Tag: responsibility

Rights and Duties

Our duty is to live lives that conform to what is good, true, and beautiful. Natural rights in general, and the rights enshrined in the Constitution in particular, are means for citizens to fulfill their duties, live good lives, and build up their families and communities.

A Flat Surface Upon Which to Eat

It’s a new year, and many of us are thinking about self-improvement. This is a wonderful thing to do. We all need a bit of a tune-up now and then. But as we make our resolutions and focus on ourselves, it’s worth considering the parable of my table.

The Grace of Belonging: A Review of You are Not...

Emily Wenneborg reviews You are Not Your Own, by Alan Noble. Noble confronts the lie of autonomy that shapes Western society and counsels radical dependence on God’s grace.

Where Is Our Freedom to Exercise Sympathy?

The same things that happened to the family farms, and to farmers like my father, are now happening to the colleges, and to faculty like me.

The Leased of These

Earlier this year, headlines indicated that an unprecedented number of Americans are more than 90 days behind on their car loan payments. Nearly all economists...

If Sartre is Right

“If man…is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he will himself have made what...

Creative Fidelity and Weighty People

In Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the character Tomas is an inveterate womanizer, a man who takes notes on the particular physical...

Small-souled Masters of the Universe

The Spring 2011 issue of The City includes an insightful piece by Wilfred McClay on “The Illusion of Mastery” in public policy. When the “will...

A City upon a Hill

Conservatives are awfully fond of referring to America as a “city upon a hill;” it would be a wonderful thing if they actually made...

The Symbolism of a White Sidewalk

I tend to think that slippery sidewalks are a sign of a broader pattern, in which people are less prepared to take responsibility for the inconvenience of ‘gray areas.’