Alasdair MacIntyre maintains that action falls within the context of a community. But what happens when the duties of one’s station conflict with each other? How do “communities” relate to each other? What place does MacIntyre grant to international relations? What should we do when communities decide to come to
For nearly a half-century, abortion has been one of the most polarizing and contested issues in American politics. The leak of Justice Alito’s majority draft opinion in the Dobbs case has occasioned bleak speculation from abortion rights advocates about what the perils of a post-Roe world might look like, especially
I have heard the phrase “Christians are being persecuted” in the context of American politics enough times in the last few years to know that it has become a piece of folk wisdom. I have seen the tendency to view persecution as confirmation in political discourse in America, particularly in
Some two years ago, I attended the Called and Co-Responsible conference at the University of Notre Dame. It was a conference about the role of the laity in the Church. One of the speakers, Fr. Michael Sweeny, O.P. made two insightful statements in his talk that resonated deeply with my
In the first part of this essay, I provided the rationale and method of offering a series of “touchstones” by way of which we might “map” the whole of Dante’s Divine Comedy. My chief aim is to speak of a very small number of parts of the poem that seem
Why Would Anyone Want God to Make for Tragedy? It may not seem like much for an advertisement for God to say that God makes for tragedy. The billboard that asserts that “God makes for tragedy” seems on a par, in terms of public relations, with the billboard warning bleary-eyed