Some time ago I argued in a magazine column that liberalism has developed in recent decades from a rigidly secular political philosophy into a this-worldly religion with its own more or less developed though unsystematic dogma based on faith and a reciprocal concept of heresy, its own unwritten creed and sacramental system, a loose rhetorical … Read more
After Windsor or Obergefell, I cannot remember which, it occurred to me that our best strategy, if only it would not cause scandal or offend truth, might be to extend the reasoning of those decisions and advocate for the most outrageous rights to show the absurdities to which the logic, or illogic, of those decisions … Read more
The Title IX world turned upside down when Avital Ronell, a “world renowned” lesbian New York University professor, was “found responsible” for ongoing physical and verbal sexual harassment of Nimrod Reitman, her male graduate student. Reitman, who identifies as gay and is now married to a man, claims that Ronell, age 66, refused to work … Read more
By now most people have seen the videos on YouTube. An agent provocateur ventures to a college campus and asks students if someone with male chromosomes and genitalia is a woman if s/he claims to be a woman. The students uniformly accept that the person is whatever gender they claim. Then the provocateur asks the … Read more
“In This House, We Believe: Black Lives Matter, Women’s Rights Are Human Rights, No Human Is Illegal, Science Is Real, Love is Love, Kindness Is Everything.” These are the words plastered on many signs that dot the landscape of lawns across America, but especially in and around liberal enclaves. It is interesting to note that … Read more
As I’ve often observed, if Islam ever succeeds in subjugating America it won’t be primarily through force of arms, but through cultural jihad (aka stealth jihad). For cultural jihad to succeed, however, it’s necessary that there are enough people in the target culture who are willing to ignore it or even to facilitate it. Put … Read more
In a distant place and a distant time, there lived an enlightened king. He was a righteous and forward-looking man who cared deeply about his kingdom and its subjects. Because he was enlightened he could see what others could not. Unlike others, he clearly saw that the past only shackled the future. In seeing the … Read more
Before Kaitlin Jenner there was Rachel Levine. Levine is a biological male who has been transitioning to female over the last decade. Levine is also a medical specialist in eating disorders with nearly thirty years of experience in pediatric psychology. In 2015, Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf appointed Dr. Levine as state physician general, explaining that … Read more
During the last year of my employment at Nameless College, whose sharp turn away from its Catholic identity and its commitment to the humanities came as a shock to my foolish optimism, I learned of what Elizabeth Corey has shrewdly called “The First Church of Intersectionality.” You must understand, my sane and ordinary readers, that … Read more
At Cromwell High School in Connecticut, a 15-year-old boy with a mustache recently crushed female competitors in track and field, to the great dismay of the girls who have spent many intense days training so hard. This doesn’t seem fair, does it? It does in the left’s brave new world of fundamental transformation. The boy, … Read more
It has been nine long months since the publication of Amoris Laetita, but there is still no end in sight to the confusion and turmoil it has unleashed within almost every corner of the Catholic Church. Bishops have now turned to the excruciating task of implementation as they try to elicit the pastoral implications of … Read more
According to the German Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper, the “wisdom of the West” expresses the sum total of what man “ought to” be. This wisdom was then discredited and rejected in the Modern era, and so is largely unavailable to post-modern man, who bobs along in the wake of Modernism, which has largely discredited itself. Here … Read more
Higher education in the United States is beset with a variety of crises, from skyrocketing tuition rates to the attendant ballooning student loan debt. Much has been written in the last several years, in particular, about the dire situation in which the humanities find themselves in the universities, as student enrollment in majors such as … Read more
It is popular today to speak of clashing worldviews as “narratives.” History shows, we’re told, that it is almost impossible for a narrative to imagine a standpoint outside itself. That is what defines it as a narrative. It is only when it has been surpassed by another narrative—as paganism was eclipsed by Christianity and Christianity … Read more