March 14, 2018
by Jennifer Roback Morse
Cardinal Cupich has been holding seminars on implementing Amoris Laetitia. These “New Momentum Conferences” will “provide formative pastoral programs.” I wonder whether these seminars will include anything for reluctantly divorced persons. No one else seems to be doing anything for abandoned spouses. Perhaps Cardinal Cupich and his friends will step up to the plate. The [...]
November 29, 2017
by Stephen Baskerville
The Sexual Revolution continues to inspire an outpouring of new books, not all of which present a benign picture of the consequences. Yet it is still rare for a scholar employed at a state-funded university to weigh in on family-sexual issues with any viewpoint other than sympathy for radical left ideology, and even rarer for [...]
September 12, 2017
by Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
“I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America.” ∼ Tocqueville, Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville was the great French chronicler of the early United States. Nearly 200 years ago, he spotted a basic tension in our national character. It’s this: Americans place [...]
August 28, 2014
by Mark Regnerus
As mainline Protestant denominations increasingly accept the ordination of gay clergy and publicly affirm same-sex unions, the sociologist in me wishes to understand what this development means for people in those denominations. I’m not talking about subtle linguistic shifts. While the difference between speaking of marriage as a “civil contract between a woman and a [...]
January 30, 2014
by Matthew Hennessey
Social science is a sham. That’s what I take from Helen Rittelmeyer’s superlative February 2014 First Things essay, “Bloodless Moralism.” Claims to objectivity are a smokescreen—those who profess to explain political, economic, or social behavior are almost always motivated by personal interests and natural biases. They are often at least as politically minded—if not more [...]
July 19, 2013
by Robert Oscar Lopez
Emotional abuse can be as bad as physical abuse. Any young person who’s heard the words, “I wish you were never born,” understands that adults can inflict tremendous damage on their dependents without leaving the slightest bruise. One of the worst parts of abuse is society’s refusal to see the injustice. Emotional abuse is particularly [...]
January 10, 2013
by Robert Oscar Lopez
How much is victory worth? And after you win, if you win, what do you have to show for it? As these principles go with warfare, so they go with propaganda. The Greek word polemos, "war," led not to the English word "war," but rather to the English word "polemics." The gay movement is not [...]
December 27, 2012
by Luis Tellez
Election Day was a drubbing for marriage. The ballot initiatives to protect marriage lost by over 4% in Maine, Minnesota, Washington State, and Maryland. Those who support same-sex “marriage” reportedly spent over $33 million, while those who defend marriage spent just over $10 million. Many friends have said that same-sex marriage is inevitable. It is [...]
November 15, 2012
by Walter R. Schumm
In the July issue of the scholarly journal Social Science Research (SSR), Professor Mark Regnerus (pictured) published an article detailing initial results from his New Family Structures Study. His results suggested that adult children who had been raised, for at least a brief time, in families with a gay, lesbian, or bisexual parent were more [...]
October 25, 2012
by Dr. William Oddie
I want to be clear, at the outset, that this is not yet another blog about Catholic teaching on the morality of homosexuality, nor is it (except indirectly) one more defense of the traditional family. It’s partly (but again indirectly) about the social effects of treating homosexual unions as though they were equivalent to marriage [...]
September 26, 2012
by Dr. William Oddie
Earlier this year, in Faith magazine, I asked this question: “Are ‘gay rights’ now the most prominent defining issue delineating—at least in Europe and the US—the gulf between the Catholic Church and the modern world?” This was a rhetorical question inviting the answer, yes: and in the months that followed, I have, it seems to [...]
September 17, 2012
by Stephen M. Krason
Franciscan University of Steubenville, where I have been a long-time faculty member, recently found itself again in the national news involving the culture wars—as it was during the summer when an aggressive atheist organization pressured the City of Steubenville, Ohio to remove a depiction of the University’s chapel from its logo—when a group of its [...]
September 4, 2012
by Robert Oscar Lopez
Between 1973 and 1990, when my beloved mother passed away, she and her female romantic partner raised me. They had separate houses but spent nearly all their weekends together, with me, in a trailer tucked discreetly in an RV park 50 minutes away from the town where we lived. As the youngest of my mother’s [...]
August 7, 2012
by Karl D. Stephan
Because scientific progress depends so much upon how research is conducted and peer-reviewed, the matter of research integrity should be a concern for everyone. An acquaintance of mine, University of Texas sociology professor Mark Regnerus, has recently found himself in the center of a tornadic controversy over a paper he published last month in the [...]