The New Catholic Economics

December 17, 2014 By David Mills

Several respondents to last week’s column for Aleteia, “Free-Market Catholics Are Losing Their Faith (in Capitalism),” rejected my observation that a significant number of politically conservative Catholics are changing their attitude to the state, to a new assertion not just of the limits and dangers of the market but of the need for a welfare and regulatory government. The reasons ranged from “I don’t see it” to “It can’t be!” It is as I say an exercise in connecting the dots and one can... Read more

The Feminine Appeal of Islam

December 16, 2014 By David Mills

When Greisa Torres moved from Cuba to Miami four years ago, she “says she lost her identity in the move and found it in the Prophet Muhammad,” reports Voice of America. “While she was pregnant with her second son, Mahdi, Torres converted to Islam. ‘It was very hard for me because we do not have family here, just my husband and my kids. On this day, my baby — Mahdi — he was going to be born. That is why I convert... Read more

Our Bad People and Their Rights

December 15, 2014 By David Mills

Americans, writes Brandon McGinley in The danger of taking for granted that America is a just society, can avoid facing the problem that some Americans suffer injustice not accidentally but systemically, by assuming that the victims are “Bad People” and that they deserve whatever happens to them and thus whatever has been done to them they have been by definition treated justly. Whatever is done to them does not violate their rights (or, I would add, dignity) because they’re Bad People. When we... Read more

Prayer Advice For the Single Adult No One Wants

December 15, 2014 By David Mills

On the same subject as my Single and Catholic, but with more direct knowledge and more sardonically put, fellow Patheos blogger Katrina Fernandez (always recommended, by the way) lists The Stages of Praying for a Single Person. Here’s the fourth in her list of six prayers married people tell single people to pray. And really, really shouldn’t. 4) Give Up The Desire To Be Married And when God decides to not play along, then what? Ask God to take all hope and desire... Read more

New York Encounter 2015

December 15, 2014 By David Mills

In the “quest to redefine our identity, in the struggle between our boundless aspirations and the limits of our condition . . . boundaries imposed by reality or tradition are frequently viewed as impediments and the very idea of freedom is pushed to a new level, from ‘doing’ to ‘being’ what we want. Yet, at the same time, we often experience a profound nostalgia to somehow recover our authentic self and to belong.” This is part of the description for Identity: In Search... Read more

Gregg’s Hopes for Conservatism Future

December 13, 2014 By David Mills

Related to my Free-Market Catholics Are Losing Their Faith (in Capitalism), which describes one answer, the Acton Institute’s director of research Samuel Gregg offers another, asks “what a conservative fundamental transformation of America would look like.” In Conservatism After Obama, he writes: Since John Stuart Mill’s time, modern liberals have been much better at grasping the importance of establishing and then dominating the parameters ofwhat issues are discussed in the public square and how we do so. In the aftermath of Obama, it’s time for... Read more

Our Buyable Senators

December 12, 2014 By David Mills

In Here’s What $184K In Campaign Contributions Gets Comcast, Consumerist describes the letter our senators Pat Toomey (R) and Bob Casey (D) sent to the chairman of the FCC urging the quick approval of the merger of Comcast and Time-Warner Cable. Toomey received $70,600 in campaign contributions from Comcast in the last election cycle, while Casey got $114,000. The writer, Chris Morran, has a great deal of fun with a letter that is pretty much water-carrying from the first word to the... Read more

Spasms of Amateurism

December 12, 2014 By David Mills

Two articles on journalism today. From Forward, Neal Pollack’s Welcome to The New Republic — Taylor Swift’s Been Waiting For You, a list of the magazine’s greatest articles since it’s beginning. For example: 3) November 23, 1935. “Harrumph To Modernism,” by Edmund Wilson In an issue otherwise occupied by 37 editorials about the New Deal, TNR’s venerable critic goes on about Joyce and Eliot and Woolf for many pages, ending with the immortal words: “No one is reading this, right? Oooga-booga!” . . .... Read more

Not Torture, Just Inhumane and Degrading

December 12, 2014 By David Mills

“[H]ooding, stress positions, white noise, sleep deprivation and deprivation of food and water . . . combined with physical assaults and death threats to the men” were not torture, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in 1978, in a case Ireland brought against the U.K. protesting the treatment of Irish nationalists — the “hooded men” — imprisoned at the beginning of “the Troubles.” It was, the court ruled, “inhumane and degrading treatment.” At the urging of some of the surviving hooded... Read more

Catholics Moving Right and Left

December 11, 2014 By David Mills

Reading social movements is hard, since the evidence is diverse and can be read in several ways. In response to my description of leftward-moving conservative Catholics, one commenter on the article itself objected that We must be reading different Catholic commentary, because I disagree completely. . . . Most people I know, including myself, are far more receptive to libertarian ideas. This does not mean that we are all anarcho-capitalists, but that we recognize that nearly everything that the state touches, it... Read more