Tomorrow I will be watching Super Bowl LV. Although I love watching football, I sometimes wonder if I should. I address this question in an essay entitled I published over six years ago soon after Baylor University opened up its new football stadium. Originally published on September 12, 2014 over at The Catholic Thing I republish it here in its entirety: Ever since my wife and I bought a giant flat-screen television set for our living room, I cannot get... Read more
We recently had an unfortunate incident at Baylor in which a small group of students on campus, with the assistance of the student newspaper (The Lariat), called for the dismissal of a lecturer in the English department. Her crime? She had made comments on twitter with which these students did not agree. The comments concerned the uncontroversial public policy question of whether biological males who claim to identify as girls or women should be allowed in semi-private spaces (such as... Read more
It is not unusual for universities to house a think-tank or two. A think-tank is an academic unit committed to research and the proliferation of that research. Some of the most well-known think-tanks include Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy. They often host lectures, symposia, discussions, debates, etc. in which resident scholars and/visiting researchers participate. Unlike other academic units of the university, think-tanks do not offer degrees or even classes, though most if not... Read more
The last two years have been my most productive in terms of publishing. I really don’t understand why. My guess is that I have become far more disciplined in reading and writing while at the same time realizing how little I actually know. Looking back at some of my early publications in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, I am actually surprised that they were published at all. What I see in my younger self is a way too... Read more
Beginning on January 1, 2019 I embarked on a journey through St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae. Nearly two years later, I am finally finished. I read the last page today, December 13, 2020, on the Feast of St. Lucy. Although I had read a lot of the Summa over the past 40 years or so (not to mention numerous other works by Aquinas including the Summa Contra Gentiles), I had never read the whole thing cover to cover in such a... Read more
MIT philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson died on November 20, 2020 at the age of 91. She was, by all accounts, one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century, having penned some of the most penetrating essays in the history of the discipline. But, as her New York Times obituary notes, she is best known for an article she published in 1971 in the journal Philosophy and Public Affairs, “A Defense of Abortion.” The Times writes: [Thomson’s article] began... Read more
The title of this blog post is the title of an article I just published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Christian Legal Thought 10.2 (2020): 21-28. An earlier version of the piece was delivered in New York City as a paper as part of the panel, “Church–State Relations in a Time of Scandal,” sponsored by The Morningside Institute (Sept. 26, 2019). Here’s the introductory paragraph: In this essay I look at the abuse crisis in the American Catholic Church through... Read more
Last week Pope Francis elevated Archbishop Wilton Gregory of Washington, DC to the College of Cardinals. He is the first American of African descent to become a Cardinal, though he is not first in the history of the Church. (Among the living non-American African cardinals are Peter Kodwo Appiah Turkson, Francis Arinze, and Robert Sarah) Because of this mistaken tweet by CBS News, I wanted to find out more about African Catholics that served the church from its beginnings. So,... Read more
“Reformation Day and Schism” is an essay I published 10 years ago in The Catholic Thing. I argue in it that Western Christians should no more celebrate Reformation Day than one should celebrate one’s marital divorce. What follows is the essay in its entirety. Sunday, October 31, is Reformation Day. It marks 493 years [503 in 2020] since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to that famous door in Wittenberg, Germany. The Augustinian monk set in motion a sequence of... Read more
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