Voices
John F. Kavanaugh, S.J., was a longtime philosophy professor at the University of St. Louis and a frequent contributor to America. He died in 2012.
A long time ago, in the 1960’s, I found myself in a march protesting what I thought was some covert racism at Saint Louis University. As I carried my sign calling for more serious recruitment of African-American students, I saw someone in the picket line looping back toward me. His sign sporte
In the latest of my weekly telephone conversations with a colleague who lives in France, the first question she asked was, What do you think of the pope and Islam? Rarely inclined to talk politics, she was testing me out. And my response was testing her as well. Well, I think he could have said it d
The more thoroughly you lay waste a nationlevel its cities, slaughter its people, its noncombatant peoplethe more conclusive your victory will be.... If you want to turn a psychotic aggressor nation into a well-mannered commercial oneif you want to beat swords into plowshares, and infantry training manuals into business cardsyour best bet is to go for high levels of national destruction.
John Derbyshire, They the People
Columns
As Labor Day approached, a sublimely ironic drama was being played out on Capitol Hill. At the end of July, the U.S. House of Representatives finally passed a bill that would raise the minimum wage, over the next couple of years and with no provision for future inflation, from $5.15 to a kingly $7.2
Politics & SocietyBooks
My local newspaper’s front page headline read Barbaric, a word uttered by the director of the Iraqi Defense Ministry’s operations room
In this column I want to make three points. First, various state initiatives are rushing to fund embryonic stem cell research and therapeutic cloning. Second, the naughty word cloning is avoided, even though it is in fact the procedure described by the sanitized locution somatic cell nuclear transfe
Thirty-eight years after its publication, the encyclical Humanae Vitae is once again causing a stir. The Italian weekly L’Espresso featured in its April 21 issue an extended dialogue between the bioethicist Ignazio Marino and the retired Archbishop of Milan, Cardinal Carlo Martini, S.J. (For t
Ethics is about what we do. We form our moral judgments, our consciences; and we act on them or we refuse to. We change ourselves and our little parts of the world by our agency. We respond to duties or a desire to maximize happiness or a commitment to justice. Supposedly autonomous agents, we make
Fifteen years ago, one might easily have thought we were entering a new era of peace in the world. The Communist evil empire dissolved so quickly, without nukes or invasions, it seemed that swords might indeed be turned into plowshares. An apparently endless cold war ended. Peace dividends danced in
The Denver Post reported that a few hours before he died, Jim Sunderland, S.J., asked his family and friends to put on his shoes, because I want to walk into heaven. Just like him: a flinty realism, a bit of humor and an undying faith. A Visitation sister, his friend for over 40 years, wrote, "