René Girard and the Common Good
I argue that Girard’s understanding of the political order is largely in line with Thomistic thinking on the common good. In following Girard in his extrapolations of…
Death to the Death Penalty? René Girard’s Challenge to Thomas Aquinas
The Catholic Church’s recent definitive revocation of the death penalty[1] suggests that something in the zeitgeist demands a rethinking of one strand of conservative thought. Always the…
God – Pictures at an Exhibition
Then Peter came to Jesus and asked, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother or sister who sins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus…
The Idol of Our Age: Dr. Daniel J. Mahoney at Abigail Adams Institute
Please see Daniel J. Mahoney's lecture, "The Idols of Our Age," at the Abigail Adams Institute, Harvard University. The YouTube link is here.
Hannah Arendt: Philosopher of Politics, History, and Faith
Hannah Arendt’s immigration to the United States in the early 1940s reminds me of a comment made by a professor of a post-WW2 American history course that…
A Bone of Him Shall Not Be Broken
Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. Tom Holland. New York: Little, Brown, 2019. Immediately after Christ’s crucifixion, the Roman soldiers, approaching the condemned thieves beside…
Why the Roman Empire Was an Empire Like No Other
What made the Roman Empire an empire like no other was that it alone was the city that became an empire. Its distinctively republican civic form became…
The Incarnation of Truth and Love
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” The gospel of St. John is the most poetic of…
Christianity’s Home in Homelessness
The history of Western philosophy may be but a footnote on Plato, but the history of the whole of Western philosophy, theology, politics, science, art, and the…
The Classics and Christianity
Why study old books? How do dusty old books written by dead men and women thousands of years ago grow my faith? Such can be common thoughts…
Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom
Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom. Robert Louis Wilken. New Haven: Yale University Press 2019. Religious liberty, toleration, and the…
John Locke on “The Reasonableness of Christianity”
The question this essay posits might seem somewhat straightforward: What is meant by the term “reasonable” when Locke described Christianity by this term in his 1695 work,…
Democracy and That Other Sort of Man
"Thus the world is like an oil press: under pressure. If you are the dregs of the oil you are carried away through the sewer; if you…
Liberal Learning and the Great Christian Tradition
Liberal Learning and the Great Christian Tradition. Gary W. Jenkins and Jonathan Yonan, eds. Eugene: Pickwick Publications, 2015. In the forward, Stratford Caldecott claims that education…
We Are Not Our Own: Childhood in a Technological Age
Liberal culture’s anti-child practices are bound up with a logic of childlessness most basically defined in terms of a forgetfulness of being and its Origin and expressed…
