and not a temporary anesthetic for our suffering. Witt should not give up her idea"-her desire for love. But the rest of us should give up on Kant.

Santiago Ramos is pursuing doctoral studies in philosophy at Boston College.

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Shaws answer: Were in deep trouble because of a longstanding U.S. Catholic determination to be more American than thou-to disprove ancient charges of Catholicisms incompatibility with American democracy by assimilating so dramatically that theres no discernible difference between Catholics (and their attitudes toward public policy) and an increasingly secularized, mainstream public opinion.

Shaw mounts an impressive case that Catholic Lite in these United States has indeed taken its cues from the wider culture, and as that culture has become ever more individualistic and hedonistic, the historic U.S. Catholic passion for assimilation and acceptance has backfired. Moreover, Shaws call to build a culture-reforming Catholic counterculture is not dissimilar to the argument I make about the Church and public life in Evangelical Catholicism: Deep Reform in the 21st-Century Church . 

But on a second reading of Shaws book, I began to wonder whether hes gotten the question of the moment quite right.

To read the history of the Catholic Church in the United States as a centuries-long struggle for assimilation and acceptance certainly sheds light on one dynamic in the development of the Church in America. Yet too close a focus on the question, Is it possible to be a good Catholic and a good American?" is to argue the question of Catholicism and America on the other guys turf. Once, the other guy" challenging Catholics patriotic credentials was militant Protestantism; now, the other guy is militant secularism. To play on the other guys turf, however, is to concede at the outset that the other guy sets the terms of debate: We (militant Protestants/militant secularists) know what it means to be a good American; you (Catholics) have to prove yourselves to us."

Thats not the game, however. It wasnt really the game from 1776 through the 1960 presidential campaign-when militant Protestantism was the aggressor-and it isnt the game today. The real game involves different, deeper questions: Who best understands the nature of the American experiment in ordered liberty, and who can best give a persuasive defense of the first liberty, which is religious freedom?"

The nineteenth-century U.S. bishops and intellectuals whose enthusiasm for American democracy Russell Shaw now views skeptically (and, yes, they did go over the top on occasion) did get one crucial point right: the American founders built better than they knew," i.e., the founders designed a democratic republic for which they couldnt provide a durable moral and philosophical defense. But the long-despised (and now despised-again) Catholics could: Catholics could (and can) give a robust, compelling account of American democracy and its commitments to ordered liberty.

Midtwentieth-century Catholic scholars like historian Theodore Maynard and theologian John Courtney Murray picked up this theme and made it central to their reading of U.S. Catholic history. Murray presciently warned that, if Catholicism didnt fill the cultural vacuum being created by a dying mainline Protestantism, the noble, many-storied mansion of democracy [may] be dismantled, leveled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged." 

That is the argument the U.S. bishops have mounted in their challenge to the Obama administrations demolition of civil society through the HHS mandate on contraceptives and abortifacients: What is the nature of American democracy and the fundamental freedoms government is created to protect? Who are the true patriots: the men and women who can give an account of freedoms moral character, an account capable of sustaining a genuine democracy against a rising dictatorship of relativism, in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged"?

The argument today isnt about assimilation. The argument today is about who gets" America.

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washingtons Ethics and Public Policy Center. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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A life-long New Yorker, Reed was also a devout Anglo-Catholic. His artistic principles were grounded above all in the consciousness of arts higher aims. Catesby Leigh, an art and architecture critic, addressed the spiritual dimension of Reeds labors in a remembrance delivered at the Requiem Eucharist for Reed celebrated at St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue. Some readers will be familiar with this magnificent Gothic edifice, designed by the distinguished office of Cram, Goodhue and Ferguson, and its soaring, richly carved reredos. An edited version of Leighs remembrance follows.

Henry Hope Reed was a man with a deep appreciation for luxury, which might sound like a trait unbefitting a Christian gentleman. For Henry, the luxurious decoration of a public square, the luxurious ornamentation of a building, even the luxurious embellishment of ones own person were essentially a matter of enriching our visual experience of the world. To be the designer or craftsman of beautiful things was to fulfill mans natural role as what Henry called a decorating animal."

It is one of the many curiosities of the age in which Henry lived that the crusade against visual amenity and luxury in the world man builds was taken up by dogmatists of a fervently materialistic bent. By their fruits ye shall know them, and Henry saw those fruits for what they were very early in the game. He didnt have much company at first, and even today he has a good deal less than those of us who learned so much from him would like. This reality helps us understand Henrys exasperated incredulity at the spectacle of the nation becoming richer and richer while its public realm became poorer and poorer-his deep-seated anger at the inconceivably extensive degradation of aesthetic experience in postwar America.

General MacArthurs famous watchwords were Duty, Honor, Country. Henrys were Beauty, Splendor, Grandeur. These ideals were inextricably bound up in his mind with a heightening and refining of the emotions, inextricably bound up with a sense of life governed more than anything by a sense of the measure of things. It goes without saying that the beauty, the manifold exquisite details of this church, the breathtaking sculptural encrustation of its reredos with the figures of Christ, the Virgin, St. Thomas and scores of saints, martyrs, angels, and divines-all by way of giving praise to God and his faithful servants-accord with Henrys sense of priorities, his sense of decorum, his sense of luxury. And above all with his abiding sense of the glory that shall be revealed.

For Henry the achievement of beauty in the arts of form offered a foretaste, perhaps the merest inkling, of that culminating glory. He also believed in embodying the noblest aspects of human endeavor in emphatically dimensional, monumental terms, with depth of relief, with depth of formal complexity. The path to grandeur lay in discerning patronage and the artists own depth of discipline and knowledge. These last two qualities Henry knew to be the basis of all creative liberty.

The battle he fought was against the flattening of human experience. Flat, blank facades on buildings conceived as commodities-or just oddities-rather than works of civic art; flat modernist pictorial abstractions; the flattening of cultural history into pseudo-history packaged as what Henry dismissed as applied sociology"-all spoke to him of something far more ominous, the abasement of man and the crude negation of his proper relationship to nature as embodied in the great tradition.

For Henry art existed to improve, and in some measure to redeem, man and nature alike. The radical naturalism that has prevailed in various guises for many decades now was simply alien to his outlook. But if magnificence had been achieved in times past, it could be achieved again. Henry never lost faith in mans enduring capacity for greatness-even as long experience compelled him to acknowledge, which was not quite the same thing as excusing, mans enduring capacity for folly.

So Henry was no mere aesthete or partisan of art for arts sake." His spiritual qualities as well as his profound connoisseurship endowed his advocacy of the classical tradition with its irrepressible vitality, and its lofty aim. The battle, after all, wasnt merely about art, it was about what it means to be human.

General MacArthur attributed to his three watchwords personal qualities that the disciplined study and determined advocacy of the classical tradition in art and architecture instilled in Henry, qualities that remained with him to the very end. To quote the general: They give you a temperate will, a quality of the imagination, a vigor of the emotions, a freshness of the deep springs of life, a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of an appetite for adventure over love of ease. They create in your heart the sense of wonder, the unfailing hope of what next, and joy and inspiration of life. They teach you in this way to be an officer and a gentleman."

So we bid farewell to Henry-not a military officer, but in his way very much the old soldier, as well as a scholar, a visionary, and a Christian gentleman.

Catesby Leigh is an art and architecture critic in Washington, D.C. Photo of Henry Hope Reed courtesy of Andrew B. Reed.

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In other words, women have succeeded in becoming the men they hated.

Earlier this month, during her annual campaign fundraiser called The Ultimate Womens Power Lunch," Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky of Illinois prefaced her introduction of Planned Parenthoods Cecile Richards with the declaration that humanity is at a crossroads on this small planet and that our survival as a species is dependent on women taking charge, taking the world in our own hands."

If forensic psychologist and mens rights activist Helen Smith is correct, Schakowsky and her friends may have their hands full of the world, and sooner than they think. In her upcoming book Men on Strike , Smith offers up statistics and her own research to suggest that men are consciously boycotting marriage, fatherhood, and the American Dream" because they feel beaten down by politically correct preferences and practices-in school, in the workplace, and in society in general. If the women want the world and all the power, the thinking goes, they can have it; the men will simply retire to whatever man-caves they are permitted.

Smith suggests that after several decades of giving particular attention and encouragement to female students, with good results, it may be time for schools and society to pay attention to the males, and to observe what has happened to those boys less-celebrated, who are now men feeling left behind and lonely. In a recent column for the New York Times, Ross Douthat cited troubling statistics: The suicide rate for Americans 35 to 54 increased nearly 30 percent between 1999 and 2010; for men in their 50s, it rose nearly 50 percent."

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. Mistaking the word equal" for the word same," these hookup feminists" have become precisely the shallow, insincere, career-fixated, people-users that early feminists decried. From spare button-down shirt in the office, to meaningless sex, Don Draper has not disappeared; he has just changed his name to Donna. Women replace men, but the story-contra Schakowsky-stays the same.

Schakowskys hope for a world led by women is also challenged by Mary Eberstadts just-released book How the West Really Lost God . Eberstadt challenges the accepted notion that faith supports marriage and the family, asking whether it is not actually the other way around-that the forming of families leads to faith.

Eberstadt makes the case that through committed human love we find God, and that this is particularly true in the transcendent experience of parenthood. The utterly new love that enters the world through childbirth leads us to acknowledge something that is greater than ourselves, and worthy of our gratitude.

Parents are the most fundamental defenders of life; they will die for their childrens sakes. Disrupt the family and you disrupt life, but not death. Death goes on. Our increasingly secular society sanctions abortion and euthanasia and battles to celebrate sterile unions that cannot naturally populate the world. We are in dissolution, so lonely that we are killing ourselves, so earth-bound in our thinking that we throw people away.

Gender politics have so confused us that the complementarity of the sexes has become a quaint notion, but Jan Schakowskys conceit is that we may save the species" by putting one sex in charge of the whole world.

And people of faith are told they are gullible.

Elizabeth Scalia is the author of Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols of Everyday Life and the managing editor of the Catholic Portal at Patheos.com, where she blogs as The Anchoress. Her previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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For centuries, dramatic presentations of the biblical narrative were bad news for Jews. Passion plays-often timed to coincide with the Easter-time commemoration of the Crucifixion-not only portrayed Jesus Passion on the Cross, but ignited the passions of the crowds who took to the streets during Holy Week to seek revenge upon people whose ancestors Christians were taught were responsible for Jesus death. In some cases, fiery preachers further incited the populace with allegations that Jews were killing children and using Christian blood in their Passover matzah. The fatal consequences of these portrayals spilled out over centuries. Christians internalized the charge that Jews caused the death of God and, with it, the lethal teachings of collective guilt of all Jews.

In our time, the calumny still endures.  In December 2005, Venezuelan firebrand President Hugo Chávez castigated some minorities, the descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ, [who] have taken over the wealth of the world." In a world of skyrocketing anti-Semitism-where even in the United States almost two-thirds of all religion-based hate crimes, according to the FBI, target Jews who amount to less than 2 percent of the population-the way the Crucifixion is depicted in 2013 still stirs concern among Jews.

Mercifully, most Christians today do not believe in collective guilt or condone anti-Semitism. The Vaticans Nostra Aetate debunked the charge of deicide and turned anti-Semitism into a sin. Protestant groups-conservative and liberal-have forged respectful relationships with Jews and Judaism. A common denominator of Christian response-if there can be such a thing-is that guilt for Jesus death is the burden of all sinners, but not of one person or group, especially when Jesus said, No one takes my life; I lay it down myself" (John 10:18).

When Mel Gibson released The Passion of the Christ in 2004, many Christians were incredulous about Jewish concerns over grotesque depiction of Jews. How, they asked, could anyone not understand that mankind as a whole shared the blame?

Jews were left to wonder, however, whether everyone shared such enlightened positions. Could anyone measure the effect upon young Americans of a subliminal suggestion that Jews are devious Jesus-haters? What about Christian viewers in countries that historically displayed animus to Jews and have hardly purged themselves of the worlds oldest prejudice? What about non-Christian viewers in countries that are fed a constant diet of anti-Semitic invective?

Those questions were never resolved. They merely drifted away . . . until the release of the History Channel series. To be sure, The Bible was clearly free of any intentional toxicity. It pounded into the viewer the covenantal connection between G-d, the Jewish People, and the Land. It did not soft-pedal the Jewishness of great biblical heroes, nor of Jesus himself.

Naturally, Jews were befuddled by some key portrayals that-though faithful to the Christian Gospels-lie outside Jewish memory and Jewish perception of history. Perhaps least understandable to Jews is the presentation of Pontius Pilate as possessing enough conscience to think twice about executing an innocent prisoner. The Pilate known to Jewish and secular history was a soulless tyrant. Philo, one of the few period historians whose words have survived, describes Pilate as guilty of briberies, insults, robberies, outrages, wanton injustices, constantly repeated executions without trial, and ceaseless and grievous cruelty." Jews are thus especially puzzled that depictions of the Crucifixion story would point to anyone other than the person who wielded all the power and executed people with equanimity.

Still, Jews know that they cannot fault believers for being faithful to their holy texts, even if they would like to see dramatic portrayals (in which there is much latitude in the way a message is presented) show some more insight in regard to their impact on viewers.

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. Only the Sanhedrin Jews and synagogue officials parade around in Jewish prayer shawls at all times, conveying the subliminal image that the real"-the most religious-Jews were the most diabolically evil opponents of G-ds gift to Man. It is this imagery that will continue to trouble Jews for a long time to come.

As the series becomes a movie and a box set for Bible classes and home, we can hope for a bit more sensitivity. We can also hope that the producers will include a study guide with sets of the series and the movie. That guide should contain unambiguous statements from Christian leaders explaining what message should be taken from the Crucifixion-and which messages should not, unambiguously and explicitly repudiating the charge of deicide.

The producers worked so hard to present a message of love. They should now ensure that no one can subvert that message to validate and promote hate.

Rev. Dr. Larry Poland is a minister in the Evangelical Church Alliance; Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center; Rabbi Yitzchok Adlerstein is the Interfaith Director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

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Todays dreams of transformation are different. Political revolutions no longer seem alluring. (The exception has been advocates of interventionist foreign policy, who dreamed of a revolution of freedom in the Middle East, sparked by our invasion of Iraq.) Our therapeutic ambitions have become more modest. For the most part we try to manage our souls rather than liberate them. The apocalypse we anticipate now tends to be technological. The Internet, artificial intelligence, medical advances-many are the prophets who announce the imminent arrival of a New World and New Man.

Take education as an example. Over the last decade its become common to hear that online education will bring dramatic changes. One company that provides access to MOOCs (massive open online courses) explains its mission in grandiose terms. We envision a future where everyone has access to a world-class education that has so far been available to a select few." This future does not stem from social or political changes. Instead, the revolution is technical: Our technology enables our partners to teach millions of students rather than hundreds." Were at a crucial juncture, a great turning point. Now, anyone around the world can learn without limits." The revolution is coming-anyone and without limits -brought to you by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

As David Rieff observes in The Singularity of Fools," a recent article in Foreign Policy , its easy to mock the technological optimists (and he doesnt let the opportunity pass him by). But something of the same utopian spirit is at work more broadly, for technology isnt limited to bytes. Weve also developed sophisticated techniques to manage economic affairs and administer public policy.

Rieff points to economist Jeffrey Sachs. The title of his 2005 book says it all: The End of Poverty . In the past we suffered limitations. Food was scarce and commerce restricted. Moreover, in our backward state we suffered from political, social, and cultural ignorance that created unnecessary conflicts and unjustified inequities. But now we have reason! As Sachs writes, Technological progress has been fueled by the ongoing revolutions of basic science and spread by the power of global markets and public investments in health, education, and infrastructure." Thus, we can realistically envision a world without extreme poverty by the year 2025."

The word technology" comes from the Greek word techne , which refers to the kind of knowledge and skill that allows us to complete tasks effectively and efficiently. A tailor possesses the techne of tailoring, the potter the techne of pottery. Plato and Aristotle juxtaposed this sort of knowledge to episteme , knowledge of first principles. One way to put the difference is to say that techne or technique involves a knowing how," while episteme allows us to know why.

By Aristotles way of thinking, household administration requires techne . In his world, the household was the key mode of economic organization. It needed to be run effectively and efficiently, which of course meant by men and women expert in the various techniques of production and management. However, this administration did not require episteme . That was something only the head of the household, the paterfamilias , needed. For he alone decided on the goals and purposes of the household; everybody else executed his commands.

Thats what makes Aristotles polis (city) different from the oikos (household). The goals and purposes of a community of free men are open questions. What counts as a crime? What makes for a just punishment? What virtues do we want to encourage? What vices to suppress? These and other basic questions are to be debated and deliberated about. If this is to be done well, then citizens need episteme , knowledge of first principles. Technical know-how wont settle the question of whether religious piety is to be encouraged or discouraged. Thats a political question in Aristotles full sense of the term, and he thought it is our special dignity as human beings that we have the capacity to answer it, however fallibly, by using our reason.

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 Rousseaus vision of perfect democracy, the fusion of the free individual with the general will. In the mystical union of democratic solidarity we are fused into a single, all-powerful paterfamilias . Factions, parties, and divisions? They fall away. All that is left is administration. The same of course characterizes Marxs account of the end of history: the dictatorship of the proletariat.

A great deal of our present-day intellectual leadership dreams the same dream, though now achieved by technique rather than revolutionary action. The techno-utopians represent the most obvious case. For them there are no political problems, only technical ones. Political conflict over the allocation of wealth? The great new wealth created by the technological revolution will create a post-scarcity" world. There wont even be existential problems. Sickness, suffering, and even death will be conquered by scientific techniques, or so futurists promise.

Jeffrey Sachs isnt Ray Kurzweil (author of The Age of Spiritual Machines and prophet of a technological immortality). But Sachs traffics in the same dream. His program rests on three pillars: technological progress, global markets, and public investments. Each is a domain of technique. The scientist engineers better crops, investors and entrepreneurs refine their business models, and non-partisan experts advise governments on how best to invest in infrastructure, education, and public health. The world is a vast household to be administered by experts. Politics-a debate about whether poverty is the greatest evil or about whether the social changes necessary to alleviate it should be endorsed-has no role to play.

Administration rather than politics : this is, I think, a widespread contemporary ambition, and not just among liberals. Free-market libertarians embrace it as well. They differ from todays regulation-loving liberals only in their supreme confidence that the marketplace can invisibly administer our freedom. The upshot is the suppression of political debate about the common good, which is why thorough-going libertarians are such a destructive force in our political culture, perhaps as much so as contemporary liberals whose main vice is the serene smugness that assumes that all we have left is administration because everybody worth talking to already agrees with them about first principles.

No doubt there are many reasons why our age prefers administration over politics. One is the perennial human desire to be delivered from the responsibilities and uncertainties of what Aristotle thought was the source of our dignity as men and citizens: our capacity for freedom and reason. But its a seductive desire. For as Aristotle reminds us, in a world of administration without politics, our only civic role is to execute orders, which is another way of saying, only to obey.

R.R. Reno is editor of First Things . He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible and author of the volume on Genesis. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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We waited in the school auditorium as our parents and grandparents and disgruntled brothers and sisters rustled in the searing heat of the church. It was a roaring hot day and someone in the choir fainted. My dad said later he could hear a hole exactly the size of an alto in the choirs subsequent performance, but we think he was teasing us. Finally the bishop arrived, having left the game in a huff when the Mets made their fourth error of the day, and the ceremony started. . . . Continue Reading »

I cringed to read that Jolie had decided to cut her body for preventions sake. It is a regrettable step, if a necessary one. My own breasts have nourished my children in their infancy and toddlerhood for the better part of the last decade. As I write this, I am nursing my twenty-one-month-old son Samuel. My cringe came with a worry: that a dramatic announcement like Jolies will distract women from less dramatic-and costly-preventative steps.

Women who lack Jolies means 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? Where will this research lead? Will there come a time when young women are routinely urged to receive genetic testing and then have their bodies cut in prevention rather than risk a future cancer diagnoses? How cursed have breasts become?

If simpler steps for prevention are available, we are wise to take advantage of the knowledge we have to keep cancer at bay. These may be, to quote a Nativity hymn, painful steps and slow." But they require of us the Lenten sacrifices of moderation that lead to good health: reduction in the consumption of fats, regular exercise, avoiding the vices of excessive alcohol and smoking, and eating healthy unprocessed foods.

After consulting pro-life physician Dr. Peter Rosi, a breast cancer specialist in Chicago who changed to family practice in his effort to educate young parents and to prevent cancer in women, I began to practice extended breastfeeding to about three years with each of my children. I have never taken the Pill.

My family eats a diet that is strong on vegetables and we aim for hormone-free foods. We garden and grow pesticide-free foods. When we can afford it, during winter, we buy foods that are hormone- and pesticide-free. We have reduced sugar and dairy consumption. We get vitamin D through vitamins and sunshine. For calcium, we eat almonds and bok choy. We avoid the use of plastic in the kitchen by using glass storage containers rather than risking the possible breakdown of bisphenol A (BPA), which is linked to cancer. These are some ways I am trying to prevent breast cancer in my body and in my children.  

For women, bearing children before age thirty may not be a politically, socially or economically wise choice, but for preventing cancer, some studies recommend this step. Breastfeeding a baby beyond the first year, even through the second year as recommended by the World Health Organization, is also a way to support breast health.

I married at age twenty-four. My first child was born when I was twenty-five years old, and I gave birth three times during graduate school. Those births were not always met with welcome by those close to me, but God called me to be a mother and I have welcomed the opportunity with open arms.

As for most mothers, learning to nurse was a challenge for me. I faced bleeding nipples and some crying sessions on the phone with my mother and with a La Leche League consultant. It is by Gods grace and with much patient help from others that I have been able to pass along the antibodies and immune protections to my babies that reduce their risk of diabetes and childhood cancers and, as was announced just this week, may even lower their risk of ADHD. I put children before a career, and it took me eight years to complete my Ph.D. as I wrote a dissertation from the kitchen table.

Society in the United States already has a hard time with the God-given nourishing function of the female breast. Mothers in most states have the protected legal right to nurse their babies anytime, anywhere. But mothers buy Hooter Hiders" and cover themselves in order to not offend others or raise eyebrows. This is not the case in contemporary Latin America, for example, where the new pope was photographed greeting a breastfeeding mother who was openly nursing her child in his presence.

Nor was it the case in the Renaissance, as artistic renderings of the Virgin Mary nursing the infant Christ readily attest. Twenty-first-century lactivists" stage nurse-in protests when businesses like Victorias Secret (2006) and Hollister (2013) ask nursing mothers to refrain from nursing in public. Breasts are oversexualized to the point that the mainstream has difficulty accepting them in any non-sexual context.

As a Church and society, we can support nursing mothers by providing information and encouragement to seek help from organizations like La Leche League and making referrals to an IBCLC board-certified lactation consultant when a new mother is struggling with nursing. Families, churches, and employers can make breastfeeding mother-baby togetherness a norm, so that mothers can succeed in nursing without feeling pulled in two while they mother their children. 

Lets not leave our health solely up to health experts who stand to gain tremendous amounts of income from fearful women who are willing to go to costly and painful lengths to avoid cancer. Day by day, we can act in moderation from childhood onward, avoiding risk factors and choosing healthy behaviors, in order to lower the risk of premature death, so that Gods call to live and serve the world and the family with our hands, our hearts, and even our breasts, can be lived out in old age as in youth.

Sarah Degner Riveros is a visiting assistant professor of Spanish at Valparaiso University. Due to an editorial error, an earlier draft of this piece was originally posted. It has since been updated.

RESOURCES

Risks of hormonal contraception explained by a breast cancer specialist physician

Breastfeeding children into toddlerhood and having multiple children reduce breast cancer risk

Cancer is linked to BPA in plastics

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I have grappled with this tactic for over twenty years as an activist against the legalization of assisted suicide and euthanasia. When I first engaged the issue in 1993, the Hemlock Society was the nations foremost organization advocating legalized physician-assisted suicide. Talk about candor in advocacy-hemlock was the poison swallowed by Socrates to carry out his death sentence, and the slogan of the organization was good life, good death." No confusion or pretense about the agenda there.

But look what happened. The Hemlock Society eventually merged with one of its own offshoots, Compassion in Dying, to form Compassion and Choices. Talk about euphemistic honey to help the hemlock go down.

Today assisted suicide is described almost exclusively through euphemism, especially in media coverage. The most prominent phrase is death with dignity." Several years ago, Compassion and Choices began a campaign to convince reporters not to use the word suicide" to describe a terminally ill persons deliberate use of a lethal prescription of drugs. The word suicide," Compassion and Choices scolded, is biased" and steeped in value judgment." Worse, in the groups view, it carries a social stigma," causing readers to be misled." In contrast, the group claimed that aid in dying" is value neutral" since it is undertaken by terminally ill people who take medication"-another euphemism in this context-who dont want to die but merely shorten their dying process."

The contrary is true, of course. Assisted suicide is the accurate and descriptive term that explicitly describes the act in question. Suicide describes the act, not the motive. Someone who kills himself commits suicide, regardless of whether he does so because of mental instability, a career collapse, or a terminal illness.

None other than the founder of the Hemlock Society, Derek Humphry, protested the use of euphemisms in assisted suicide advocacy in a 2006 letter to the editor published in the Register Guard of Eugene, Oregon. Humphry wrote against using the term death with dignity" to describe the lawful act [in Oregon] of a physician helping a terminally ill person to die by handing them a lethal overdose," as an affront to the English language." The proper term should be physician-assisted suicide, Humphry opined, because, 'Physician means a licensed M.D.; 'assisted means helping; and 'suicide means deliberately ending life."

Humphry ended the letter with a plea to call a spade, a spade." Indeed. Otherwise, we cant have an honest societal debate about one of the more consequential-and potentially culture-changing-issues of our time.

The assisted suicide movement certainly isnt 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. Similarly, the New York Times recently referred to babies who survived late-term abortion-only to be murdered by the abortionist Kermit Gosnell-as fetuses," even though there is no such thing as a born fetus.

The intentionally bloodless term collateral damage," used during war, is particularly galling in this regard. Collateral in this context means secondary," or indirect." Damage means physical harm caused to something in such a way as to impair its value, usefulness, or normal function." The point of the term is to distance ourselves from the horror that actually happened: the killing and wounding of non-combatants during an act of war.

The proper and accurate term for such a circumstance is civilian casualties." Surely war is of sufficient import, and basic respect for these victims should require accurate terminology in describing the carnage.

The struggle over the lexicon about how to properly describe aliens illegally in the United States is another example. I think illegal alien" is properly descriptive. So too is the somewhat more tactful undocumented immigrant," as that describes the lack of formal permission for these people to be residing in the country. But notice that many advocates for legalizing the status of millions of such people in the country now refer to them merely as migrants" or immigrants."

The media play a huge role in this problem. Indeed, it is easy to discern the side of a controversy that the media favor by the words and terms reporters deploy in stories to describe the political combatants. Thus, the Associated Press stylebook requires the use of the following terms involving contentious debates:

Similarly, illegal alien" is now forbidden by the A.P.:

Euphemisms are a propagandistic tool of misdirection. They ill serve a free people. But advocates wont stop manipulating us until we insist that they, in Humphrys words, call a spade a spade."

Wesley J. Smith is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institutes Center on Human Exceptionalism. He also consults for the Patients Rights Council and the Center for Bioethics and Culture. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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I regret the need to report this, but I must. 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. In Part II of the essay, The Negation of Sexual Difference," he lifts sentences and paragraphs from a 2010 interview with Béatrice Bourges, president of the Collective for Children and an opponent of same-sex marriage and adoption.

Even more egregious, big chunks of Bernheims exposition of the biblical vision of malefemale complementarity come from Fr. Joseph-Marie Verlindes recent book, Lidéologie du gender: Comme identité reçue ou choisie? Verlinde carefully cites his sources (including John Paul II). Not only does Bernheim plagiarize Verlinde, he also gets rid of the attributions, transforming the quotations into his own voice.

It seems he has bad academic habits. His 2011 book, Quarante méditations juives, includes passages plagiarized from an interview with Jean-François Lyotard published in 1996. When first accused, Bernheim insisted that it was Lyotard who had plagiarized his student chaplain lectures from the 1980s, only later to admit fault.

Bernheim also cultivated the impression that he had passed the agrégation, a competitive exam at the pinnacle of French academic training, when in fact he had not. The French take their academic honors very seriously, and as a friend familiar with the French scene explained, to pretend that one is agrégé is the rough equivalent of falsely claiming to have received battlefield honors.

The first thing to say is that this affair cant be interpreted as an example of progressives hunting down dissenters. Bernheim took a strong stand on a controversial issue, but it wasnt his opposition to gay marriage that precipitated the scandal. It was his dishonesty. These transgressions of basic academic integrity were uncovered by Jean-Noël Darde, a plagiarism watchdog, not a gay activist.

The second thing to say concerns plagiarism. One of the perversions of our era is to make a god of intellectual property. Most commentators described Bernheim as stealing" words and sentences. This is wrongheaded. Plagiarism is a sin against truth, not property. Its first and foremost a kind of lying, not a kind of stealing. He violated our trust by speaking in a voice that was not his own, which is why in this and other cases of plagiarism the writer loses intellectual and moral authority broadly.

A third thing to say concerns the man. In my years of teaching, I had to deal with plagiarism many times. Now and then a cynical young person tried to get by with the minimum of work. But most of the students who plagiarized did so because they were desperate or scared, or both. I could tell because it was so obvious, and thus pathetic and pitiable. And indeed, when I confronted students I found that there was almost always a great deal of pathos in the background: psychological crises, terrible fears of failing, a consuming sense of hopelessness in the face of the assigned material.

Bernheims plagiarism seems to be of this sort. Now that Ive reviewed some of the details, I cant believe he believed he could get away with it. (I am, in fact, somewhat embarrassed that I didnt grow suspicious when the French rabbi sounded so much like John Paul II when talking about sexual complementarity and transcendence.) Please join me in praying for Rabbi Bernheim. From my reading of the evidence in this affair (whats so hard about citing someone?), it seems he certainly needs it.

The final thing to say is that Im sorry. The essays arguments arent any less true for having been plagiarized. But we allowed the magazine to be a vehicle for falsehood. The lie was in the byline. Homosexual Marriage, Parenting, and Adoption" was not in any proper sense by Gilles Bernheim. I apologize to you for publishing an essay that betrayed your trust in the integrity of First Things.

R.R. Reno is editor of First Things . He is the general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible and author of the volume on Genesis. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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Typically, those who have wrestled with the issue of canon in the history of American religion have made only crude differentiation among different groups. In colonial America, there were the Quakers and nearly everyone else. In antebellum America, things became a bit more complex, but there were Shakers, Mormons, and a cluster of prophets on the one hand and Bible alone" anti-creedal evangelicals on the other extreme. Toss in Emerson and Thoreau.

Enter David Hollands eloquent and intelligent  Sacred Borders: Continuing Revelation and Canonical Restraint in Early America . For anyone who teaches in the field of American religious history, this is essential reading. It should assume a venerable place on graduate school exam lists. However,  Sacred Borders  has just as much to offer pastors, Bible study leaders, and, well, frankly, any Christian willing to think deeply about the ways that American Christians have understood revelation and Scripture.

Hollands argument is extended and detailed; it eludes simple summary. The subtitle of the book points to its breadth. He brings into conversation and contest both those whose belief in ongoing revelation threatened (sometimes mildly, sometimes obviously and severely) a closed biblical canon and those who answered such threats and policed the canons borders.

What I realized while reading  Sacred Borders  is that many, if not most, Christians believe in at least enough continuing revelation to pose some sort of threat to a strictly closed canon. At the same time, nearly all who challenged the closed canon maintained some sort of belief in canonicity; indeed, many pulled back from the logical conclusions of their ideas out of a traditionalist respect for the Bible. Along the way, Holland engages the early Puritans, Quakers (from George Keith to Elias Hicks), deists, Jonathan Edwards, prophets (such as Nimrod Hughes), Swedenborgians, Shakers, Mormons, Adventists, Unitarians, Transcendentalists, and more. Holland describes some figures as inhabiting a canonical borderland"; it seems to me that many individuals were in more of a borderland than they knew.

Before proceeding with Hollands argumentation , let me give you a sample of the many pleasant surprises included in his narrative. In 1811, Nimrod Hughes published a pamphlet about a visionary experience he had sitting in a jail cell. His vision led him to believe that God would destroy one-third of the earths population on June 4, 1812. His  Solemn Warning   went through five editions and caught the attention of former presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who discussed both Hughes and a mixed-race prophet named Christopher McPherson. Adams told Jefferson that modern prophecy was unphilosophical and inconsistent with the political Safety of States and Nations."

Jefferson, architect of religious freedom, told Adams not to worry about McPherson. However, he quoted Jeremiah to the effect that every man that is mad, and maketh himself a prophet, thou shouldst put him in prison and in the stocks." Adams looked up Jeffersons verse and agreed, telling the sage of Monticello that he could not help wishing that the ancient practice had been continued down to more modern times and that all the Prophets at least from Peter the Hermit to Nimrod Hews inclusively, had been confined in the Stocks and prevented from spreading so many delusions and shedding so much blood." Nimrod Hughes began a quick fade from American consciousness on June 5, 1812. The former prisoner certainly did not merit imprisonment because of his prophecies.

Hughes helps Holland make one of the central arguments of his book: theology matters. Ideas matter. It would be tempting, he writes, to explain Hughes away through the context of the brewing war with Great Britain. A fiery two-tailed comet in the sky," Holland writes, wars and rumors of wars, a frightened and backward-looking populace, and a fanatic ready to make the most of their fear. What more do we need to know?" A great deal, it turns out.

As it happens, Hughes wrote his pamphlet prior to the comet and prior to the war. Instead, Holland argues, Hughes tapped into a long-standing biblical tradition of prophetic revelation [rather] than into any passing events." Belief that God had ever spoken, Hughes reasoned, must be open to the idea that He would speak again." Indeed, throughout  Sacred Borders, Holland warns scholars not to reduce religious phenomena to simple social explanations at the risk of ignoring longstanding religious traditions (in this case, centuries of debates about the biblical canon). He finds that concern about the canon was a  constant  in American religious history through the antebellum period. The question of canon was always timely, and he argues that Thomas Paine and Ethan Allen thought about God and the Bible as much as any of their evangelical contemporaries."

Even more remarkably, to my eyes at least, Holland offers an always necessary reminder (for scholars) that to the individuals about whom he writes, God was a presence, a real presence. God was a benevolent Father to liberal Protestants (and many others), a God of universality" and reason to deists, etc. God sat at the center" of debates about the canon, Holland reminds us. Arguments from the Almightys character," Holland informs, and what strikes me as a genuine impulse to know Him, really do appear as the primary engines of the canonical discourse."

What should historians do with this realization , which Holland says came to him as a surprise? The most difficult question for historians engaging a religious past is what to do with God." The answer to me seems simple. If we want to understand Jonathan Edwards, Joseph Smith, Horace Bushnell, and Ellen White, we have to take their quest for Gods presence, voice, and spirit seriously.

Holland shows how his thinkers in many ways inhabited the same intellectual world. For example, Theodore Parker clarified Proverbs 29:18 with brackets: 'Where there is no vision [revelation] the people perish." The Shaker Frederick Evans made the same point with dashes: 'Where there is no vision - revelation - 'the people perish." Transcendentalists, Unitarians, Shakers, Mormons, and Evangelicals all wrestled with many of the same issues.

Now, one could read this book simply to become familiar with many of the leading theologians and religious leaders of preCivil War American history. I also recommend it, however, because it will help Christians be aware of the complexity of issues surrounding their canon. If the canon is closed, why? How do we know? What sorts of ongoing revelation threaten a closed canon? If the canon is open, if reason or intuition or visions have as much or more weight than Scripture, how could Christianity (or any religion) maintain an essence or an anchor? Why did God give Christians the Old and New Testaments and not give sacred books to other peoples? Why has God stopped giving human beings Scripture?

Why do these issues bedevil Christians more than, say, Muslims? One answer goes back to the emergence of Christianity:

Christians reopened the scriptural canon, and mostly closed it again. No wonder some Christians are always trying to crack that door open once more.

John Turner is assistant professor of religious studies at George Mason University and author of Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet and Bill Bright and Campus Crusade for Christ: The Renewal of Evangelicalism in Postwar America. This article originally appeared at the Anxious Bench.

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The horrible Cleveland kidnapping and rape case is something about which almost any adult American who listens to any news (or even some entertainment-oriented programming) can name some basic facts. It is easy to understand why the Cleveland case got so much attention from the media and interest from viewers. The Cleveland story has many news hooks. It has violence, sex, death, and unimaginable horror in a normal-seeming neighborhood under the noses of the authorities.

The combination of elements is one reason why the Cleveland story became so big so fast, and so is the fact of coverage, but there is more to it. Stories dont have legs just because of their inherent interest and the fact of some media coverage. The nature of the coverage matters too. If every television and radio news outlet had limited its coverage to a one-minute report that three kidnapped women had escaped and a man was in custody, the story would likely not have acquired its current salience.

It matters if a news story contains a narrative that explains the lives of those involved and makes emotional connections with the viewer and listener. It is the difference between the yeah-something-happened-in-Philadelphia-lets-move-on coverage that the mainstream media eventually gave the Gosnell trial and the four straight days in which the network evening news programs gave the Cleveland story prominent coverage-including leading with the story for three straight days.

As Conor Friedersdorf pointed out, the Gosnell grand jury report provided an enormous number of potential news hooks. There was the failure of the authorities to supervise Gosnells clinic. There was the intersection between government negligence and extreme pro-abortion politics. There were acts of spectacular evil like cutting the spines of newborn infants. There was the Jeffrey Dahmer-type keeping of fetal (infant?) body parts as trophies. Lest you think that this might be too gruesome, the previous weeks evening news coverage contained a description of a man starving a pregnant woman for two weeks and then punching her in the belly until she had a miscarriage.

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 audiencefriendly spin on stories that the mainstream media already cover. When the conservative media emphasize a story the mainstream media downplay or ignore, the result is that, on some news stories, we have two parallel Americas. There is one America for those who consume right-leaning media and another (larger) America for those who dont.

Very rarely, if conservative media can mobilize its audience, they can shame the mainstream media into acknowledging the existence of a story. Mollie Hemingway did this brilliantly, but there is coverage and there is coverage. The NBC Nightly News carried a story on Gosnells murder conviction, but there was no context. It was just another murder trial. It was a local crime story. They covered" this fascinating and horrible story into boredom.

The conservative outside groups are often an expensive (for the donors) waste of time. Super PACs like American Crossroads have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on commercials that were, in retrospect, futile. Remember when Obama bowed to a Chinese leader and this symbolized American subservience to China because of Obamas borrowing policies? You probably dont, but Karl Rove and American Crossroads made an ad to remind you.

Remember when Jay Carney had an awkward answer about the Obama teams fundraising tactics? You probably dont, but American Crossroads produced an ad about it. (That ad should really hurt the constitutionally prohibited 2016 Obama reelection effort.) American Crossroads produced an attack ad more than three years before the next presidential election against a candidate who might well not be the Democratic nominee.

There are several ways conservative donors could better spend their money. The first would be to set up an alternative media outlet that would compete with the mainstream media for the attention of a general audience rather than for the conservative segment of the population. Such an outlet would not be another Fox News. It would be patterned after the news divisions of the major broadcast networks and aim for the same market segment, but with a reporting staff and editorial judgment that had a conservative perspective.

The draw would not be to put a conservative spin on the news of the day. It would be to pursue stories that the major networks dont get to. Such a network could take the time to explore the reporting angles opened up by the Gosnell case. They could also report on any number of other matters that dont make the news. We just dont know what stories get missed because of the absence of such a well-funded right-leaning news outlet.

Another way conservative donors could better spend their money would be to either start new conservative outside groups (or repurpose old ones) to use ad money to pursue educating the public about issues of long-term concern rather than running opportunistic ads that attack particular candidates. Such groups would focus less on gaffes and shaping how viewers perceive the often transient controversies that dominate the news for a day or a week and then fade away.

These better conservative outside groups could run ads explaining the abortion extremism of the Democratic party, the risks of centrally rationed health care, cheaper alternatives to the current Medicaid system, or tax reform that would increase the take-home pay of middle-class families. Having a larger share of the public understanding how conservative ideas will save them money will do more to help Republicans than any number of ads that show pictures of Obama set to scary mood music.

Conservative donors would be better off funding either new right-leaning broadcasting outlets or public educationoriented outside groups. Giving money to the current crop of conservative super PACS is only a slight improvement over donors spending the money on their own leisure. Conservative donors have a chance to escape the trap of just talking about the news of the day. They can escape the media spin cycle.

Pete Spiliakos writes for Postmodern Conservative . His previous On the Square" columns can be found here.

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Christians in the United States who imagined that, whatever tribulations or hardships they have to endure, they would not include speeches by the president of the United States and the policies of the United States government had better reconsider, in light of President Barack Obamas April 26 address to the annual Planned Parenthood Gala at Washingtons Marriott Wardman Park Hotel.

It was an appalling speech that had the sole benefit of clarifying the last-ditch commitment of the present administration to the most open-ended abortion license possible. And it drew a line in the sand that those committed to the biblical view of the sanctity of human life cannot ignore-and must challenge.

Planned Parenthood is a multimillion-dollar industry, funded in no small part by the federal government, that has been directly responsible for the deaths of millions of unborn children and is currently responsible for over one thousand such deaths every day; yet the president described Planned Parenthoods work as providing quality health care to women all across America."

Pro-life advocates efforts to craft state laws requiring Planned Parenthood clinics and other abortionists to follow the minimal sanitation and safety standards required of true medical facilities are, according to the president, a matter of shutting off communities that need more health care options for women, not less."

The clinic-regulation laws that have been passed in states across the country are, the president charged, part of an orchestrated and historic effort to roll back basic rights when it comes to womens health"-as if abortuaries that do not meet the health and safety standards required of your local McDonalds are contributing to anyones health."

Moreover, such laws are an attempt to mandate government injecting itself into decisions best made between a woman and her doctor"-as if a butcher like Philadelphias Kermit Gosnell, who severed the spinal cords of infants born alive in botched abortions, was any womans personal physician.

Perhaps because the Obama speech to Planned Parenthood coincided with Gosnells homicide trial, the president did not utter the word abortion" once. But the timing notwithstanding, that omission was hardly surprising in an address that may have set a new standard for deliberate misrepresentation of reality.

For it requires willful moral blindness about reality to say that what Planned Parenthood is about" is helping a woman from Chicago named Courtney" make sure she could start a family, by providing access to affordable contraceptive care to keep her healthy" in the face of a fertility-threatening disease. Today, President Obama noted to applause, Shes got two beautiful kids. Thats what Planned Parenthood is about."

About the millions of beautiful kids" (many of them African-American) who were never born because of Planned Parenthood, the president of the United States had not a word to say. Not a word of remorse. Not a word of compassion, for either the slaughtered innocents of our time or the mothers suffering post-abortion trauma. Just a celebration of your right to choose," without the slightest moral pause over the question, Choose what?" 

But there was worse. For President Obama concluded his remarks as follows: Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you . . ."

And that is nothing short of blasphemy.

Too harsh? No. For in its discussion of this grave sin against the Second Commandment, the Catechism of the Catholic Church (paragraph 2148) teaches that it is also blasphemous to make use of Gods name to . . . reduce people to servitude, to torture persons or to put them to death." That is precisely what happens in Planned Parenthood abortuaries. And on that, the president of the United States called down the divine blessing.

Pray for him. Pray for the United States, which is in very, very serious trouble. 

George Weigel is Distinguished Senior Fellow of Washingtons Ethics and Public Policy Center. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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There have been moving calls for pro-life Americans to renounce the use of the death penalty, even applied to such men as Gosnell. Some people think it renders our witness for the sanctity of innocent life more credible when we extend it even further to cover the guilty. I disagree. What some call a consistent ethic of life" or a seamless garment" I call mismanaged mercy and botched, misguided compassion .

It emerges, most often, from the attempt to short-circuit the natural virtues in pursuit of the supernatural, and among the many fruits of this moral disorder was the clerical sex abuse scandal-where hasty mercy was offered toward insiders" (fellow priests), at the expense of future nameless victims (all of them laymen). No doubt the bishops who exercised such mercy, who sent their offending priests not to prisons but to rehabilitation centers, told themselves that they were acting as Jesus would. Someone should have told them about the millstones.

In fact, one may not practice mercy without having first satisfied justice-and then only when an act of mercy will not enable or excuse the given crime. Surely, if we can see that an excessive or cruel punishment violates justice, we should likewise be outraged when the guilty are slapped on the wrist-as bigoted white juries used to do to white defendants who savaged blacks.

The mercy we ask of God is different in kind than we as men are asked, or even permitted, to dispense. Gods resources are infinite, and (as Jesus reminded us in the parable of the workers in the vineyard) what he gives to one of us need not be taken from anyone else. Even then, he pardons only the penitent. Human rulers are obliged to insist on the fair distribution of limited goods on earth.

Central to the story of the prodigal son, but often overlooked, is this line, addressed to the aggrieved elder brother: Son, you are with me always, and everything I have is yours." In other words, by taking back his wastrel son, the father is not unjustly cutting the elder sons portion in half. He is satisfying justice, and adding to it mercy. So in begrudging his brothers forgiveness, the elder is guilty of envy.

Envy is, for Aquinas, the gravest of deadly sins , and envy of spiritual goods (such as mercy obtained) is the deadliest form. Christian love demands that we wish and pray for the eternal salvation of every human soul, however improbable. That includes the souls of men like Kermit Gosnell, Timothy McVeigh, Osama bin Laden, and the Nazis justly hanged at Nuremburg. This wholesome wish has nothing to do with whether or not we favor their deaths.

Those of us who believe in the immortality of the soul can distinguish between death and damnation-as could St. Pius X, who to the end of his reign employed a papal executioner. So could the Vatican city-states legal code, which kept the death penalty on its books until 1969. Since St. Paul wrote, Christians have believed that death could rightly be inflicted as a penalty-not merely to stop a murderer from killing again, but as an act of justice. The Catechism of the Council of Trent (and here, few Reformers would have differed) called the civil magistrate the legitimate avenger of crime."

Pope John Paul II made history when he issued Evangelium Vitae , then revised the Churchs Catechism to match it, and suggested that the only proper use of capital punishment is in societal self-defense, in cases where even modern prisons could not safely contain a killer. The reason, according to the revised Catechism, is that bloodless means better correspond to the concrete conditions of the common good and are more in conformity to the dignity of the human person" (CCC 2267). Some scholars such as Jeffrey Mirus have suggested that we see here a development of doctrine. Others, including Cardinal Avery Dulles, have disagreed.

Since John Paul IIs teaching appears at such variance with previous, equally authoritative statements, it cannot be said to be binding in conscience on Catholics. In terms of authority, an encyclical that teaches something new might be seen as roughly analogous to a district courts decision; until the Supreme Court (the extraordinary Magisterium-exercised in an ecumenical council or ex cathedra ) weighs in, the question remains unsettled. (By contrast, Humanae Vitae reaffirmed millennia of previous teaching-had it approved contraception, the situation would be akin to that of Evangelium Vitae on this point.)

Furthermore, as others have argued, John Pauls condemnation of capital punishment rests on his prudential judgment of concrete conditions"-which may or may not be correct, but which rests outside the scope of papal authority. A pope can solemnly teach what makes a war just or unjust, but his opinion about any given war is just that-his opinion. It deserves respect but does not demand religious submission." Not every crusade, or papal war supported by interdict, was infallibly justified.

I agree entirely with death penalty reformers who point to the innocent men executed, the paucity of decent legal representation for the accused, and the racial imbalances among those put to death. If the U.S. were largely to cease employing the death penalty until these outrages are fully addressed, that would mark progress for the sanctity of life-because it would be centered on sparing the innocent. (I would add that a better use of energy might consist in trying to stop the routine, rampant rape of prisoners in America.) But when someone is manifestly guilty of heinous crimes of public import, crimes rightly deserving death, to rush to mercy may in fact entail a miscarriage of justice.

Let us go back to Nuremburg. Those men executed for crimes against humanity could surely have been safely contained in prison, and prevented from re-establishing National Socialism in Germany. By the standards of the revised Catechism, it would have better served the common good and the dignity of the human person for such men to spend the rest of their lives in humane prisons-writing their memoirs, answering fan mail, and giving advice to aspiring activists who shared their goals. Is this really true? Would the world have been better served by reading Goerings prison memoirs? (He killed himself, to cheat the executioner.)

Likewise, for Kermit Gosnell to escape the executioner undermines our respect for justice. In the concrete conditions" of life in America in 2013, the unborn are treated as worse than chattel-worse than cattle, actually, since those are killed more humanely. Embryos are kept frozen in limbo for our convenience, and through stem cell research are cannibalized for parts. Late-term abortions, such as Gosnell routinely performed, are legal in most states-and the president of the United States, as an Illinois state senator, refused to rule out the killing of babies who survived this gruesome process.

Sending the most hardened murderers off to watch cable TV and share the weight room with embezzlers and drug users makes a mockery of justice. It shows profound disrespect to his victims, and the next victims of our culture of death. In cases as grave as these, where notorious criminals commit appalling crimes that still go mostly unpunished, true justice and genuine mercy demand the hangman.

John Zmirak is author, most recently, of The Bad Catholics Guide to the Catechism. He blogs at The Bad Catholics Bingo Hall .

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Doctorows previous novel, the best-selling Little Brother, published in 2008, sets the stage for Homeland, published this past February. In the San Francisco of the near future, the Department of Homeland Security throttles American liberties in its system of surveillance and coercion after a terrorist attack on the Bay Bridge, and seventeen-year-old Marcus Yallow fights back. Homeland continues the story. . . . Continue Reading »

It neglects tragedy. Tragedy as a form of art and of entertainment highlighted death, and death is central to true Christian worship. The most basic liturgical elements of the faith, baptism and the Lords Supper, speak of death, of burial, of a covenant made in blood, of a body broken. Even the cry Jesus is Lord!" assumes an understanding of lordship very different than Caesars. Christs lordship is established by his sacrifice upon the cross, Caesars by power. . . . Continue Reading »

Kierkegaards philosophy is not so much a salve as a thorn in the flesh. To his atheist admirers, he presents a challenge, for they want to celebrate his intellect yet reject his belief in Christianity as the center of truth. Their effort to do so-to square the circle-has led to misdirection, and diversions. Thus, they praise irony and paradox in Kierkegaards writings, and delight in his rapier wit; they wax eloquent about his psychological insights and marvel at his prolific output; they explore his turbulent relationship with his father, and doomed courtship with his forlorn fiancée; and they provide expert analysis of his battle with Hegel.

But one thing they hesitate to emphasize is precisely that which drove the Danish philosopher most: his Christian faith. About that, they remain strangely passive. They cannot ignore it, so they try to minimize it, usually mentioning it in a perfunctory manner. Some are more clever, and try to employ Kierkegaards philosophy against Christianity, or even empty it of religion altogether. The literary critic Harold Bloom, for example, comments:

Bloom is correct about Kierkegaard being a genius, but this does not quite exclude his being an apostle." The eminent poet W.H. Auden rightly called Kierkegaard a preacher, an expounder and defender of Christian doctrine," who may properly be compared" to Cardinal Newman. Underscoring that are Kierkegaards private prayers, which reveal an intense piety, and love and devotion to Jesus Christ. Kierkegaard believed we should approach the Bible with holy reverence, and that it should be read on our knees." He summed up the meaning of his life when he declared that his work viewed as a totality, is religious from first to last," and that the whole of my authorship relates itself to Christianity."

If Kierkegaards 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. He assailed what he called the latters involvement in Christendom"-a flabby, self-assured idea of Christian civilization, which went along to get along-with authentic Christianity, which was far more demanding.

He looked around and saw not serious Christians but a mass of people who assumed they were Christians simply because they were born into a supposedly Christian country and belonged to the state Church. He was particularly scandalized by the leading Danish clergy, who rubbed shoulders with the high and mighty, and promoted superficial religion-trapped in a jovial mediocrity"-even as they professed to be witnesses for Christ." In a series of polemical blasts, Kierkegaard contrasted this easygoing lifestyle with genuine Christianity:

At the heart of his attack upon Christendom" is a repudiation of the notion that the Church can elevate society merely by its existence, and that all Christians have to do to transform society is build up Christianitys collective numbers.

Kierkegaard replies: No, no, no!" Real change, real progress begins with the individual, not with any kind of statistical Christianity" which places size over substance:

There can be no reform of the Church, much less society, he declared, unless individual hearts and minds are first converted to the gospel. Otherwise, our whole way of life" would amount to nothing but stuff and nonsense."

For confronting the establishment of his time, Kierkegaard was denounced as being vitriolic and accused of creating division-much like those today who call their fellow Christians to account.

Kierkegaard was misunderstood in his time, and still is today. He once wrote in his journal, People understand me so little that they do not even understand when I complain of being misunderstood."

The two biggest misconceptions about Kierkegaard have to do with his attitude toward the Church, and his general disposition. Because he rebuked the Church so sternly, some people think he was trying to subvert it. On the contrary, says scholar Howard Johnson, Kierkegaard was a loyal son of the Church," who like St. Thomas Aquinas," or any other theologian until recent times, was so living in the sacramental, ecclesiological reality" of Christianity that it would never have occurred to him to try to topple altars." His critique was constructive, not destructive:

The second misconception is that Kierkegaard was a perpetual malcontent, the gloomy Dane," who could only protest and never find peace and solace. In fact, the moment he committed himself to Christ, unreservedly, Kierkegaard found that peace which was the source and strength of his whole life. After his fathers death, he confessed:

As his biographers attest, Søren Kierkegards life was marked by many trials and tribulations, but he persevered. James Collins, one of his most perceptive interpreters, reminds us that at his own request, there was erected over his grave a marker inscribed with these lines of his favorite religious poet," Hans Adolf Brorson:

If we keep the faith, and endure the gauntlet of this world, we too, God willing, can achieve the eternal peace which Søren Kierkegaard, through his burning witness, so nobly earned.

William Doino Jr. is a contributor to Inside the Vatican magazine, among many other publications, and writes often about religion, history and politics. He contributed an extensive bibliography of works on Pius XII to The Pius War: Responses to the Critics of Pius XII. His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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Leahy reportedly has prepared amendments that would recognize same-sex companions. The letter from these church leaders pledged they would be strongly opposed by many in our communities who would be otherwise sympathetic or even enthusiastic about the benefits of immigration reform."

The signers included representatives of the Southern Baptist Convention, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, National Association of Evangelicals, and Lutheran ChurchMissouri Synod, among others. Some of them joined a media conference call to reiterate their warnings. They were even joined by Jim Wallis, a same-sex marriage supporter, who admonished: This is the wrong place at the wrong time."

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. As for Jim Wallis, he is at least a realist who understands politics as the art not of the ideal but of the practical.

Their stance contrasts vividly with a statement from 120 United Methodist officials, including forty-two bishops (about half of them retired), who urge recognition of same-sex families" in any immigration legislation. The eleven millionmember United Methodist Church does not recognize same-sex marriage, but many of its U.S. church officials, alas, prefer to pretend otherwise.

Dozens of United Methodist bishops were at the Mexican border early this month to demonstrate support for immigration legislation. Unlike some of the Evangelical supporters of immigration reform," United Methodism in its policy statements officially (although unbeknownst to most members) favors non-enforcement of current immigration law and full entitlement benefits for all immigrants.

The May 3 United Methodist letter opposes curtailing family chain immigration, specifically citing the Gang of 8" elimination of a sibling category and capping of children over age thirty. It also complains of favoring immigrants with advanced degrees. It pronounces as unacceptable" triggers making citizenship for illegal immigrantscontingent on increased border security, which would result in greater arrests and deportations." E-verify for employers and militarization" of the border are likewise criticized.

Spending such massive sums of money for border security, a function which is questionable in its efficacy, while at the same time cutting necessary programs that benefit people in real need is simply immoral," the United Methodists complain. Therefore, we urge Congress to drastically cut the funding for border militarization to only the essentials." And they are troubled by the Gang of 8" proposal to defer government benefits for newly legalized immigrants by a decade or more. They also dont like rigid criteria" denying citizenship to illegal immigrants guilty of three misdemeanors or one aggravated felony, speculating about racial profiling," and surmising that punitive public policy is usually ineffective public policy."

This statement reflects the fact that United Methodist and other mainline Protestant public policy advocates have been politically marginalized for so long that they have the luxury of political posturing before their own audience without worry for any actual national impact.

Jim Wallis, for example, likely agrees with the United Methodists on virtually every point about immigration. His unvarnished rhetoric of twenty-five years ago sounded very much like theirs, if not more radical. But he has carefully aligned himself with strategically more important Evangelicals for more than a decade. And his public endorsement of same-sex marriage so far has not significantly estranged him from Evangelical allies; witness his inclusion in the largely Evangelical media conference call aimed at Leahy.

Fascinating times for church political witness. If some form of mass legalization passes, it will probably solidify new religious alliances and confirm a political evolution especially for many Evangelicals. If it fails, it will be perhaps one sign that despite all the rhetoric, Evangelicals remain politically conservative and skeptical of sweeping legislative solutions to immigration and much else.

Meanwhile, Evangelical and Catholic public resistance to including same-sex couples in otherwise appealing (for them) immigration legislation hopefully evinces a persistent adherence to traditional Christian teaching amid increasing adversity. It recalls the USCCBs refusal to back Obamacare over abortion. May such principled stubbornness continue.

Mark D. Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy.

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For the past half-century, cultural conservatives have been running an ambulance service. Alarmed by the collapse of sexual morals, rising rates of divorce and illegitimacy, and legalized abortion, weve devoted energy and resources to shoring up the traditional family," conceived of as father-breadwinner, mother-homemaker, and their common children. But the nuclear family is as much problem as solution. An exclusive focus on defending the nuclear family reinforces the social dislocations that created the crisis.

Its a truism among social historians that the nuclear family is not the traditional family. Peter Berger and Hansfried Kellner pointed out years ago that marriages used to be firmly embedded in a matrix of wider community relationships." Husbands and wives knew each other long before they were married, and their marriage pulsed" with the same life as the wider community. Today, by contrast, each family constitutes its own segregated subworld," a subworld that married couples have to exert much greater effort" to construct. For todays couples, success or failure hinges on the present idiosyncrasies of only two individuals." Once, it took a village. Now two are enough to tango.

Not even the most traditional of traditionalists wants to return to a world where clan ambitions and dynastic politics trump the desires of individual men and women. At its best, though, that matrix of wider relationships" provided models for lifelong marriages, encouragement and advice to weather marital storms, and dozens of sets of eyes to notice when marriages were going sour. Communities are meddlesome, but meddling can be a social good. 

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, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and on its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is."

Marriage stretches beyond the local community to embrace the cosmic: The marriage of two lovers joins them to one another, to forebears, to descendants, to the community, to Heaven and earth." Embedded in a network of relations, marriage and the nuclear family were public facts. 

For Christians, the wider public is first of all the Church. During each of the dozens of wedding services I have performed, I have asked the congregation, Do you as a church and family promise to do all in your power to uphold these two persons in their marriage covenant?" I have been blessed to serve a church where the Amen" to that question is never perfunctory. 

Fragmented communities weaken marriages, and our society seems cunningly designed to fracture communities. The subtle threats are the most corrosive, and are deeply engraved on the physical arrangements and habitual patterns of our lives. What kind of scrutiny can a community have over marriages when neighbors see neighbors only when both are comfortably encased in a sound-proof, air-conditioned bubble of glass and steel? How much help will your friends be to your family if you squeeze out time for real conversation only a few times a year, on the handful of evenings youre not working late at the office? How much community scrutiny is possible when live and let live" is a cultural axiom? 

Raising such questions, and invoking Berry, presents a spectrum of issues that many cultural conservatives prefer to dodge. The most penetrating conservative analysts of family life, such as Allan Carlson, have always recognized the cultural contradictions of capitalism and of technological society. They have always recognized the costs (as well as the gains) of separating work and home; of geographic, vocational, and social mobility; of the indisputable wealth-generating power of capitalism. On the ground, though, conservatives look the other way when told that our economic system or our technological progress might inhibit the formation of what Berry describes as an economy that exists for the protection of gifts, beginning with the 'giving in marriage."

Nuclear families as we know them today are the product of the same forces that undermined the communal support system on which nuclear families depend. Without that support system, the nuclear family is at best a thin reed, at worst a cause of yet more fragmentation. So long as cultural conservatives avoid addressing these wider forces, we will be able to mount nothing more than a rear-guard reaction. So long as we stay in our ambulances, well continue to see an alarming number of industrial accidents. God willing, well heal some, but its high time we take a look at the factory to find out whats happening inside.

Peter J. Leithart is on the pastoral staff of Trinity Reformed Church in Moscow, Idaho, and senior fellow of theology and literature at New St. Andrews College. His most recent book is Between Babel and Beast: America and Empires in Biblical Perspective . His previous On the Square" articles can be found here.

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