I started to respond in the combox to Joseph Pearce's response to Austin Ruse's response to Sanyeev Sanjal's report (which I guess you have to be a Deutsche Bank customer to get) on the effects of current global fertility decline. Neither a report of a report of a report nor a post here can adequately cover [...]
Paul Adams Publication of two very different articles, one in the Guardian (UK), the other in the liberal American Catholic magazine Commonweal, bring to mind the gap that often exists between the merit of a public intellectual’s work and the “dynamics of reputation and public debate,” as the first author, Stefan Collini, calls it. Collini’s [...]
On this feast of the Epiphany, as the celebration of Christmas draws to a close, I want to consider again the gifts with which the Magi, the three wise men, greeted the newborn King in the stable. The gold and frankincense, foreshadowed by the prophet Isaiah in today’s reading (Is. 60:1-6), are gifts fit for a [...]
<Cabaret scene video: http://youtu.be/29Mg6Gfh9Co>When the Mensheviks walked out of the Petrograd Second Congress of Soviets, on October 25, 1917 (Julian calendar), thereby enabling the Bolsheviks to establish their dominance, Trotsky famously declared: "You are pitiful, isolated individuals! You are bankrupts. Your role is played out. Go where you belong from now on—into the dustbin of history!"Ronald Reagan [...]
As the data and commentary flood in, some preliminary thoughts. The most interesting analysis I have read so far is by Joel Kotkin , who describes the dominance of a New Clerisy,, much along the lines predicted by Daniel Bell in 1976. Even though the financial giants backed Romney - a switch from 2008 when no-one [...]
I am reading Sigrid Undset’s Stages of the Road, a collection of essays written in the years after she won the Nobel Prize for literature, published in English in 1934, and now reissued with an introduction by Elizabeth Scalia. As the new edition’s blurb says, it is a “fascinating collection of of saints’ lives, a prophetic [...]
Now that any hope has been dashed that the Supreme Court would sink the HHS mandate that employers cover abortifacient drugs, sterilization, and contraception, along with the rest of Obamacare, the fight for religious freedom assumes even more urgency. The "contraception mandate" is facing legal challenges of its own, but past SCOTUS rulings on the First [...]
One of the positive aspects of David Blankenhorn’s reversal on same-sex marriage is the commentary it has elicited from defenders of marriage like Michael Cook of the dignitarian website MercatorNet and Maggie Gallagher, former chair of the National Organization for Marriage and co-author of an outstanding summary of the research on marriage, The Case for Marriage [...]
I was surprised and pleased to see an interview with John Finnis, a leading natural law theorist, emeritus professor of law at University College, Oxford (where I first encountered him in my student days there) and now professor of law at Notre Dame. The interview was conducted at University of Notre Dame Australia, in Sydney. What surprised [...]
I find it impossible these days to think of Gary Gutting, philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, without being reminded of C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters. I imagine a letter from Lucifer to his nephew Snipe, the agent in charge of undermining Catholic education, something like the following. Paul Adams My dear Snipe, I have [...]
