September 29, 2020
by Michael Warren Davis
“The world has heard enough of the so-called ‘rights of man.’ Let it hear something of the rights of God.” — Pope Leo XIII Like all the philosophers of the Enlightenment, John Locke believed that morality could be justified on purely rational grounds. Like all the philosophers of the Enlightenment, he was also wary of [...]
July 17, 2020
by Donald DeMarco
In genius and influence, according to Christopher Dawson, Abu Hamed Mohammad Ghazali (1058–1111) most resembles Saint Thomas Aquinas. This is indeed high praise. The Persian scholar’s most famous work is The Destruction of Philosophy (Tehâfat el Falâsifah). As a Moslem thinker, he saw clearly the fundamental incompatibility between the Moslem faith and the Greek conception [...]
June 19, 2020
by Crisis Magazine
On Monday, the Supreme Court handed down its decision on Bostock v. Clayton County. In it, the Court decided that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would retroactively apply to homosexuals and transgenders, protecting them against employment discrimination. What was once the stuff of BuzzFeed rants is now the law of the land: homophobia and [...]
June 17, 2020
by Michael Warren Davis
“An employer who fires an individual for being homosexual or transgender fires that person for traits or actions it would not have questioned in members of a different sex,” he wrote. “It is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” This isn’t the [...]
April 22, 2020
by Casey Chalk
On the Saturday of the Easter Triduum, Virginia governor Ralph Northam signed Senate Bill 868, called the Virginia Values Act, which “prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in housing, public or private employment, public spaces and credit transactions,” according to the Washington Post. It also provides “causes of action,” allowing [...]
February 7, 2020
by Jane Clark Scharl
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 [...]
January 17, 2020
by Austin Ruse
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 [...]
January 1, 2020
by Daniel Guernsey
During a recent eighth-grade trip to Chicago, chaperones and students of Notre Dame Academy in Toledo walked out of a performance of The Nutcracker after learning that lead characters would be portrayed in a gay marriage. This was a courageous and bold move—a correct application of Pope Francis’s well-publicized encouragement of young people “to make [...]
November 27, 2019
by Donald DeMarco
On the night of November 8, 2019, the Toronto Catholic District School Board, after a long and heated debate, voted to adopt four gender terms into its code of conduct: “gender identity,” “gender expression,” “family status,” and “marriage status”. The chairman of the board, who supported the 8 to 4 vote, stated that “we need [...]
August 27, 2019
by Casey Chalk
Do you know those people who constantly demand special treatment? The ones who need all kinds of strange allowances, affirmation, appreciation, and recognition—all for just being them? Maybe they’re hypochondriacs. Maybe they’re always shifting their dietary restrictions, despite not having any food allergies. Or maybe they’re old-fashioned compliment-fishers. These people are drains on their families, [...]
June 5, 2019
by Hudson Byblow
Recently, I have noticed an increasing amount of news reports challenging morality clauses in employment contracts for Catholic school teachers. While yet another example of a teacher breaking a morality clause popped up this spring, another one struck my eye in late 2018, a little closer to home. This latter one didn’t only challenge the [...]
March 18, 2019
by Casey Chalk
Almost four hundred years ago, English Protestants convened at Westminster Abbey to create a new confessional document for the English Church. This document, the Westminster Catechism, became foundational for the Reformed tradition. In this text, the Westminster divines make a remarkable claim regarding the nature of Holy Scripture: All things in Scripture are not alike [...]
October 23, 2018
by Jim Russell
Two things converged this month that caused me to coalesce my thoughts more clearly on the cultural tragedy of “coming out” as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, etc. Of course, the more obvious event was that this past October 11 was “National Coming Out Day,” marking the anniversary of the 1987 March on [...]
October 5, 2018
by Adrian Reimers
"[W]hat the Church holds to be true about human sexuality is not a stumbling block. It is the only real path to joy and wholeness. There is no such thing as an 'LGBTQ Catholic' or a 'transgender Catholic' or a 'heterosexual Catholic,' as if our sexual appetites defined who we are; as if these designations [...]
July 21, 2017
by Jim Russell
As I survey the current state of the Catholic Church, I believe I can no longer hold back. It is time for me to come out. I am and have for some time identified as a member of the QTBGL community, and I need to explain why I call myself a QTBGL Catholic. For those [...]
May 1, 2017
by Jim Russell
The recent April 26 Religion News Service commentary by Fordham University’s Fr. Bryan Massingale is titled “As a Catholic priest, I am against an executive order on religious liberty.” I found it to be breathtaking—in much the same way as a steel-tipped boot can take your breath away as it lands in your gut. The [...]
