From the Washington Post: If Gore’s America (and presumably John Kerry’s) is reproducing at a slower pace than Bush’s America, what does this imply for the future? Well, as the comedian Dick Cavett remarked, “If your parents never had children, chances are you won’t either.” When secular-minded Americans decide to have few if any children,…

Lynne Stewart is the attorney for Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (convicted of instigating the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) who has been indicted for illegally passing information from her client to outside terrorist groups. I have no idea if this woman broke the law, but if this interview with a far-left journal is any indication,…

I’ve written before about the tensions between libertarians and conservatives. As a recovering libertarian these ideological differences still interest me a great deal. It seems to me that another way of shedding light on this tension might be by considering our evolving understanding of community. Conservatives are, in essence, defenders of community. Preserving the tribe…

From the Acton Institute: The principle of subsidiarity, which teaches that a community of a higher order should not interfere in the activities of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, is a first principle in genuine Catholic social teaching. It requires each of us to be responsible for those…

Why has the “population bomb” been a bust? Largely because of freedom, individualism, and capitalism says Timothy Burke: The population-explosion club was one part of a larger tendency that carried over the faith in centralization and statism that was characteristic of one lineage of high modernist thought and practice. I see that lineage today in…

Michael Gilleland provides morsels of it for our delectation every day at his great blog Laudator Temporis Acti.

No one can avoid having some significant interest in her or his relationships to the nation-state just because of its massive resources, its coercive legal powers, and the threats that its blundering and distorted benevolence presents. But any rational relationship of the governed to the government of modern states requires individuals and groups to weigh…

Disputations makes some distinctions.

That’s what Ken Layne wants to know: These are facts. The Republican leadership stands for absolutely nothing beyond growing the federal government, federal deficit and federal control of our lives at a staggering, unforgivable & untenable rate. We have a president who has never seen a spending bill he didn’t love — he has yet…

John Ray at Dissecting Leftism points out some of the limitations of understanding politics along a simple left-right axis. This is a particularly interesting observation: Putting it at its briefest, the Left/Right division is so pervasive because that IS how the great majority of people think. There are of course varieties of conservatism — with…