It’s amazing the difference a name makes. On one day this past week, nearly a hundred endangered elephants were killed and around 3,000 abortions were performed in the United States alone, and we were unfazed, but the killing of Cecil the lion broke our hearts. He wasn’t just any random lion. He was Cecil. Mere lions (along with chickens, cows, lambs, and pigs) are killed, but Cecil was murdered. We love the lion that was named Cecil. We feel as if we knew him. Continue Reading »
We live in an increasingly secular society. One consequence of this cultural shift is the rejection of the once uncontroversial belief that humans reside uniquely at the pinnacle of moral worth.Activist academics, purveyors of popular culture, and issue ideologues across a wide swath of movements—from bioethics, to animal rights, to environmentalism—seek to knock us off the pedestal. Public intellectuals like Princeton University’s Peter Singer even argue that being human is morally irrelevant; what matters is possessing sufficient cognitive capacities to qualify as a “person.” Continue Reading »
As Time and other premillennial makers-of-lists have discovered in recent months, there is no lack of candidates for the position of emblematic figure of the twentieth century. In the world of politics alone, there are several plausible nominees on a slate that includes the admirable and . . . . Continue Reading »
The most creative dimensions of Western spirituality are rooted in a deep interaction between the biblically informed understanding of God, creation, and time and a humanist view of the true, the good, and the beautiful. Although tensions were sometimes acute, the affinities are many, and the . . . . Continue Reading »
Once we’ve denounced the balderdash that all too often passes for teaching in contemporary American colleges, there still remains the question of what we ought to teach instead. Indignation is an insufficient alternative to the brutal secularization of the college curriculum. But some conservative . . . . Continue Reading »
The early Church father Tertullian asked a famous question, one that has been asked again and again in the history of the Church, and that I would like to ask again: “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem?” By Athens he means intellectual culture, the life of the mind, the study of . . . . Continue Reading »
