At its highest levels, political life today is an attempt to reach heaven through purely human means—that is, to construct Babel. That attempt is partly motivated by institutional interests, but at bottom has to do […]
At least for me, Pope Leo XIV’s recent encyclical does little to resolve doubts about how Catholic social teaching should be interpreted and understood. But I should explain my doubts. In its modern form, social […]
Christ told Pilate that his kingdom was not of this world, which, he had prophesied, was doomed to end in catastrophe. He lived without worldly ties: without a job, wife, children, steady source of income, […]
Pope Leo recently said, in response to a question about the effect of Cardinal Marx’s promotion of blessings for same-sex couples on church unity, The unity or division of the Church should not revolve around […]
People today expect politics to give more than it can, often to the point of secular utopianism. There are two basic reasons for that. The first is a decline in transcendental faith. People need an […]
Effectively, open borders are a bad idea. That’s true whether they result from explicit policy or from failure to enforce the law effectively. The population of the world outside the United States is about 8 […]
We live in unusual times, and Donald Trump is, to put it mildly, an unusual politician. We need to understand him to deal with him, and with that in mind, I will present my own […]
The men who discussed and approved the documents of the Second Vatican Council also oversaw their implementation. The Church’s response to the Council was nonetheless very different from what they expected. Why did that happen? […]
Chesterton called America “a nation with the soul of a church.” He was largely right. Not all Americans buy into the whole of our national creed, but it’s real, and it dominates public life. It […]
Modern politics go to extremes. There are a variety of reasons for that. One is that modern thought likes to draw far-reaching conclusions from a few simple principles. In the natural sciences, where exact verification […]
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