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At the Intersection of Faith and Culture

As I write this, it’s Election Day. It is the first Election Day in 24 years that I haven’t voted. Every election cycle, Republican operatives in the media—“conservative” talk radio hosts, Fox News pundits, and the like—insist to their audiences that a decision on their part to do anything other than vote Republican is a…

As the mid-term elections approach, it’s high time for Republican commentators to walk the walk. Just the other morning, Mark Steyn, busily promoting his new book, made an appearance on Bill Bennett’s radio program. The latter agreed enthusiastically with the former that in order for conservatives to prevail culturally, it is imperative for them to…

That there is a sensationalistic dimension to the Ebola coverage is something of which I have no doubt. Sensationalizing events is what the media does best. There may even be a sense in which it can be said that sensationalism is intrinsic to mass media.  Sensationalism serves the interests of two groups of people: media…

For a discussion of capital punishment, with no thinker is there a better place to begin than Ernest van den Haag. It is with justice that the latter’s seminal analysis of this topic is a staple of textbooks in college ethics courses nationwide: the author addresses the thicket of issues that are at stake in…

Dan Marquis contends that except in “rare cases,” abortion is immoral, and it is immoral, he further argues, because the fetus has a “FLO”—a “future like ours.” Before arguing that abortion is wrong, Marquis first attempts to show what makes killing in general wrong. Killing is wrong, he concludes, because it deprives the person killed…

Few holidays are as “politically incorrect” as is the day that Americans reserve to commemorate the birthday of Christopher Columbus. Such is the ferocity of the smear campaign to which Columbus has been subjected for decades that he has been made into a villain among villains in the rogues’ gallery of history. Geoffrey Symcox, of…

John T. Noonan, a Catholic jurist whose work on abortion regularly features in ethics textbooks, contends that the traditional definition of a human being remains rationally superior to its competitors. A human being, Noonan insists, is anyone who has been conceived by human parents. The most common rival to conception is that of viability: the…

Judith Jarvis Thomson is a veteran philosopher who, several decades ago, penned a thought-provoking essay that features in virtually all of the contemporary texts used in college-level ethics courses. Her objective is to show that what she takes to be the standard argument against abortion fails to preclude allowances for abortion in cases of rape,…

Recently, I cautioned my fellow Americans against falling for the notion that the so-called “Islamic State” is among the gravest threats, or any threat, that the United States had ever encountered. I noted that if the hyperbolic cries of politicians and their media propagandists in both parties so much as remotely resembled reality, then we’d…

There is much talk about “the Islamic State,” or “ISIS,” or “ISIL,” or whatever we are calling it. To listen to the talking heads, both Democrats and Republicans, one could be forgiven for thinking that these 15,000 or so Muslim butchers are the biggest threat that the Western world has ever faced. Of course, as…
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