Yesterday’s Lewis v. Harris ruling by the New Jersey State Supreme Court is truly unfortunate. In a 4-3 split decision, all seven justices cited the state’s efforts to end discrimination based upon sexual orientation against individuals to defend their decision to extend the equal . . . . Continue Reading »
Jewcentricity is a word that will probably not catch on, but Adam Garfinkle employs it to good effect in American Interest Online in trying to explain some European habits of mind, or mindlessness, as the case may be. He writes: Educated Europeans know that their own histories, far more deeply than . . . . Continue Reading »
Why do many pro-choice people find our arguments against early abortion not just unconvincing but absurd? Consider, for example, the ridicule that the defense of human embryos sometimes draws. In order to have any hope of winning the debate, defenders of unborn life must understand how an argument . . . . Continue Reading »
An academic colleague of mine has carved out considerable expertise for himself in the area of slavery. I roused his ire once by asking if, two centuries from now, people might regard abortion the way we now do slavery. This was at a meeting of Enlightenment-period scholars. There is in all of us a . . . . Continue Reading »
John Derbyshire, the popular writer for National Review Online , recently published a "self-interview" disclosing how and why he lost his faith . Generally, I would not comment on such a personal matter or criticize anyone’s internal struggles. But Derbyshire went further than just . . . . Continue Reading »
It is always encouraging to see episcopal leadership on the important questions of our day. Particularly heartening is the courage of those bishops who eschew the lie of the naked public square. Catholic archbishop John J. Myers of Newark, New Jersey, is one of these Christian leaders. And in . . . . Continue Reading »
Evangelicals have never forgotten, and for good reason they have never forgotten, that Washington Post story of a few years ago that described them as “poor, uneducated, and easily led.” The Post apologized for it, sort of, but the sentiment lives on in large sectors of the commenting . . . . Continue Reading »
It begins in earnest when the viewbooks start to come in the mail. Mounds of them, innumerable quantities of them, each demanding to be read: Middlebury, Yale, Rice, Macalester, Brown, the University of Rochester, Upper Saginaw Creek Community College, St. Scholastica’s Reformatory for . . . . Continue Reading »
Those sixteen words have taken a terrible beating in the past fifty years. For most of our history, they occasioned little controversy. That was when our culture and our polity seemed to be on more or less amicable terms. There are several possible datings of the change, but I think we can settle . . . . Continue Reading »
Lewis Carroll anticipated the word games that demagogues play when he had Humpty Dumpty say, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.” There are a lot of Humpty Dumptys around in our time, turning words inside out to turn the moral order upside . . . . Continue Reading »
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