First Things RSS Feed - An Exchange https://www.firstthings.com/author/an-exchange en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:55:57 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/an-exchange 60 Sin, Grace, and Zero Tolerance https://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/03/sin-grace-and-zero-tolerance https://www.firstthings.com/article/2005/03/sin-grace-and-zero-tolerance Tue, 01 Mar 2005 00:00:00 -0500 The Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, adopted by the Catholic bishops of the United States in Dallas in 2002, is being reviewed and will be revisited by the bishops at their meeting in June 2005. Article 5 of the Dallas Charter mandates that a cleric be removed permanently from ministry for even a single act of abuse. (The expression “removed from ministry” involves ambiguities that will be clarified below.) Plainly some in the U.S. and apparently many in Rome want that provision changed, so that some who engage in sexual wrongdoing with minors will be returned to ministry.

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]]> War & Statecraft https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/03/war-amp-statecraft https://www.firstthings.com/article/2004/03/war-amp-statecraft Mon, 01 Mar 2004 00:00:00 -0500 In October 2002, George Weigel of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., delivered a lecture on “Moral Clarity in a Time of War” [see FT, January 2003]. The lecture was a response to various statements from religious leaders in the run-up to the conflict in Iraq, most of which, in Weigel’s judgment, exhibited a deplorable ignorance or misunderstanding of the just war tradition. Weigel sets out not only to dust off what he believes is the authentic heart of the tradition, but also to defend a reading of that tradition which would offer secure moral grounding for a preemptive U.S. action against Iraq, or any comparable “rogue state.”

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]]> Correspondence https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/08/correspondence-46 https://www.firstthings.com/article/2001/08/correspondence-46 Wed, 01 Aug 2001 00:00:00 -0400 Avery Cardinal Dulles carefully lays out the Catholic Church’s traditional teaching on capital punishment (” Catholicism and Capital Punishment ,” April), but unfortunately neglects any serious engagement with the text of the Church’s most authoritative articulation to date on the subject, viz., no. 2267 of the 1997 edition of the Catechism of the Catholic Church . The text there indicates that something fundamentally new is happening in the Church’s response to this thorny issue. Two novel points should be noted.

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