“Courage,” said Atticus Finch, is “when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.” Harper Lee’s southern hero understood a truth that many religious conservatives must now embrace: Bravery often isn’t rewarded. Last week Time . . . . Continue Reading »
The First Things Podcast, Episode 10. Also featuring: Catholic immigration theology and defunding Howard Zinn. Continue Reading »
The First Things Podcast, Episode 6. Also featuring: The Elephant Graph and Aphorisms on Youth and Age. Continue Reading »
The man to whom I was pastor, 1988 thereabouts, owned and operated an Amoco service station (long before it became BP Amoco). To his surprise he learned the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), to which he belonged, along with several mainline denominations, had called for a boycott of . . . . Continue Reading »
Is a Thomism friendly to the gay lifestyle the wave of the future? Is it the next phase in a scholarly, sophisticated kind of theology? Such is the impression given by the medieval scholar Adriano Oliva in his new book Amours, published in French and Italian. Continue Reading »
Even if the sexual revolution is ultimately unsustainable, it does not mean that we will see a return to traditional sexual morality. Continue Reading »
It's time to give up the idea of selling sex “ethically.” Continue Reading »
In a few carefully argued pages in his recently translated The Crisis of Modernity, the Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto del Noce explains the “ascendance of eroticism.” Del Noce died in 1989, but his account could have been written yesterday. He illumines why Fifty Shades of Grey . . . . Continue Reading »
Human nature does not change. Despite our postmodern sophistication and our wishful thinking about perfectibility, our nature is immutable—not least in its fickleness, its embrace of irrational ideas and practices, and its suggestibility.Charles Mackay’s classic work, Extraordinary Popular . . . . Continue Reading »
On September 10, we published “An Appeal,” endorsed by a long list of fellow scholars. The Appeal sharply criticized paragraph 137 of the Instrumentum laboris for the upcoming Synod on the family. In her “A Benign Reading of a Confusing Paragraph,” Janet Smith offered a thoughtful . . . . Continue Reading »
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