We all, at various times, are forgetful. One of my recent memory lapses found me in my branch library sans reading glasses. The librarian could not comply with my request to borrow a pair since she did not want to break the law. The law is taking very good care of me, I thought, and [...]

In 2018, the Maryland legislature passed a bill requiring that sex education classes—those taught to thirteen-year-olds—include lessons on the meaning of consent. The results have been unsurprising. A January article in the Washington Post reports on seventh graders at Hallie Wells Middle School “huddled around a table in their second-period health class,” debating a scenario [...]

As the plague in Europe had its occasional years of acute virulence, so in the United States the election season is upon us again. And as the plague arrived in 1348 and would not be eliminated for five hundred years, and Europe was more or less always beset by plague, so the United States is [...]

There is nothing quite so depressing as politicians jerking nuns around. The Little Sisters of the Poor are returning to the U.S. Supreme Court for a third time. They’ve already twice defended their right not to comply with the Obamacare requirement that employers provide free contraceptive coverage in their health insurance. The Little Sisters are a [...]

I am a passionate lover of both American history and the places where it was enacted—even if I am not always happy with the outcome of specific events. This is why I was fanatically happy when American Heritage Magazine was revived, and why I am a member of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. Ever [...]

Over in Spain, the Vox (“Voice”) party is standing up for parents’ rights in education. Vox is promoting a policy that allows parents to opt their children out of “talks, workshops or activities with an ideological or moral leaning against their leanings”. Not surprisingly, the policy in defense of parental rights has sparked a firestorm [...]

The annual Rainbow Shakedown of America’s corporations continues. The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has released its Corporate Equality Index for 2020. They announced it at Davos, no less. The Corporate Equality Index is the annual threat to corporate America that they better step into line with the gay elite because hell hath no fury as [...]

If you support Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, or Bernie Sanders, you’d better pay close attention to what they are saying about the transgender movement. If elected in November, their administration will have a direct impact on your son’s or daughter’s long-term emotional and physical health, especially if they are on the autism spectrum. Wrapped in [...]

Andrew Yang is a man ahead of his time. Mark my words: within our lifetime, his ominous-sounding “Freedom Dividend—basically a universal basic income, or UBI—will become a plank of at least one of our two major political parties. And how could it be otherwise? Mr. Yang argues (correctly) that the developed world is going through [...]

It is always painful to criticize someone you admire and consider a friend. But Jonathan Last—now the executive editor of The Bulwark, one of these new NeverTrump websites—has allowed his Trump skepticism to color his attitude, not just toward the March for Life but the pro-life movement in general. He gets a lot wrong along [...]

President Donald Trump released his long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan Tuesday, promising a “new dawn” for the region. This comes after the failed $50 billion plan presented last July by the President’s counselor and son-in-law Jared Kushner. Dubbed the “Deal of the Century” by the White House, it aimed to establish financial infrastructure in the Palestinian [...]

In the midst of some of the most divided, rancorous politics America has ever seen, there is one area of intriguing bipartisan agreement: paid family leave. What in the past has been decried by the Right as socialism and by the Left as unnecessary has, in the past few years, become an unexpected rallying point [...]

I’m ambivalent about that most common pro-life argument: that, because life begins at conception, to abort a pregnancy is to commit murder. That’s not to say I don’t believe it’s true. On the contrary: it’s not only true, it’s obviously true. It’s one of the few points upon which credible scientists and ethicists can agree. [...]

Editor’s note: this article by the founder of Crisis first appeared in the March 1993 print edition of this magazine. More and more, through deception and euphemism, the American people are being led by their government into the primitive and barbaric practice of abortion. They are being led to think of abortion as a moral good, a [...]

Imagine there was a program to help fund alternative schooling including religious schooling, and even the costs of homeschooling, that was not under the control of the U.S. Congress. Not possible, right? Wrong! I was at the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday for oral arguments in the landmark case of Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue. [...]

Mark Joseph Stern, the resident LGBT scold at Slate magazine, is having a hissy fit over pronouns. Stern complains that a “transgender” pedophile in federal custody was not allowed to be called by his preferred pronouns. The case revolves around a man named Norman Varner, who, in 2012, was found to have sexual images of [...]

Pro-life America will march the Washington Mall on January 24, 2020, to protest the Supreme Court’s 1973 (Roe v. Wade) and 1992 (Planned Parenthood v. Casey) rulings to make abortion accessible without “undue burden” of law. Though January marks the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, this year the March for Life is looking ahead to [...]

My late father-in-law, Neil McCaffrey (founder of Arlington House publishers, The Conservative Book Club, etc.), remarked back in the 1960s that bishops would do well to learn something about economics, given their predilection for instructing the faithful and indeed the world in that discipline in its moral dimension. It has seemed to me for the [...]

Last month I had the privilege and the pleasure of being a panelist during a public debate in Budapest on the thorny subject of “Christian Democracy and the Future of Europe”. I was one of five “experts” on the panel. The others came from Poland, Hungary, Germany, and England. My fellow Englishman on the panel [...]

Some years ago, I served at a parish with a priest—let me call him Father Micawber—who frequently asked me to preach. It seems he was satisfied with my homilies, with a single exception. “You should be more upbeat,” he told me. “We want people to leave Mass happier than when they came in the door.” [...]