Articles

If voting for your favorite baseball player doesn't prove his greatness, does the same lesson apply to your favorite or even your own community?

Benedict's encyclical responds to the elite technocrats of the liberal order more charitably than they deserve. It is true that, in mundane circumstances, liberal society often professes a congenial relativism, and it is equally true that the technocrats of modern charity—who discover the redemption of man in contraception, efficient abortion, and maximized “private” freedom with neither self-government nor moral judgment—reject the identity of “Agápe and Lógos”, the “God of the Bible” who is “Charity and Truth, Love and Word.” But this does not mean they lack a conception of truth or that they are in fact mere sentimental relativists. They rather advocate an immanent and materialist absolute.

Benedict XVI's first social encyclical, "Caritas in Veritate," challenges long-accepted understandings of the relation of faith and reason and of charity and justice. In so doing, he not only calls into question the failed rationalism and failed conceptions of ownership that have done so much to harm and misshape the modern west; he also revises the Catholic Church's social doctrine, in some respects drawing it away from its origin in the neo-Scholastic political theory of Leo XIII, while in others renewing and strengthening the profound continuity of the Church's Gospel message.

The disposition that characterizes the modern mind--a disposition that favors as its ideal a skeptical “view from nowhere,”--serves to undermine the very elements that make community possible.

On the threshold between two unchosen ways of life - one of commitments, the other of choices. Both give rise to discontents, but ours today makes them a way of life.

I can’t seem to get the Orwellian thought of a “National Department of Bigness” out of my head – where everything is kept small and local…except the Department.

In 2007, we bought a house and moved to Greenville, North Carolina. Here, I recall the first rough day of home ownership, topped off by John Wayne and cold wine.

Making the case for nuclear power. Since everyone else is.