Despite a determined will to disbelieve the evidence before our eyes—especially on the part of people such as academics and social workers like me, and other champions of the sexual revolution—we know from a host of empirical research that married people are happier, healthier, and better off financially. (See Waite & Gallagher for a review of findings, confirmed by [...]
In the words of John Paul II (Veritatis Splendor, N. 101): Today, when many countries have seen the fall of ideologies which bound politics to a totalitarian conception of the world — Marxism being the foremost of these — there is no less grave a danger that the fundamental rights of the human person will be [...]
Trying to navigate the conceptual fog that envelops the concept of social justice, I just came acrossan interesting article, "Social Justice, Institutions, and Communities," posted today on the Witherspoon Institute blog,Public Discourse: Ethics, Law and the Common Goodby Adam J. MacLeod. It concludes like this: The job of the individual in promoting social justice is to [...]
I recently attended a presentation by a local Tea Party leader about the relevance of his movement. It’s a good question, given the rapid collapse of TP’s influence, as far as can be discerned from the GOP primaries in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. The TP is a kind of mirror image of the Occupy [...]
Charity is under attack from all sides. Scrooge and his successors seek to replace charity in the form of voluntary or faith-based giving with public welfare or rights-based claims on the state. Whether out of embarrassment at the religious roots of their secular profession or out of a belief that justice supersedes charity, social workers are [...]
In America's capital of the weird breaking the world record for naked Santas is no big deal. But it says a lot about the death of childhood. For some time now, I have been following the extensive travels and adventures of a very interesting fellow I know primarily through Facebook via my daughter—social networking in action. [...]
A new Australian website called The Conversation, oriented to the “university and research sector,” has an article today by Peter Cowan, Professor at the University of Melbourne and Co-director of the Immunology Research Centre at St Vincent's Hospital Melbourne. Its title there is “Xenotransplantation: using pigs as organ and tissue donors for humans” but the excellent [...]
When policy analysts talk about “harmonizing work and family” through social policy they mean to expand women’s freedom and choices. But, they assume, the harmony is to be achieved according to the male model of subordinating family to work. They absorb and take for granted a large cultural shift, a revolution in the concept and responsibilities [...]
The Awfulness of Ayn Rand...and Malick's Sublime Film on Nature and Grace, 'The Tree of Life' At the conclusion of his essay on "The Trouble with Ayn Rand," David Bentley Hart recommends skipping the new film version of Atlas Shrugged, the novel of a writer who, like Nietzsche, despised Christian morality and exalted selfishness, who thought Mickey Spillane [...]
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 10, 2011 Sleepwalking through the great infanticide What is the morally significant difference between killing a baby just emerged from the womb and one about to emerge? If one is wrong, why not the other? The utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer accepts that there is no such difference...but he endorses both in certain [...]
