’Tis the season to be jolly. ’Tis also the season for me to ask for your financial support! Our mission is important. Our need is great. First Things magazine and firstthings.com are published by the Institute on Religion and Public Life, a 503(c)(b) non-profit that depends on people like you for donations… . Continue Reading »
Now it’s certain. This will be a populist papacy. Denunciations of unfettered free market economics in Evangelii Gaudium—“an economy of exclusion and inequality”—attracted a great deal of attention in the secular press. But for the most part commentators ignore the fact that Francis’ populism has a very strong ecclesial dimension as well… . Continue Reading »
How much can one learn about another person in slightly less than one month—especially a person never seen before nor met again? “Not very much,” would be a reasonable answer. Yet that was not true of a special friendship I developed with AME Bishop Sarah Frances Davis during the month of October 2012. Bishop Davis died last month in Houston at age sixty-five… . Continue Reading »
I remember a particular child custody case as a young lawyer. At the preliminary court hearing, opposing counsel and I engaged in a pretty heated hallway discussion. But lawyers argue for a living. I thought it was just the usual chest-bumping. . . . Continue Reading »
The center-right faces two interlocking problems. The first is external. After decades of assuming that America was a center-right country with a “silent majority,” the right was awoken to an America that gave a majority of the popular vote to Barack Obama not under the perfect circumstances of 2008, but under the ambivalent circumstances of 2012. To make it worse, the electorate gave twenty-five out of the thirty-three Senate races contested in 2012 to the Obama’s Democrats or to Democrat-aligned independents. . . . Continue Reading »
I don’t know how many pro-free market Catholics there are, but I sure know a lot of them, and when the Pope speaks on economics, we (and I very much include myself in this “we”) tend to either plug our ears and ignore it, or else confidently and even irreverently dismiss it. Neither of those approaches can suffice. . . . Continue Reading »
There’s a lot for U.S. Catholics to be thankful for at Thanksgiving 2013: seminaries that have turned the corner from the doldrums of the immediate past and are now full, or getting close; a reform of the liturgical reform that is bringing a new sense of the sacred back to Catholic worship; a pope who’s put a new face on the Church while holding fast to the Church’s settled teaching; the finest multimedia exposition of Catholic faith ever produced, Fr. Robert Barron’s “Catholicism” series; strong leadership from our bishops in meeting challenges to religious freedom and moral reality; a burgeoning men’s movement that draws thousands to witness for Christ; a new feminism that rejects a unisex approach to life and that is robustly pro-life. . . . Continue Reading »
As the President prepares to pardon the White House’s Thanksgiving turkeys, it’s worth looking back to our colonial roots to ask what role mercy should play in criminal justice. When we look back at colonial-era punishments, we think of them as promiscuously bloody, far too quick to execute. But while there were many more capital crimes than today, colonial American criminal codes were much less bloody than England’s and gave much more room for mercy than do today’s… . Continue Reading »
Economists with the National Bureau of Economic Research released a working paper in 2009 on global poverty concluding that the world had seen a significant decrease in extreme poverty—defined at the time as living on $1 or less per day—between 1970 and 2006. While even a significant decrease in extreme poverty still leaves much room for additional gains, the decrease in rates of extreme poverty during this period of time is stunning. . . . Continue Reading »
Samuel D. Rocha does not just think outside the box. When it comes to education, his thought is downright otherworldly. A Primer for Philosophy and Education, his brief introduction to the philosophy of education, is proof that educational heresy is what you get when you begin with theological orthodoxy… . Continue Reading »
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