Thousands of medical ethicists and bioethicists, as they are called, professionally guide the unthinkable on its passage through the debatable on its way to becoming the justifiable until it is finally established as the unexceptionable. Continue Reading »
Cohen declares, “No outcome in Syria could be worse than the current one.” He seems to have a high degree of confidence that if the United States had bombed the Assad regime, it would have produced a more peaceful Syria. Maybe it would have. Or maybe bombing—or perhaps better to say, merely bombing—the Assad forces would have produced only a different kind of hell. Continue Reading »
The contradictions between these two ways of looking at the world, promethean and determinist, are obvious. Either we are autonomous individuals who transcend the accidents of birth or we are members of whatever identity groups we happened to be born into. Depending on the circumstances, the Left will either deny or affirm the primacy of nature. Continue Reading »
Goldwater by 1964 was the unquestioned leader of the emerging conservative movement. Trump, by contrast, has channeled a populist impulse that has yet to become a movement. It’s true that his candidacy has resonated deeply with a segment of the population and has similarities with other right-wing, anti-immigrant movements in Europe. But at this point he heads a personal, candidate-centric campaign. Continue Reading »
A lesson for Catholics in the U. S. from a classic history of the struggle for control of the American continent. Continue Reading »
Pope vs. Hitler opens by asking whether Pius XII really was “Hitler’s Pope,” as John Cornwell notoriously alleged, or rather, as Riebling’s book maintains, Hitler’s implacable enemy. Cassel includes critics, and not just supporters, of Pius XII. But his film makes clear where the hard evidence lies. Continue Reading »
It is atomized societies that are susceptible to demagogues—not societies that enjoy strong social bonds and organic communal solidarity. Continue Reading »
What should a preacher do in his Sunday sermon? Lecture on the Bible? Talk about Jesus? Tell stories? Comment on current events? Exhort Christians to live Christianly? Continue Reading »
A book by Donald Ray Pollock is always an entertaining ride, by turns riveting, hilarious, revolting, and poignant. But reading Pollock can be surreal if you grew up a mile down the road from him in Knockemstiff, Ohio. Continue Reading »
Schlafly deserves to be remembered for what she actually was. She was a brilliant student. She was a stay-at-home mother who launched a full-time career as a political activist and public speaker from nearly the day her first child was born, doing a neat end-run around the feminists who claimed to have invented the idea that a married woman could have a professional life. She was a formidable debater and a prolific author to the very end. Continue Reading »
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