Essay

Recently both President Obama and members of the Supreme Court gave support to the argument that the very idea that marriage is only between a man and a woman—central to the Judeo-Christian belief about marriage, […]

Happy 237th birthday, America! Two cheers for democracy! Why only two? Aren’t we supposed to cheer wildly for democracy as unambiguously good? Don’t we have a moral obligation to hold up democracy as the best—indeed, […]

An arbiter, derived from the Latin for judge, is defined as “one chosen to judge or decide a disputed issue”; also, “one who has the power to judge at will”. Many insist that an arbiter […]

In the previous two pieces in this space, we have looked at two fallacies: the ad hominem and the genetic fallacy.  Both fallacies are, like all fallacies, bad ways of trying to achieve good ends.  […]

Oh what’s love got to do, got to do with it, What’s love but a second-hand emotion; What’s love got to do, got to do with it, Who needs a heart When a heart can […]

It is often said that faith (and, if comes to that, culture) is “caught, not taught.”  A massive amount of what we believe most deeply comes to us, not from engagement in abstract arguments about […]

As humans made in the image and likeness of God, we have a built-in desire to know what’s really going on and to trace all the little discoveries of what is really going on right […]

“Social justice,” a term coined by the Italian Jesuit Father Luigi Taparelli D’Azeglio (1793-1862), appeared in an 1894 curial document and a 1904 encyclical. Later, Pope Pius XI (1922-39) made it part and parcel of […]

In his Sunday homily the week after the Boston Marathon bombing, Cardinal Sean O’Malley said that the action of the bombers was a “perversion of their religion.” We have grown accustomed to hearing such statements […]