One of my favorite contemporary writers is Theodore Dalrymple, whose essays I first discovered in The New Criterion about 20 years ago. He wrote that one of his favorite writers, who also had a pen name, was the essayist and critic Simon Leys who died in 2014. Continue Reading...
Reuters reported today that a large portion of US farm aid went to the wealthiest farmers and advocacy group.
More than half of the Trump administration’s $8.4 billion in trade aid payments to U.S. Continue Reading...
Aristotle asked what made the good life? Was it pleasure, material wealth, honor, or virtue?
He argued that while pleasure, wealth, and honor were a part of a good life and human happiness, they could not constitute it. Continue Reading...
Those of us who deal with ideas can often throw words around without being sufficiently careful about their meaning or attentive to their impact. We can be tempted to use terms to make a splash or win an argument at the expense of complexity. Continue Reading...
Lord Acton famously wrote that “liberty is the delicate fruit of a mature civilization.”
Liberty, Acton argued was rare and required constant attention to be maintained. As many have noted, one of the challenges with political liberty is that it creates the conditions for its own demise from within. Continue Reading...
At the center of the economy are human persons.
Economics must first be a human discipline before it can be a technical one. One of the essential characteristics of the human person is that we are social beings. Continue Reading...
In his must-read book, The Quest for Community, Robert Nisbet discusses the relationship of community and authority.
Communities provide human connection and sense of belonging, but they also come with limitations. Continue Reading...
There are many reasons to critique business these days. From crony capitalist practices to surveillance capitalism and data collection, from abuse of the environment for short term profits to siding with the fashionable for short term praise at the expense of religious freedom and long term cultural health. Continue Reading...
Here is a piece I wrote for Law and Liberty on 5 Insights that Christianity Brings to Politics
The relationship between Christianity and politics is a complex one. The Church has played a mixed role in the history of political liberty to be sure. Continue Reading...
At the recent Vatican meeting of Catholic Charities Pope Francis praised the participants for their concern for the poor and marginalized, but warned them of the danger of “fake charity.”
Carol Glatz writes in Catholic Herald:
Charity is not a sterile service or a simple donation to hand over to put our conscience at ease,” he said. Continue Reading...
