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Neither Left Nor Right, But Catholic… Building Up The Nonprofit Sector

September 14, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Neither Left Nor Right, But Catholic… Building Up The Nonprofit Sector

By STEPHEN M. KRASON (Editor’s Note: Stephen M. Krason’s Neither Left nor Right, but Catholic column appears monthly [sometimes bimonthly] in Crisis. He is a professor of political science and legal studies and associate director of the Veritas Center for Ethics in Public Life at Franciscan University of Steubenville. He is also cofounder and president of the Society of Catholic Social Scientists. Among his books are The Public Order and the Sacred Order; The Transformation of the American Democratic Republic; Liberalism, Conservatism, and Catholicism; and Catholicism and American Political Ideologies. (This column originally appeared in Crisismagazine.com and is reprinted with permission. All rights reserved.) + + + A few years ago, as Obamacare was being put in place, Republican Gov.…Continue Reading

Are There Answers For Human Life Apart From Science?

September 13, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Are There Answers For Human Life Apart From Science?

By ARTHUR HIPPLER (Editor’s Note: Dr. Hippler is chairman of the religion department and teaches religion in the Upper School at Providence Academy, Plymouth, Minn.) + + + There are always students at the beginning of my Moral Theology class who wonder why the course matters. To them, “moral theology” is perhaps a pretentious way of getting immersed in a set of rules dictated by the Church. For a significant number of these students, science offers real knowledge and real answers about the world — definite, quantifiable, and widely accepted. But is important for them to understand that science cannot provide all the answers necessary for human life. Any science textbook worth reading will help the student to see this important point.…Continue Reading

A Book Review… The Pursuit Of Happiness

September 12, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… The Pursuit Of Happiness

By MITCHELL KALPAGIAN Finding True Happiness, by Fr. Robert Spitzer, SJ, Ph.D. (Ignatius Press, San Francisco: 2015), 312 pp., $19.95. Available from www.ignatius.com or 1-800-651-1531. A work of both practical commonsense advice and spiritual wisdom, this book defines four types of human happiness that conform to human nature and mark the human condition, a hierarchy of values that ascend from the first level of happiness provided by the enjoyment of pleasures and the comforts of material possessions to the highest level of transcendence in which man experiences a loving relationship with God and contemplates the meaning of the One, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. As man graduates from the first to the fourth level, he experiences a sense…Continue Reading

A Book Review… Europe Is Committing Suicide

September 11, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… Europe Is Committing Suicide

By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY Murray, Douglas. The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 352 pp. Given the widespread publicity accorded this volume by major print media, its principal thesis is well known. Douglas Murray, associate editor of the Spectator, argues in plain English, “Europe is committing suicide.” Its leaders have betrayed their peoples by their failure to acknowledge the Islamic threat. “As a result, by the end of the lifespan of most people currently alive, Europe will not be Europe and the peoples of Europe will have lost the only place in the world they have to call home.” That a state of cultural and political disorder exists within the Europe and the United States is…Continue Reading

Jacques Maritain Revisited

September 10, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Jacques Maritain Revisited

By DONALD DeMARCO A good philosopher must have a mind that is, to a certain extent, independent. It should be independent from the errors of his predecessors, but certainly not from reality or from reason, which is the means by which one ascertains certain truths about reality. He must also be an original thinker, not in the sense of being novel but in tracing things back to their origins. This combination of independence of mind and originality of thought, so qualified, is quite rare among philosophers. When Jacques Martian came into the world, on November 18, 1882, Europe was teeming with intellectual activity. In Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche was proclaiming the death of God and the advent of the Superman. In…Continue Reading

Is Administration Reneging On Trump’s Religious Freedom Promise?

September 9, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Is Administration Reneging On Trump’s Religious Freedom Promise?

By TERENCE P. JEFFREY The political optics were some of President Trump’s best — as he prepared on May 4 to sign an executive order defending freedom of conscience. “With this executive order,” Trump told the crowd in the Rose Garden, “we also make clear that the federal government will never, ever penalize any person for their protected religious beliefs.” He did not say most of the time or almost always. He said “never, ever.” Nor did he say any group or religious order. He said “any person.” This was a categorical promise. Having made it, Trump framed his argument for it by making specific reference to the Little Sisters of the Poor, noting that members of this Catholic order…Continue Reading

Should Japan And South Korea Go Nuclear?

September 8, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Should Japan And South Korea Go Nuclear?

By PATRICK J. BUCHANAN By setting off a 100-kiloton bomb, after firing a missile over Japan, Kim Jong Un has gotten the world’s attention. What else does he want? Almost surely not war with America. For no matter what damage Kim could visit on U.S. troops and bases in South Korea, Okinawa, and Guam, his country would be destroyed and the regime his grandfather built annihilated. “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” wrote Sun Tzu. Kim likely has something like this in mind. His nuclear and missile tests have already called the bluff of George W. Bush who, in his “axis of evil” speech, declared that the world’s worst regimes would not be allowed…Continue Reading

A Book Review… Deciphering John Locke On Tolerance

September 7, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on A Book Review… Deciphering John Locke On Tolerance

By JUDE DOUGHERTY Jolley, Nicholas. Toleration and Understanding in Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. x + 175 pp. Cloth, $70.00. This book is an attempt to identify a unifying strain of thought in three works by John Locke that Nicholas Jolley rightly believes an uninformed reader might think were written by three different people. The works are An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1671), Two Treatises on Government (1690), and Epistola de Tolerantia (1689). The third mentioned work may not be as influential as the first two but may be the most important one for understanding Locke’s mature thought on the subject of tolerance. Jolley finds that Locke, unlike Hobbes, is not a systematic philosopher. He reminds the reader that…Continue Reading

Did Demons “Help” God Create The World?

September 6, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Did Demons “Help” God Create The World?

By FR. BRIAN W. HARRISON, OS My old friend Philip Trower recently contributed a very stimulating defense of theistic evolution (“Creation, The CCC, Evolution and Angels,” The Wanderer, July 13, 2017, p. 8B). To his credit, he makes a serious, and I think quite original, attempt to address a serious problem that the vast majority of Jewish and Christian evolutionists either seem blissfully unaware of, or sweep under the carpet. The problem is this: How can our belief in a perfectly good and loving Creator be reconciled with a scenario in which, for scores of millions of years prior to the Fall of our first parents, billions of innocent sentient creatures suffered terror and excruciating pain from lethal predatory attacks…Continue Reading

Seeking The Face Of God

September 5, 2017 Featured Today Comments Off on Seeking The Face Of God

By JAMES MONTI Our whole lives as Catholics, our daily battles to do God’s will, to sin no more, to fight evil and falsehood, to uphold, defend, and promulgate truth, are all ordered to one supreme destiny — to behold the face of God in Heaven, as promised in the Book of Revelation: “. . . his servants shall worship him; they shall see his face” (Rev. 22:4). The Old Testament is replete with aspirations to see the face of God. Psalm 42 expresses this most eloquently: “As a hart longs for flowing streams, so longs my soul for thee, O God….When shall I come and behold the face of God?” (Psalm 42:1-2). This quest is likewise voiced in Psalm…Continue Reading