R. R. Reno

Something must be done. Or so we’re hearing from many quarters, including now the White House. Count me skeptical. The first thing to say concerns the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons. This is being treated as a bright-line violation of global norms that in itself requires . . . . Continue Reading »

Same sex marriage has become the issue of our time. Michael Kinsley summed the situation nicely: “You may be in favor of raising taxes on the rich, increasing support for the poor, nurturing the planet, and repealing Section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act, but if you don’t support gay marriage, you’re out of the club”… . Continue Reading »

What makes a man a man or a woman or a woman? For a long time—forever to be exact—it was nature and its serendipitous allocations of chromosomes. A tiny, tiny, tiny number of newborns emerged with scrambled codes, but the rest of us fall to one side or the other: “Male and female . . . . Continue Reading »

We’re about to enter into a bio-technological revolution that will fundamentally change how children are conceived, gestated, born—-and understood. The science is advancing rapidly. Of equal important are social attitudes. A recent Pew study shows that the American public is largely . . . . Continue Reading »

I love the Feast of the Assumption. The readings for today include a dragon ready to devour the son of the sun-clothed Queen of Heaven. And then there is the magnificat, the Virgin Mary’s hymn of thanksgiving and praise: “My soul doth magnify the Lord; and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my savior”… . Continue Reading »

Jean Bethke Elshtain delivering the 2012 Erasmus Lecture, ” On Loyalty .” She died yesterday. It was not a surprise. Jean was suffering from a debilitating heart condition. But it was nonetheless a shock, as the sharp blow of death so often is, even when we see it coming. Jean was one . . . . Continue Reading »

Some books are great: Middlemarch by George Eliot, for example, or Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. They’re historically important, influential, and seminal. But the monuments of Western culture are not the same as personal touchstones. It’s not just the intrinsic value of certain books”their “greatness””that makes them existentially arresting; it’s also the time and place when they happen to fall into our hands… . Continue Reading »

War on the Weak We’re in the midst of a war on the weak. And I don’t just mean the unborn. We have a right to die, or so we’re told, and therefore we must legalize doctor-assisted suicide. Nobody is harmed, we’re again told, by the free decision of a terminally ill patient to end his life. . . . . Continue Reading »

First things remain first things. The dignity of the human person, the joys and duties of the religious life, the harmony of faith and reason, the profound, indispensible contributions that theologically serious citizens can make to a demo­cratic, pluralistic society: All these and more remain . . . . Continue Reading »

The Catholic Church betrays Christ’s call to love; “Its leadership works though domination, control, and punishment.” So wrote Fr. Bert Thielen, S.J., in a long letter explaining his decision to renounce the priesthood and return to the lay state of life. His letter saddened me. It was Bert who received me into the Catholic Church… Continue Reading»