Is Mere ‘Tolerance’ Intolerable?

Berlin is a city saturated with history. Everywhere—on every corner, in every park, behind every wall and in every building—one stumbles on a piece of that which once was, scattered by the wind of time and silently reminding the indifferent faces of the weight of the past. Continue Reading...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...