Peter Leithart All this means that Windsor presents American Christians with a call to martyrdom. In Greek, martyria means “witness,” specifically witness in a court. At the very least, the decision challenges American Christians to continue to teach Christian sexual ethics without compromise or apology. But Windsor presents a call to martyrdom in a more specific sense. There will be a cost for speaking the truth, a cost in reputation, opportunity, and funds if not in freedoms. Scalia’s reference to... Read more

Robert Oscar Lopez Single-parenting and divorce have always been understood as a breakdown of the married mom and dad ideal, but the demand to view same-sex parenting as “normal” imposes a silence on children about the wound caused by the loss of one parent or the other. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/07/10474/?utm_source=RTA+Lopez+abuse&utm_campaign=winstorg&utm_medium=email Read more

Not only was the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Defense of Marriage Act baseless and just plain wrong, you won’t learn much from reading Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion. Except that he thinks only bigotry can explain support for marriage as it was until the year 2000—a male-female union. You can learn something, however, from reading the three dissenting opinions closely. The conservative justices’ dissents are like flares signaling the path that marriage proponents must take from here. http://www.redstate.com/ryantanderson/2013/07/02/what-three-dissents-signal-for-marriages-future/?utm_source=RTA+SCOTUS+RedState&utm_campaign=winstorg&utm_medium=email Read more

Rodney Stark Most of those Americans who are reported as having no religion are not unreligious but only unaffiliated, and some of them even attend church. They do not belong to any specific denomination, but probably most of them would agree that they are Christians, had they been directly asked that question. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324532004578360020102202976.html Read more

David Brooks Back when the humanities were thriving, the leading figures had a clear definition of their mission and a fervent passion for it. The job of the humanities was to cultivate the human core, the part of a person we might call the spirit, the soul, or, in D.H. Lawrence’s phrase, “the dark vast forest.” http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/opinion/brooks-the-humanist-vocation.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1&msource=MAG10& Read more

An interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, author of “Infidel” • “From the perspective of the Arab leaders, reaching a two-state solution is to betray God. If you want peace and not merely a process, you must make peace with the people. The negotiators themselves are of no importance.” http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=10309 Read more

Most of us live our partisan politics through the media, which generally means cross-firing tweets, posts and cable news shows about the latest scandal as interpreted by a rotating stable of Washington strategists, party faithfuls and pundits. But behind the klieg lights, there has always been a less topical, more abstract debate between liberal and conservative academics and philosophers about the nature of human flourishing and the political and social institutions that best promote it. Robert P. George is one... Read more

When, during a conversation in a swank hotel lobby in Manhattan, I mentioned to Richard Dawkins that I was working on a story about William Lane Craig, the muscles in his face clenched. http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Theist/140019/ Read more

Just as Lincoln rejected the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the Dred Scott decision, so too conservative leaders need to reject the Court’s faulty reasoning about DOMA. Anti-democratic judicial activism has become habitual only because our elected leaders have declined to respond to it with Lincoln’s clarity and firmness. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/07/10472/?utm_source=RTA+Holloway+Lincoln+Supreme+Court+DOMA&utm_campaign=winstorg&utm_medium=email Read more

Matthew J. Franck You know that someone has bad news to relate when he begins by saying, “well, it could have been worse.” That is what the defenders of conjugal marriage are saying after the brace of Supreme Court rulings issued yesterday on challenges to that truth that is as old as the human race, that marriage is between a man and a woman. The net effect of the rulings is further damage to marriage, and to the power of... Read more