reason

There Ain’t No Pure Church

Some people become Catholic because the Church is a communion of sinners and slobs who are losers, oddballs, factory rejects, and broken dunderheads who can’t tell their butt from a hole in the ground and who have messed up their lives so badly that they know only God can save them. They don’t know from … Read more

Understanding Liberals

The liberal vision of government is easily understood and makes perfect sense if one acknowledges their misunderstanding and implied assumptions about the sources of income. Their vision helps explain the language they use and policies they support, such as income redistribution and calls for the rich to give something back. Suppose the true source of … Read more

Our Ruling Classes and Reality Management

Well, it’s been an exciting week and a half. On Mercy Sunday, we dispatched Osama bin Laden without mercy, and most people weren’t too broken up about that — including me. I’m a Just War kinda guy, and all the initial reports made it sound like we killed a knave in clean combat as he … Read more

For God So Loved the World, He Created Hell

  Evangelical preacher Rob Bell has created quite a stir by suggesting in his recent book that there is no hell, because God loves us so much. But this is exactly backwards: There is a hell because God loves us so much. Nobody goes to hell except those who irrevocably prefer something else to God … Read more

Bad Medicine?

Diagnosed at sixteen with a lifelong autoimmune disease, I’ve had a lot of time to think about physical suffering and how best to approach it. Crohn’s disease and inflammatory arthritis are not usually life threatening, and I’ve been blessed to not have them disrupt my life too severely. Still, I’ve had my fair share of … Read more

Easter in a Time of Scandal

C. S. Lewis remarks somewhere that he heard a woman on a bus once complain that the Christians couldn’t leave well enough alone. Now they were even trying to drag their beliefs into Christmas. I think of that as I watch postmoderns (a people radically innocent of historical knowledge or perspective, for whom the Age … Read more

Teachers, Tenure, and Labor Unrest

As a tenured professor at a state school with a conventional pension plan, I have been very interested in the recent labor unrest in Wisconsin. Throw in the facts that my grandfather was a local politician in Wisconsin and that I have a first cousin in that state who is an elementary teacher, and the … Read more

The real reason states are bankrupt?

If we want to understand why so many states teeter on bankruptcy, Stephen Moore, senior economics writer for the Wall Street Journal, says we should look no further than statistics about U.S. workers. There are now almost twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (8.7 million), a reversal from … Read more

Feeling your age

The UK’s Daily Mail reports on a recent study that shows that women consider themselves old at 29, whereas men don’t consider themselves old until about 58. Apparently, women’s perceptions of their own age relate to their appearance, but for men it’s about sexual performance.  It is thought that this gulf between the sexes is … Read more

True and False Tolerance

Tolerance is an ambiguous word greatly valued by the zeitgeist. Who dares to declare himself against tolerance? There would be nothing left to say, however, if the contemporary idea of tolerance was not fundamentally distorted. Properly understood, tolerance implies respect for people but not agreement with their error or fault. Thus, ideas do not have … Read more

Opposing Abortion With Reason Alone

Long before I became a Catholic at age 34, I opposed abortion.  I came to this position on the basis of reason alone — as an Evangelical I had not been schooled on this issue.  Evangelicals, by the way, did not start their anti-abortion activism until the 80s, taking over leadership from Catholics like Dr. … Read more

The Apple Argument against Abortion

I doubt there are many readers here who are pro-choice. Why, then, do I write an argument against abortion? Why preach to the choir?   Preaching to the choir is a legitimate enterprise. Scripture calls it “edification,” or “building up.” It is what priests, ministers, rabbis, and mullahs try to do once every week. We … Read more

The case for ugliness

Simcha Fisher is popping up everywhere these days. In addition to her personal blog and her contributions here and at Faith & Family, she’ll now be blogging at the National Catholic Register as well — a lucky thing for those of us who think the world can always use more Simcha. And her first post … Read more

Bishop Vasa to doctors: ‘Do whatever He tells you’

Bishop Robert Vasa, the coadjutor bishop-elect of Santa Rosa, CA, and the episcopal adviser of the Catholic Medical Association since 2002, presided at a White Mass for medical professionals over the weekend. In his homily, using the example of the Miracle at Cana, Bishop Vasa told the congregation that, when the “usual practice of medicine … Read more

Modern Individualism

On the last page of the final chapter of Democracy in America, Tocqueville summarizes the comparison he has just drawn between the new democracy and the old order as follows: “They are like two distinct humanities.” This is very much the feeling experienced by the partisans as well as the opponents of the modern democratic … Read more

Rowing Upstream: On Being Catholic in the Modern World

Many years ago I was attending my first faculty reception at my first formal faculty appointment, at Stanford, and was met at the receiving line by the sponsoring dean with a warm handshake and the baffling words, “I want to tell you that I have the greatest admiration for your Church.” The two of us … Read more

Words Written in Trembling

A reader recently sent me the following: Somebody I know wrote: This following is about abortion, but not “is it right or wrong” or “what does the Church teach,” but “How on earth would you deal with this pastorally?” A friend of mine has a married cousin. She and her husband had a healthy child … Read more

Ryan Woodward’s “Thought of You”

No matter how far and how superlatively the folks at Pixar push the computerization envelope, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to get over my obsession with hand-drawn animation. I can’t quite quantify/describe the difference, but I sure can “feel” it. Ryan Woodward’s “Thought of You” is the latest example over which I have … Read more

Chosenness

Some time back, a reader wrote me with an interesting observation: You know, I just thought of something. I used to have a part-time job as a pest caller (phone surveys, mostly) and so I met a lot of Wiccans. (In the 90’s they congregated in phone & restaurant work, for some reason; don’t know … Read more

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