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Alasdair MacIntyre… Would Have Signed The Paris Document

May 4, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Alasdair MacIntyre… Would Have Signed The Paris Document

By JUDE DOUGHERTY With the publication of After Virtue in 1981, Alasdair MacIntyre set the parameters for a philosophical debate that was to last for decades. As if his point had not been well made, he followed that book with two others, Whose Justice, Which Rationality? and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry. With the first of these volumes (now in its third edition), McIntyre succeeded in bringing moral discourse back to earth from the abstract, idealized realm inhabited by philosophers in the English-speaking world who limited themselves to analysis of language and formal arguments, or invented imaginary situations that presumably gave direction to affairs in the real world. In After Virtue, MacIntyre observes and documents that philosophers trained in…Continue Reading

Beauty Can Bring People Closer To God

May 3, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Beauty Can Bring People Closer To God

By DENNIS PRAGER (Editor’s Note: Below is an essay by Dennis Prager, a nationally syndicated conservative radio talk-show host and author. The essay is an exclusive excerpt from Prager’s new book, The Rational Bible: Exodus, published by Regnery. Prager, whose background is Jewish, wrote the book to show how the Bible teaches “sublime moral values” and is essential to our lives. Regnery Publishing offered this excerpt to The Wanderer because Prager here addresses the criticism Catholics receive for constructing such beautiful cathedrals, and defends why this is respectful and necessary.) + + + 25.3 And these are the gifts that you shall accept from them: gold, silver, and copper; The Torah now details the gifts the Israelites may bring (but…Continue Reading

Academic Challenge In Religion Assists Evangelization

May 2, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Academic Challenge In Religion Assists Evangelization

By ARTHUR HIPPLER “Why do the religion classes have to be so hard?” This is a question I used to hear from parents at my school. “Don’t they just need to know ‘God loves you’ and ‘be kind to others’?” These same parents expect math and science, history and literature, to be challenging, to prepare their children for college. But for them, religion is a subject that, in the words of Robert Fulghum: All you really needed to know you learned in kindergarten. The Church discourages the trend of schools toward making religion “easy.” In the General Directory on Catechesis (1997), the Congregation for Clergy insisted that “religious instruction in schools appear as a scholastic discipline with the same systematic…Continue Reading

Do Liberals Want These Migrants To Die?

May 1, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Do Liberals Want These Migrants To Die?

By TERENCE P. JEFFREY (Editor’s Note: Terence P. Jeffrey is the editor in chief of CNSnews.com. Creators Syndicate distributed this column.) + + + Last September, two children illegally crossed over the U.S.-Mexico border into the United States. One was accompanied by a parent who compelled the child to cross; the other was not. Soon, liberal activists were working to make sure one of these children died. Which one did they want to see dead? The child compelled to cross the border by the illegally crossing parent. What was this child’s offense? Physical location. You see, this child was the unborn child of the other. His or her greatest problem was not having crossed illegally into the United States, it…Continue Reading

A Book Review… Learn About Our Lady’s Role In History

April 30, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… Learn About Our Lady’s Role In History

By DONAL ANTHONY FOLEY Donal Anthony Foley reviews Daily, Daily, Sing to Mary: Celebrating With Our Lady Every Day of the Year by Fr. Paul Haffner (Gracewing Publishing, 648 pages, $17.85, paperback). This hefty book is designed to provide a daily reading relating mainly to places associated with Marian apparitions, devotions, and pilgrimages. Thus there is an entry for every day of the year and these are drawn from a wide variety of sources, with the general aim of encouraging devotion to the Blessed Virgin as part of everyday life. In many cases, the readings chosen for a particular day will be well known to most readers, involving as they do, an important Marian feast day, such as the Presentation…Continue Reading

Why The Authoritarian Right Is Rising

April 29, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Why The Authoritarian Right Is Rising

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN A fortnight ago, Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party won enough seats in the Hungarian parliament to rewrite his country’s constitution. To progressives across the West, this was disturbing news. For the bete noire of Orban’s campaign was uber-globalist George Soros. And Orban’s commitments were to halt any further surrenders of Hungarian sovereignty and independence to the European Union, and to fight any immigrant invasion of Hungary from Africa or the Islamic world. Why are autocrats like Orban rising and liberal democrats failing in Europe? The autocrats are addressing the primary and existential fear of peoples across the West — the death of the separate and unique tribes into which they were born and to which…Continue Reading

Why I Am Pro-Life

April 28, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Why I Am Pro-Life

By DONALD DeMARCO An analysis of the first two words of the sentence, “Why I Am Pro-Life,” is most instructive. The “I” is ambiguous. It could be the ego closed in on itself or it could represent the person whose existence is far more expansive than the self that is truncated by its egoism. The word “Why” knocks on the door of the “I” and asks it to reveal itself on the horizon of reason. “Why did you do this?” the mother asks her child who had just done something naughty. In so asking she is obliging her child to give an account of himself. When we give an account of ourselves on the plane of reason or unreason, we…Continue Reading

Let’s Ask Aquinas Some Questions On Punishment

April 27, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Let’s Ask Aquinas Some Questions On Punishment

By JUDE DOUGHERTY One can find discussions of punishment and its rationale in ancient Greek and Roman sources and in numerous biblical texts. Contemporary discussions of punishment take their lead from the British utilitarian Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and the French sociologist Emil Durkheim (1858-1917). Bentham thought all punishment to be a mischief. The only justification for punishment, he maintained, is the plausible belief that greater evils would thereby be avoided by incarceration. In the nineteenth century when the theist context for punishment began to fade and even the deterrent effect was challenged, Emil Durkheim formulated a purely secular rationale for the infliction of punishment. For Durkheim crime is essentially an affront to the “collective conscience,” namely, the commonly accepted morality…Continue Reading

Restoring The Sacred The Need To “Re-Sacralize” First Holy Communion Day

April 26, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Restoring The Sacred The Need To “Re-Sacralize” First Holy Communion Day

By JAMES MONTI As April wanes and May draws near, many parishes are preparing for the great annual occasion of First Holy Communion. Over the past five decades, in all too many places, this sacred rite has been banalized and desacralized by silly music and “stage props” that have turned one of our supreme acts of sacred worship into a celebration of the self, to make children feel how “special” they are, with cameo photos of the First Communicants pasted all over the frontal of the altar and construction paper flowers with the children’s names plastered across the church walls, as well as the ever-unhelpful loaf of table bread and cluster of grapes as a centerpiece for all this, not…Continue Reading

Where Is The Center?

April 25, 2018 Featured Today Comments Off on Where Is The Center?

By DONALD DeMARCO Edward Ingram Watkin, better known simply as E. I. Watkin, an English convert to the Catholic Church, is a name that should not be lost to Catholics of today. When he passed away in 1981 at age 92, The Times of London described him as “one of the most distinguished Catholic philosophers of his day.” His best-known work is The Catholic Centre, published in 1945. His motivation for writing it was “the passionate realization that the world is now the stage of a conflict between those who genuinely believe in a Divine creator and those who avowedly or implicitly deify man.” The “Catholic center,” for Watkin, is where opposites are reconciled. “Catholicism,” he writes, “occupies the reconciling…Continue Reading