The Philosopher’s Reflections on the Rosary

“I Don’t Know How You’ll Help Me, But I Know You Will” Why would a philosopher go to bat for the Rosary? I’d better ‘fess up right off. I’ve never been able to convince myself that I’m a philosopher, even though I own a Ph.D. in that disc … [Read more...]

The Fundamental Option

A Faithful Student’s Guide to a Competing 20th Century Moral Theory

For years now in the post-conciliar period, the concept of the fundamental option—which some have likened to St. Thomas Aquinas’s notion of a commitment to an “Ultimate End” as the first principle of moral action (see Benedict M. Ashley, O.P … [Read more...]

The Family: Expanded Sacrament

It has become a trite truism to say that the traditional family is under attack. The sources of the onslaught may be traced back at least to the 19th century’s exaltation of Romantic infatuation and its accompanying insistence that the s … [Read more...]

Conscience, Freedom, and the “Law of Graduality” at the Synod on the Family

Ideas have consequences—we well know. My concern here is a series of problematic and closely related conceptions of conscience, human freedom, the moral qualification of human acts, and progress in moral living that might be operative in t … [Read more...]

Benedict XVI on Freedom in Obedience to the Truth: A Key for the New Evangelization

... the more fundamental task ... is to form human hearts, beginning with those who have already been evangelized and need to be “newly evangelized,” those who know something already, but are not living it; those who are showing up in the pe … [Read more...]

God and Caesar

In the Catholic view, the religious sphere is based on the virtue of faith. This faith is a gift of God ... In contrast, according to this Catholic view, the civil sphere is based on experience illumined by faith. That is to say, it is … [Read more...]

True freedom is interior

Interior freedom is gained by loving God and one’s neighbor, and by not being inordinately attached to any created thing.               Alexander Solzhenitsyn and St. Therese of Lisieux Freedom is what makes man to be man.  Freedom is wh … [Read more...]