Reckoning with Roe v. Wade
We are still reckoning with the legacy of Roe’s fraudulent jurisprudence.On the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, our society still struggles to come to terms with what exactly is at stake in the...
View ArticlePerry, Prayer, and Politics
Rick Perry’s prayer rally engendered accusations that he wrongly crossed the church-state divide. But great leaders in American history have long held that religion is a necessary basis for public...
View ArticleReligious Liberty and the Ministerial Exception
An upcoming Supreme Court decision might give government, rather than religious organizations, the final say on who counts as a religious minister.Civil authorities, James Madison noted, are...
View ArticleMLK’s Philosophical and Theological Legacy
Martin Luther King, Jr., espoused a worldview repugnant to many of those who now claim his legacy.From the “very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland,” Alabama Governor George Wallace, in his 1963...
View ArticleMarriage Unmoored
Many expect that the Supreme Court will soon overturn the traditional marriage laws remaining on the books in forty-three states, a prospect that would have been unthinkable only a decade or two ago....
View ArticleWhy America Needs Social Conservatism
An America without social conservatism would be stripped of its conservative enlightenment roots and go the way of Europe via entitlements and centralized economic regulation. When Charles James...
View ArticleEarly Religious Freedom in America
The Founders’ nuanced views of religion and politics prevent us from reading modern concerns about the separation of church and state into their words.“Whatever we once were,” Barack Obama insisted in...
View ArticleDo Sports Build Character?
The recent Penn State scandal reminds us that if sports are to instill moral character, we must approach athletics first as an education in the virtues, not as an avenue to fame and wealth.It is a...
View ArticleSlavery and the Constitution
Slavery was a great evil, but the Constitution was neither its source nor its guarantor.Yesterday was Constitution Day, a little-known federal holiday that commemorates the signing of the United States...
View ArticleStripping the Constitution
Adam Freedman’s stark proposal in The Naked Constitution that we strip our founding document of its modern and academic glosses shows us that we need to take structural reforms to our Constitution...
View ArticleAbortion After Tiller
A new documentary on late-term abortion providers shows us that the abortion debate is much more about why life is valuable than about when human life begins.On Pentecost Sunday 2009, Scott Roeder...
View ArticleUnderstanding the Slavery-Abortion Analogy
Analogies between slavery and abortion are frequent in American politics. In his recent decision in Planned Parenthood v. Abbott (2013), federal district judge Lee Yeakel joined the long list of people...
View ArticleDiagnosing Our American Illness
Speaking to a crowd in 2008, Senator Barack Obama claimed victory in his quest for the Democratic nomination for president. “If we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it,”...
View ArticleThe Decline of Movement Conservatism and the Rise of the Alt-Right
“How small, of all that human hearts endure,” Oliver Goldsmith concluded in his philosophical poem The Traveller (1764), “That part which laws and kings can cause or cure.” There is profound truth in...
View ArticleMaking Sense of the Founders: Politics, Natural Rights, and the Laws of Nature
Did the American founders share a unified and coherent political theory? Most scholars today would laugh at the question and then say no. The political thought of the founders, Alan Gibson suggests,...
View ArticleSexually Violent Predator Laws and Indefinite Confinement: Insights from C.S....
C.S. Lewis—the twentieth-century Oxford don, literary scholar, Christian apologist, and celebrated children’s author—is an unlikely source of wisdom for thinking about the sexually violent predator...
View ArticleSecular Materialism Can’t Make Sense of Reality
During the founding era, Americans were not yet living in Charles Taylor’s secular age, a time in which citizens in the Atlantic world can “engage fully in politics without ever encountering God, that...
View ArticleWhat’s the Difference Between Abortion and Infanticide?
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam offered a qualified defense of infanticide when commenting recently on a proposed bill that would loosen restrictions on late-term abortion in his state. If a mother...
View ArticleJohn Quincy Adams contra Patrick Deneen: Marriage, Family, and the Story of...
Hang around social scientists long enough, and you will hear one of them describe his thesis as the “story I am trying to tell.” This is as true of quantitative, numbers-oriented scholars as of those...
View ArticleEugenics and Other Evils
G. K. Chesterton opened his 1924 book Eugenics and Other Evils by warning that a “blow from a hatchet can only be parried while it is in the air.” The hatchet in the air was eugenics, but the blow had...
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