Viewing a few clips of Donald Trump and realizing that he has millions of Americans cheering him on, I wonder, does anybody in the United States stop to question the underlying values that so many Americans seem to swallow without thinking? I’m talking about what I call the Alpha American Achievement culture. Go, go go! Win, win win! Be Beautiful! Be Successful! Be Great! Be Powerful! Positive Thinking! Beat the other guy! You can do it! Putting a braying windbag like... Read more

My latest article for CRUX reflects on my visit in June to the Monks of Norcia Historically the monks have endured great hardships without complaint or self-concern. They have been persecuted, slandered, and imprisoned. Their monasteries have been turned into prisons and poor houses. Their buildings have been razed, only to be raised again. Time and again I have visited modern communities built on the ruins of ancient monasteries. As one monk said with a quiet smile, “We’re like weeds.... Read more

If you want a sampling of the state of our culture jump over to this article in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph. It is shocking beyond belief, and be warned, some of the language is graphic. Here’s the setting: nice, upper middle class English woman is having a picnic with some friends and their kids. Then the conversation turns to pornography. The Vision: a Swallows and Amazons return to nature; a traditional rope-swinging, make-your-own-fun, soap-free weekend that all kids love. And aged... Read more

You know the old schtick from the New Testament scholars: all those miracles stories and supernatural events? They’re all pious fiction. Somebody made it up. It’s “mythical”. They added that stuff to make Jesus more special. They added that stuff to make it seem like he was fulfilling Old Testament prophecy. They cooked up those stories to make him into the Son of God. Pshaw! It never happened! How gullible are you? C’mon. Get real. He was just an ordinary... Read more

Sin is never original What I mean is that there is nothing new or fresh about sin. The devil never created anything. He can’t create anything new. All he can do is twist and distort something that already exists. C.S.Lewis points this out regarding human creativity as well. While we are very creative, he says, we don’t have the capacity to create anything genuinely original. We can create new combinations of things we already know or we can create new... Read more

The videos from Center for Medical Progress have raised lots of emotions and passionate articles. Ross Douthat, with his usual razor sharp intelligence, lays out the evidence against the wishy washy argument that abortion restriction legislation causes more people to need abortions. The essential argument of people like Dana Milbank here is that de-funding Planned Parenthood will deprive people of contraceptive services and thereby bring about more abortions. Douthat crunches the numbers and proves him wrong. So to be clear: In 2010... Read more

Last week while wasting time on the internet I came across the weird event of public body painting. You can read about it here, but be warned there are some images of partial nudity. What happened was a group of New Yorkers volunteered to strip naked and have their bodies painted. Quite apart from the public nudity, what struck me as bizarre was how visibly our society is drifting into a kind of primitivism. It hit me first some years... Read more

Believe it or not, today is National Underwear Day. Wearing underwear is not only civilized, but it has many practical purposes people haven’t thought of. Can’t be doing with another baby just yet? Do away with all those calendars and charts and thermometers, and simply keep your underwear on. When I was working as a high school chaplain I used to tell the boys in my homeroom that they had three totally reliable and Catholic approved contraceptives: their belt, their... Read more

I have resisted the too easy observation that the world goes sadly angry about the killing of Cecil the Lion while turning away from pie dishes full of livers, lungs and limbs of dead babies. Instead I am curious about the responses of Cecile Richards–the President of Planned Parenthood–and all the other abortion supporters. Cecile has stepped up to the cameras and mouthed the lies she has been told to mouth by her expensive PR handlers. She’s doing her Nazi... Read more