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Search Results for: wicked – Page 3

Rooting Out the Vermin: Bishop Robert Barron’s Letter to a Suffering Church

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In his new book, Letter to a Suffering Church, Bishop Robert Barron provides a necessary mixture of teaching and empathetic rage. Barron is right: we should refuse to be mollified by pathetic excuses and baseless claims that everything is fixed. Yes, we need to pray and pursue holiness, to safeguard those parts of the vineyard that are in blossom. But we also need to root out the vermin and destroy their lairs.

Of The Diversity Delusion, Delivered

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Heather Mac Donald’s The Diversity Delusion is right on point, but it is also biting in tone, brimming with exasperation and anger. Mac Donald is at her finest when she offers an ode to the humanities, reminding the reader of the wonder and sublimity in Shakespeare and Bach, the truth and timelessness in Homer and Plato.

Outrage Mobs Might Be More Forgiving If They Believed in Hell

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Without a Christian framework, but with a strong sense of sin, seemingly minor wrongs and slights are seen as representative expressions of the injustices of society as a whole. But there is no one to grant absolution to the repentant, or to redeem the world from its fallen state. Each wrong is indelible, and so there is only sin and punishment. Forgiveness becomes impossible when every discrete wrong is bundled into a secularized version of original sin.

Hannah Arendt, the Covington High School Students, and Charity in our Political Culture

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In politics, charity requires that we not assume the worst of those we disagree with politically, at least not without substantial proof. Charity is not some fuzzy feeling; it is the principle that motivates people to seek all of the facts about a situation prior to judgment.

Remembering Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

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Fr. Richard John Neuhaus got to the central question facing us: Is it true that postmodern liberal societies are incapable of sustaining the religious values without which they could not have been born, and without which they cannot long function? Neuhaus was unwilling to surrender to that proposition. Neither should we be.

Intentional Killing Is a Usurpation of God’s Lordship Over Life: A Reply to Edward Feser

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Public Discourse is launching two new features: short book notes and long form essays. They'll run occasionally, on Saturdays and Sundays. Today is our first longform essay. Enjoy.

Permission to own slaves and suppress false religions was taught by the Old Testament, never denounced by the New Testament, and accepted in word and deed for very long periods by popes, bishops, and saints. And yet the Church eventually repudiated such permission. So, too, with intentional killing in capital punishment. The fact that death is deserved and proportionate does not license the state or any human being to intend to impose it.

Pawns in a Tabloid Kingdom of Likes

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We must have the fortitude to exorcise the shrill voices and influence of the angry mob from our souls. Parents, educators, and clergy: be wise, good, and courageous, and teach your children and students to be the same.

Living With Morals: A Review of The Fall of Gondolin

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Tolkien not only imagined heroes, glory, and splendor for us, but depicted hope after ruin and tragedy.

Is It Possible to Reconcile Nationalism and a Commitment to Universal Human Dignity?

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Can nationalistic love of one’s country be integrated into a moral framework of universal human dignity? Yoram Hazony’s new book tackles this question, but his answer is unsatisfying.

Jordan Peterson on Cain and Abel

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Spurred by social comparison, Cain and Abel represent rival responses to the suffering inherent in the human condition following the rise of self-consciousness. Abel’s suffering leads to his self-development as a warrior. Cain’s suffering leads to envy, malevolence, and murder. This essay explicates and develops Peterson’s interpretation of the story.

Masterpiece, Marriage, and Bigotry: The Court’s Ruling Is More Robust than Many Acknowledge

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State officials and judges cannot comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Masterpiece simply by articulating facially neutral reasons for decisions that punish people for acting on the understanding that marriage is a man-woman union.

What Mothers Cannot Give to Their Sons

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For the sake of boys and the families they must eventually lead, we must open our hearts and quit attempting to thrust upon them an unnatural and uninspiring commitment to sexual indifference.

Adapt or Die: Why Social Conservatives Need a Moneyball Revolution

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If social conservatives don’t radically alter what we are doing—if we don’t buck the current conventional wisdom and do something different—we will lose.

Law, Liberalism, and Luther: Beyond the Myths

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Contrary to the popular, tidy narrative repeated by Robert Reilly and others, neither Luther nor his colleagues and heirs “abandoned” natural law. Nor did they recast it in a voluntarist mold. They embraced and defended it along entirely traditional lines.

Grace Builds Upon and Doesn’t Destroy Nature: On First Things, Baptism, and the Natural Family

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We need not parrot old arguments, but we should avoid giving countenance to dangerous and unproductive ones. Being novel, contrarian, and clever is no substitute for the politics of prudence and the sober pursuit of truth.

Capital Punishment, Catholicism, and Natural Law: A Reply to Christopher Tollefsen

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Aquinas taught the principle that a punishment ought to be proportionate to the offense, where death is a proportionate punishment for the gravest crimes.

Doubting Thomas (Aquinas) on Private and Public Killing

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There is a genuine tension, not just in Aquinas but in Church teaching more generally, between claims about the intrinsic goodness, sanctity, and inviolability of human life, and claims about political authority to kill. The second in a two-part series.

A Philosophical Case Against Capital Punishment

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Arguments against the death penalty can be made not only on the basis of theology but also on the basis of natural law philosophy. The first in a two-part series.

The Consuming Self

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Americans increasingly identify with our consumption. When combined with political tribalism, the result is the increasing refusal to do business with members of other political or cultural groups. In the end, an identity based on consumption will only consume itself.

The Physiophobe: Modern Man Against Reality

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We are physiophobes: we are afraid of, or we detest, the way things are. We take no delight in the real. We do not revel in boys being boys and girls being girls, and their coming together in marriage, the real thing, to make children, real children.

Cakes and Consciences: The Case of Jack Phillips and Masterpiece Cakeshop

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The Supreme Court recently agreed to hear the case of Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop, who declined to bake a cake for a same-sex wedding reception. There is no need to coerce artists to employ their abilities in ways contrary to their religious beliefs.

The Spiritual Womb: Thomas Aquinas on Parent and Child

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Not only are parents solicitous for their children’s many needs, but until children reach the age of reason, they must “borrow” their parents’ reason. The natural unity of parent and child thus parallels the organic unity of a mature human being.

In Defense of Plato’s Republic

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For Socrates, the city isn’t only an arbitrarily chosen device for illuminating the soul’s mysteries but an essential means for creating and sustaining justice and the other virtues in the soul.

Higher Education in Hell

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A politicized education is illiberal by its own inner compulsions. It has almost the hideousness and chaos of hell itself, so inextricably coupled it is with the mire and passions of the passing day.
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