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HHS and Soft Totalitarianism

The Obama administration’s recently-announced HHS regulations, which would require Catholic institutions to subsidize health insurance coverage that provides sterilization, abortifacient drugs, and contraceptives, should be located within the context of the administration’s three-year long effort to define religious freedom down. As the administration has demonstrated in its international human rights policy, it regards religious freedom as a kind of privacy right: the right to freedom of worship, which the administration seems to regard as analogous to any other optional, recreational activity… . Continue Reading »

Mitt Romney’s Constitutional Theology

Speaking at a campaign event on Monday, February 13 in Mesa, Arizona, Mitt Romney made a bold suggestion about the Constitution and Declaration of Independence: “They’re either inspired by God or written by brilliant people or perhaps a combination of both.” Inspired by God? It sounds like just another sop tossed to Tea-Party constitutionalism, but Romney was in fact invoking a longstanding Mormon doctrine which views the U.S. Constitution as not only great, but literally divine… . Continue Reading »

Obama Has Stranded the Catholic Left

“Catholic Left” and “Catholic Right” are inadequate and irksome labels that too often sully all of us with the “ick” of politics even when our churchy disagreements are not rooted in politics at all, but simply upon a difference in vision and emphasis. So stipulating, and resigned to using more scare quotes than I would like, I am struck by what little assist President Obama gave to his friends on the “Catholic Left” with last Friday’s “accommodation” to their concerns with his HHS mandate… . Continue Reading »

Santorum Fights the Liberal Bulldozer

Rick Santorum was impossible thirty years ago. If Rip van Winkle woke up today he would be dumbfounded. How could such an overtly religious and socially conservative politician have so much traction on the national scene? The answer comes from the Left. Since the Sixties our liberal elites have become increasingly anti-religious, increasingly opposed to traditional moral norms, and increasingly aggressive. As a result they have made our national politics much more extreme. … Continue Reading »

Miracles of Authority

When abused, authority damages bodies. A husband punches his wife and breaks her nose. Abusive day care workers crush the bones, dislocate the limbs, and scar the souls of small children. Tyrants torture bodies into a quivering mess. Even when the results are not so extreme, abusive authority disables bodies. A husband who never lays an aggressive finger on his wife may still silence her with mockery and bullying threats. Children are blinded to reality by the manipulations of a sexual predator. Harsh teachers don’t open ears to instruction, but deafen… . Continue Reading »

In the Slipstream with Wayne Roosa

Wayne Roosa, artist and art historian, will be displaying his 2010 series, In the Slipstream, at the First Things offices beginning February 16, 2012. (For more information on the opening night event, click here.) A professor of art history at Bethel University, St. Paul, Minnesota, and Chair of the New York Center for Art and Media Studies (NYCAMS), Roosa has been a research fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities research grant. His writings deal with contemporary art as well as the role of faith in art… . Continue Reading »

The Feminist Shaming of Fertility

In light of recent controversies over Planned Parenthood, it is helpful to have a book that illuminates the organization’s motivating ideology. In Women, Sex, and the Church: a Case for Catholic Teaching, Angela Franks lays out how self-described “women’s health groups,” view a woman’s fertility fundamentally as a hindrance, a burden, a disease to be eradicated … Continue Reading »

Vatican III? Where?

There are many good arguments against quickly convening a Third Vatican Council”a notion beloved of Catholics who occupy the portside cabins on the Barque of Peter. The most obvious is that Catholicism has barely begun to digest the teachings of Vatican II on the nature of the Church, the universal call to holiness, and the reform of the episcopate, the priesthood, consecrated life, and the lay vocation in the world… . Continue Reading »

Failing to Connect the Dots on Contraception

At the January 7, 2012 Republican presidential debate, there came a point at which the questioning turned to “social issues.” Moderator George Stephanopoulos asked Mitt Romney whether he thought a state could ban contraception. Stephanopoulos had in mind the 1965 Supreme Court decision Griswold v. Connecticut, which ruled that a state could not ban contraception, and which, by invoking a presumed “right to privacy,” laid the groundwork for the subsequent Roe v. Wade decision overturning bans on abortion… . Continue Reading »

The Counter-Cultural Church has a Credible “Yes”

Last week’s column on the HHS mandate brought a rash of email from the usual suspects”men and women who feel passionately inclined to inform me that the church is “mysogynistic, women-hating, gay-hating, authoritarian, fetus-idolizing…” well, you get the drift. People who could not begin to accurately articulate the church’s position on most matters are quite sure that her counter-cultural stances are grounded on nothing more than hate… . Continue Reading »

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