Too little is said about covetousness and the part it plays in our daily lives and politics. Yet the desire to possess what belongs to someone else can become resentment, and resentment can harden into anger. Here lies an important connection between the sin condemned by Christianity and the politics of grievance advanced by the […]
There are real—and in many cases seemingly irreconcilable—differences over the moral standards and enduring principles that should undergird not only our legal system and form of government, but also the way we treat one another in daily life. Moral standards are the principles by which conduct is judged right or wrong, good or bad, just […]
For philosophers from antiquity through the Enlightenment and into our own unsettled age, “the people” has never meant a mere aggregation of individuals. It has meant something far richer: an organized community bound together by shared political and economic experiences, a common moral vocabulary, and a recognizable way of life. Without that shared core, there […]
The partisan arguments now raging between left and right in America differ not merely in policy preferences but in their grounding assumptions and their political philosophy. Yet the vocabulary now used to describe political protest, and political violence has become alarmingly imprecise. Even the terms found in the nation’s own constitutional and legal inheritance—”rebellion” and […]
Does your interlocutor believe in a universal moral law binding on all human beings? That single question determines whether political argument will rest on reason or dissolve into pure passion. A moral predicate is the foundational moral assumption on which all subsequent reasoning depends. Without some shared base, rational debate becomes impossible. The historical foundations of the American […]
After taking a required theological ethics course in college, I was impressed with the complexities that had been introduced into our thinking by academicians, ethicists and theologians, and even legal scholars about issues of right and wrong that almost always are simple to resolve in our own hearts and minds. We are guided by both […]
“I can forgive you for killing my children, but I can never forgive you for making me kill yours” Golda Meir I have spent over 26 years in the military on active duty, in the reserves, and as an instructor of surgeons and physicians around the world. I was never at “the tip of the spear” […]
— Published with Permission of AmericanPolicy.org — Our nineteenth-century legal theory (individual right, contract, ‘a man can do what he likes with his own,’ etc.) was based on the conception of the separate individual. – Mary Parker Follett, The New State What is more important to people than their children? If people aren’t willing to stand […]
With few exceptions, every aspect of American life is in decay: You should have all heard the news by now that our representatives in Washington have a fund for the purpose of paying for sexual harassment complaints. If this doesn’t raise the ire of every American, then we don’t know what will. This is just […]