morality

Quasi-Religions

Two basic needs that we human beings have are the need for meaning and the need for morality. We need to feel that our lives are meaningful, that they have a purpose. And we need to have an authoritative moral code that tells us what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s good and what’s bad. Absent … Read more

Marriage and the New Morality

Two men wearing tennis whites walk out on the court. Opening a folding table and chairs, they sit down and start to play chess. An attendant rushes up and says, “Sorry, gentlemen, this place is for tennis. You can’t do that here.” Looking up with a scowl, one of the men snaps, “This is how … Read more

This Just In: Civilization Ends

When do you know it’s over? When do you know that civilization has collapsed inwardly to such an irreparable extent that the next stop is barbarism? When is that Weimar moment? Certainly, the legalization of abortion was one such moment, as barbarism is defined as the inability or unwillingness to recognize another person as a … Read more

New Comics Explore Moral Questions

For someone always interested in the issues of religion and morality in comic books, today’s visit to the comic book news websites was a definite payday. First up is a self-contained graphic novel just released earlier this month, Ghostopolis, by Doug TenNapel.  He’s the writer/artist who wrote some of my favorite Christian comics, including Earthboy Jacobus, … Read more

Dual Citizenship

This weekend, we Americans celebrate 234 years of national independence. For most of that time, we rejoiced that two broad oceans protected us from foreign wars and enemies. No more: The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, removed forever any doubt on that score.   What is the appropriate response? To that question there is … Read more

Back to the Roots: The Founders and the Separation of Church and State

The cry, “That violates the separation of church and state!” has been the centerpiece of the secularist drive to marginalize Christianity in the public sphere since the 1940s. The real — and often neglected — question is what precisely that separation means and how it should be interpreted and applied. The secularists’ interpretation of the … Read more

Is “Easy Rider” a Catholic Film?

The late Dennis Hopper’s film is associated of course with the counter culture; in fact, in the 1970s it inspired a bunch of movies that did not exactly uphold the values of traditional morality and the Establishment. Now, or a few weeks ago at least, conservative commenters say that all along the film has been … Read more

Cardinal O’Malley defends school decision

Last week, I mentioned that a Boston-area Catholic school had declined to re-enroll a boy with lesbian parents, but that the archdiocese was looking to place the student in another Catholic school. On his personal blog yesterday, Cardinal Sean O’Malley defended the archdiocese’s decision: In Boston we are beginning to formulate policies and practices to … Read more

The Liberal Arts and Sexual Morality

Are the liberal arts and sexual morality connected? There is strong evidence that they are, for if we graph their development over the last half-century, we will see an almost identical curve of accelerating decline. Although this proves nothing, it certainly suggests something worth exploring more deeply. Spectacular proof of the decline of the liberal … Read more

Clothe the Naked

“Nake” is an extinct English word meaning to strip clothes off. To be “naked,” therefore, is to be in a state of having had your clothes stripped off. Why does this bit of pedantry matter? Because it speaks volumes about what our ancestors regarded as the “natural state of man.” It is not until after … Read more

Seven Ways the Bishops Should Respond to Sex Abuse

To rebuild the trust of U.S. Catholics in the Church and its leaders and to make reparations to the victims left in the wake of this scandal, the bishops need to address several points: 1. The bishops should make clear that this is a crisis and that they are not conducting business as usual. Powerful … Read more

Why Attack the Pope?

Sexual abuse is deplorable, no matter where it occurs. But one wonders: Why the near hysteria regarding sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, most of which occurred decades ago, from a society that celebrates the lack of constraints against almost every form of sexual activity, no matter how degraded? Is there any other instance of … Read more

Wendell Berry Friday

If you ask me, we’re way overdue for a Wendell Berry reading around here. In Berry’s essay The Use of Energy, he reflects on the agrarian ethos, the connection between religion and energy, and the role of living things, tools, and machines. He concludes that the energy crisis is not one of technology, but of … Read more

Debating ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’

It’s a heated debate: Should Congress go along with the request — recently made by President Barack Obama, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that was adopted by Congress and President Bill Clinton in 1993? Should … Read more

Natural Law and Abortion

  In the current opposition to abortion on moral grounds, the “right to life” principle has attained an indisputable hegemony. But numerous exceptions to this principle are admitted, even by those who stand firmly by the general rule. Self-defense in the face of unjust aggression or threats to life is almost universally approved; just war … Read more

The Failure of Darwinism to Explain Morality

“As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.” G.K. Chesterton In the struggle to survive, the fit win, and so it is also … Read more

Feminists and Moral Consciousness

Since writing The Thrill of the Chaste — a recovery manual for grown-ups who missed the memo on abstinence — I have addressed all kinds of people, from fishermen in Alaska to unwed moms in New York City, pornographers at “Sex Week at Yale” to hooting Catholic schoolboys in Drogheda, Ireland. But never have I … Read more

The Beatitudes

Over Lent, we took a good long look at one of the legs of Catholic moral teaching: the Ten Commandments.   Some people have the notion that the Ten Commandments are pretty much all you need for Catholic moral teaching. Hew to them and you’ll be a moral person — and being a moral person … Read more

The Fifth Commandment

  It’s a simple-sounding proposition: "You shall not kill" (Ex 20:13). And some people, such as pacifists, are absolutists in understanding it to mean that all killing is forbidden. But, in fact, that is not what the commandment means. In Hebrew, the Fifth Commandment forbids the taking of innocent human life. Both war and the … Read more

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