Attention to one’s duties to state in life prevents normal Catholics from keeping track of the latest depredations of cancel culture. That is as it should be. Staring at the societal collapse only leaves one’s soul depleted, while engendering a sterile rage. Reliable sources such as this one should be sufficient in fulfilling one’s obligation [...]

Officer Derek Chauvin has been convicted of second-degree murder in the death of George Floyd. I won’t express any opinion about the verdict because I was not at the trial, and I have not examined the evidence closely. I’ve been advised by a policeman whose opinion I trust that a conviction for manslaughter was appropriate. [...]

I recently logged onto the Voice of America (VOA) website—an American international broadcaster funded by the U.S. Congress—and saw an article entitled “LGBTQ Members Face Threats in Iraqi Kurdistan,” which discussed the plight of Iraq’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning or queer (LGBTQ) community in the country’s autonomous region of Kurdistan.  The segment included [...]

During this 117th Congressional Session, certain Members of Congress reintroduced the “Equality Act” (H.R. 5, S. 393), which would, among other provisions, amend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to prohibit discrimination on the basis of “sexual orientation” and “gender identity.” Adoption of this bill would release one of the final restraints on abuse in [...]

I see that Ousseynou Sy’s sentence for attempted murder has just been reduced to 19 years on appeal. Ousseynou Sy? Perhaps the name doesn’t ring a bell. He’s the bus driver who set his bus full of children on fire two years ago. It happened on a highway near Milan, Italy. Sy hijacked his school [...]

It seems like rioting (or the threat thereof) has become a form of participatory democracy. Nothing reveals the disintegration of authority and the common good so much in our society as the more and more frequent resort to violence. That this is particularly connected to police and the use of force, undue or otherwise, is [...]

The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement during the riots in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, brought increased scrutiny into the movement’s leadership. Formed in the wake of the Trayvon Martin shooting back in 2013, Black Lives Matter is a terrorist organization that uses race as a weapon against communities across the United States—that much [...]

“The early church was a socialist church.” So said Rev. Raphael Warnock in 2016, four years before the citizens of Georgia elected him a U.S. senator. It’s a strange statement, least of all because the description “socialist church” is an oxymoron. Not only would the Church fathers be puzzled by it, but so would socialism’s [...]

Several decades ago, in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff contended that, in the West, the religious worldview that was concerned with personal salvation in God had been eclipsed by the therapeutic culture. The primary goal of this new, dominant culture is for the individual to feel good because there is “nothing at stake [...]

This may shock you, but most mass shooters are not white.  The American Left, including the Catholic political Left, hold onto certain narratives as if their lives depended on it. They hold on so tightly their knuckles—if you’ll pardon the expression—turn white. Hardly any narrative seems so important to them right now as “most mass [...]

There has been much discussion in recent years regarding what the Catholic Church can do about self-identified Catholic politicians who support policies considered gravely immoral by the Church. Most of the conversation has centered around Canon 915, which states that those who are “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to [...]

The events of the past year have posed new and, in certain respects, unprecedented challenges not only for the Church and the body politic, but also for individual man and his relationship to both. In the early days of the pandemic, governments surely had just cause for concern in the face of this highly contagious [...]

While a growing number of media outlets are attempting to indict “white supremacists” for the dramatic increase in reported hate crimes against people of Asian descent, the reality is that for more than four decades Asian Americans in some of our largest cities have been the victims of violence and discrimination perpetrated by members of [...]

There is a section in Monsignor Luigi Giussani’s The Religious Sense in which he identifies various ways of escape people choose when confronted with questions of unwelcome ultimacy. For instance, the meaning of one’s own existence, about which a great many people appear to be strangely incurious. The section is called “Emptying the Question,” and in [...]

My daughter’s high school required her to wear a black cardigan sweater. So off we went to a clothing store so that she could be in full conformity with the school’s dress code. The sales clerk, however, told us that none were in stock. Nonetheless, my daughter, while browsing, discovered exactly what she was looking [...]

If you’ve scratched your head over the latest of the ever-growing number of things (like algebra and Beethoven) that has “become” racist, you can blame your confusion on radical leftist Saul Alinsky. Alinsky once said, “He who controls the language controls the masses.” Today, the masses are being played by some novel concepts derived neither [...]

In just the first months of the Biden administration, Catholic educators have been confronted by serious threats to their freedom to teach and witness to the Catholic faith. We knew the storm was coming. Over the last four years, schools and colleges enjoyed a brief respite before the anticipated return of Obama-era policies like the [...]

“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only—and that is to support the ultimate career.”  That famous C.S. Lewis line (which is actually just a paraphrase of his original quote) comes to mind every time I see a headline about what the market rate value of a housewife should [...]

Politics is downstream from culture. You have heard it plenty of times. Andrew Breitbart coined it, and many conservatives have adopted it as a truism, almost as gospel. But is it true? Sure, it’s true. It makes perfect sense. The country’s political views grow from a cultural soil that has been prepared. Brown v. Board [...]

Everything seems to be an existential threat nowadays—from racial, gender, economic and political inequalities, to climate change, to the coronavirus pandemic. However, if we have been paying attention to the media recently, there has been a new addition to the list: misinformation, aka “fake news.” Journalists and politicians would have us believe that misinformation has [...]