Ecclesia et Civitas

I suggested last month that recent developments, including Donald Trump’s victory, open up possibilities for the future. But unsettling established orthodoxies isn’t enough: there must be something better to replace them. That brings us to […]

If we want our social and political efforts to be useful, their direction should depend on the way the world is going. But people aren’t good at reading the signs of the times. As Yogi […]

Progressives believe in “progress,” which, in practice, means extending the “arc of history”—the general tendency of thought and social organization—toward a windowless global technocracy that manages the whole of life. Many people—including Catholics who merge […]

What direction should Catholicism take in America today? It’s a new setting, historically speaking, and despite all efforts, we don’t seem to be dealing with it well. We live in a democratic consumer society that […]

Last month I pointed out serious problems with progressive Christianity, mostly having to do with the progressive rejection of transcendence. To fill out the discussion, it seems I ought to say something about conservative Christianity. […]

A number of Catholic commentators responded to the blasphemous parody of the Last Supper during the opening ceremonies for the Olympics by denying it was what it was. Others were outraged by Catholic outrage. After […]

Is our society democratic? It is compared with many countries. Iran, for example, has elections that matter, so it is democratic to that extent. Even so, what counts here as a harsh or contemptuous response […]

“What is truth?” — Pontius Pilate “Truth is such a flyaway, such a slyboots, so untransportable and unbarrelable a commodity, that it is as bad to catch as light.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson Pilate and […]

What use is Twitter (now called “X” but still better known as “Twitter”)? It has millions of users, who can post whatever they want, so there’s lots of information on very different topics. Sometimes there’s […]