The truth doesn’t have a side. That thought came to me while re-watching To Kill a Mockingbird. To view this 1962 movie is to be taken back to a time and place that was black and white in many senses of that term. The story takes place in the South in the mid-1930s, when movies [...]

In a previous essay, I identified the ad lapidem fallacy as the one most commonly used in social media “debates” (I use that term very loosely). This is the tactic of responding to an argument not by addressing its substance, but by mocking it, scoffing at it, or otherwise denigrating it so that observers will [...]

We hear a lot nowadays about the polarization in American politics, between the two parties and between conservatives and “progressives” (as liberals have come to be called). What is not mentioned is that, due especially to ideology, the great casualty of our current politics has been integrity. While politics is not known as a field [...]

More than 70 years ago, the English satirist Aldous Huxley wrote that modernity is the “age of noise.” He was writing about the radio, whose noise, he said “penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions—news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama [...]

Recent developments make me wonder if Church leaders and Catholic institutions in the U.S. are not, “on the unawares,” helping to further crucial parts of the secularist-leftist political and cultural narrative. Several months ago, on a visit to the U.S.-Mexico border one high-ranking prelate criticized “the xenophobic ranting of a segment of the population” on [...]

Complaints that Washington-is-broken, which seem to have new intensity in recent years, often go hand-in-hand with laments about “partisanship” in politics. And, to be sure, there are reasons to be concerned about the functionality of our political system and its ability to address and solve some very serious problems. The present, sad condition of much [...]