Honor Among Thieves

by Betsy Childs Howard

Whom can you trust in a room full of virtual criminals? Continue Reading »

20 Jan 2014

Politics and Christianity: The Rule and The Exception (Continued)

by Ralph Hancock

(Please read my previous post first, if you haven’t.) Try to follow me here: Christianity, I was arguing, necessarily implies an ambivalence towards any moral-political culture. On the one hand, it reinforces much conventional moral content by declaring it to be the object of a divine . . . . Continue Reading »

11 Dec 2012

Politics & Christianity: the Rule and the Exception

by Ralph Hancock

The essence of Christianity is to love one another, to have compassion, not to judge, but to forgive, to accept – no? Applied to politics, the implication seems obvious: unlimited tolerance, equality of lifestyles, etc: in a word, extreme liberalism. What’s wrong with this picture? . . . . Continue Reading »

10 Dec 2012

Feeling Moral

by J. Budziszewski

“Luke! Trust your feelings!” As we know, Luke does what he is told, and the galaxy is saved. How fortunate that he did not trust his mind and skill, as he was tempted to, because then the evil empire would have won. The Star Wars movies express a view of how to live, a morality of feeling, found . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Nov 2002

Leading Children Beyond Good and Evil

by James Davison Hunter

Perhaps the enduring subtext in the evolution of moral education in America, and its continuing story to the present, has been a quest for inclusiveness. While the need to provide moral instruction to young people has never been questioned, neither has the impulse to accommodate the ever-growing . . . . Continue Reading »

1 May 2000

Abortion, Set to Music

by Terry Teachout

Sacred Music of the 20th Century LAL-2001, Life Art, Ltd. 129 Frandview Terrace, Box 300, Lakeside, MT 59922 The most unexpected classical music recording I’ve run across recently is Sacred Music of the 20th Century, a compact disc chiefly devoted to a cantata by John Boyle called Requiem for the . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Aug 1996

The Achievement of Alasdair MacIntyre

by Edward T. Oakes

Moral philosophers are caught in a peculiar paradox these days. On the one hand, their field is flourishing: No longer intimidated by the logical positivists (who denied truth to moral assertions except as expressions of likes and dislikes), thinkers as diverse as Iris Murdoch, Martha Nussbaum, and . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Aug 1996

Lost in the Movies

by James Nuechterlein

Last year I saw two truly vile movies, Pulp Fiction and Kids. The first turned my stomach. The second filled me with shame for having sat through it: leaving the theater, I felt unclean. Those movie experiences reminded me of the depths to which popular culture has sunk, a reminder . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Feb 1996

On Bringing One’s Life to a Point

by Gilbert Meilaender

In February of 1994, in what was its March issue, First Things published a statement on the homosexual movement signed by twenty-one people, of whom I was one. An excerpt from that statement was published in the Wall Street Journal on February 24. I do not intend here to rehearse the argument of . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Nov 1994

The Homosexual Movement

by The Ramsey Colloquium

I. The New Thing Homosexual behavior is a phenomenon with a long history, to which there have been various cultural and moral responses. But today in our public life there is something new, a novum, which demands our attention and deserves a careful moral response.The new thing is a movement that . . . . Continue Reading »

1 Mar 1994