Human flourishing

March 23, 2023

The Return of Stoicism in an Age of Chaos

Despite its popularity, or perhaps because of it, Stoicism is a difficult thing to define. Is it a philosophy, a nuanced outlook, a mindset, a healthy lifestyle, or a conservative fad? Continue Reading...

March 10, 2023

Fear and the Feeble Foundations of Ideology

I recently read the monumental essay “The Power of the Powerless” (1978) by Soviet dissident Václav Havel and immediately began to draw parallels between how he describes socialist oppression and what I understand of diabolical oppression. Continue Reading...

February 02, 2023

MAID in Canada

“You know what your life is worth to you. And mine is worthless,” said Mitchell Tremblay, a 40-year-old Canadian man battling severe mental illness and intent on using his country’s medical suicide program to end his life as soon as possible. Continue Reading...

July 04, 2022

How Frederick Douglass found hope on the Fourth of July

On July 5, 1852, nearly a decade before the start of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass, a freed slave and statesman-abolitionist, offered a profound speech on seeing the Fourth of July through the eyes of a slave. Continue Reading...

May 18, 2022

Racelessness is the future of justice

What if the answer to racial tensions in America lay in the removal of race as a necessary identifier of any human person? This question frames a new theory put forward by Sheena Mason, assistant professor of African American literature at SUNY Oneonta, in Oneonta, N.Y. Continue Reading...

April 05, 2022

The kids are all right, but better with religion

In a classic 1976 episode of All in the Family, the TV character Archie Bunker took it upon himself to baptize his grandson at his local church. He did this secretly, as he explained to God, because his son-in-law was a “dopey atheist” who wouldn’t permit the baby to be baptized. Continue Reading...

February 25, 2022

Canon law, works of mercy, and human dignity

“All human societies face about the same problems,” claim David Friedman, Peter Leeson, and David Skarbek in their fascinating and peculiar book Legal Systems Very Different from Ours. “They deal with them in an interesting variety of different ways. Continue Reading...

January 31, 2022

Jordan Peterson has left the academy and that’s not a good thing

Jordan Peterson, the bête noire of the left, resigned his position at the University of Toronto in enviable fashion: on his own terms while issuing a blistering condemnation of the ideological corruption of the academy. Continue Reading...

January 20, 2022

The twilight of Christianity, the loss of authority, and our fragmented selves

Political theorists have engaged in much debate concerning the “quarrel between the ancients and the moderns,” such quarrel evidence of the opposing claims of the two worlds. Leo Strauss, the best known articulator of an absolute rupture, counterposed classical Greece to modern liberalism and its culmination in Nietzsche. Continue Reading...

December 31, 2021

Resolve this New Year to visit Billy Wilder’s The Apartment

Christmas movies tend to be sentimental, to emphasize the struggles that define our society and our souls, but ultimately they are hopeful and even joyful. Humanity triumphs at the end of the story—for evidence, read my series of essays on The Bishop’s Wife, The Shop Around the Corner, Christmas in Connecticut, and Miracle on 34th Street. Continue Reading...

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