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How Happiness Studies Lets Us Down
Demand elicits supply. The demand I have in mind is the demand for happiness: Suicide rates are up, depression is up, and though people today seek to be happy,...

The Lessons of Fr. Paul Mankowski
Paul Mankowski, S.J., who died unexpectedly four years ago this past fall, was the kind of priest who seemed to spring from pages of the best Catholic fiction—a larger-than-life...

Orthodoxy at War
St. Sophia Cathedral is quiet and almost empty when I step inside on a wintry morning. Saints in icons on the walls and pillars stare at me. A huge...

Forgiveness: A Statement by Jews and Christians
In January 2023, a group of Jewish and Christian scholars met to form a circle of study and conversation. We shared an important conviction. As divergent as our faith...

Parents Can’t Fight Porn Alone
Madi grew up in a religious home, blessed with attentive parents who took the dangers of technology seriously. They installed filters on her devices and required her to hand...

The Patriarch and the Palestinians
If I drink coffee at every meeting, I’ll kill someone,” His Beatitude Pierbattista Pizzaballa says when I ask him to join me for an espresso while we talk. Who...
Iain McGilchrist’s New Era
Once, the story goes, man stood at the center of the universe. He looked in the mirror and saw a masterpiece: “How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty...
My Gay Tragedy
I sat in my chair, looking through the window across the wide plain to the towers of Lüneburg. Everyone was silent. The therapist turned to the older woman. “What...
Cities for Humans
You get the best first impression of Poundbury on a bright summer’s afternoon, when the air is heavy with heat and the light begins to turn gold. You’re in...

Against Christian Civilization
The last time I was in America, which was last autumn, I visited the battlefield at Little Bighorn. It was a beautiful snowy day. The landscape was vast and...

Resist the Conception Machine
The almost complete lack of reflection on the normalization of assisted reproductive technologies for producing children is a telling sign of the unseriousness of our age. The transformation of...

Modernity’s Self-Destruct Button
All politics is local, as they say. And so, before we proceed to the big question of this essay—Can modernity survive for much longer?—I want to start with a...

Overcoming Theological Amnesia
Ressourcement. It’s a French word that means “resourcing”—or, better, “re-sourcing.” As a term in theology, it calls for renewal based on a return to richer, more original sources, especially...

Night of the World
Martin Heidegger is notorious for his embrace of Nazism in the 1930s. Yet he was a luminous commentator on the religious substance of modern poetry. Perhaps because of his...

The End of the Age of Hitler
A century ago, the most potent moral figure in the West was Jesus Christ. Believers and unbelievers alike accepted him as an ethical exemplar. Not to do so was...