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…

Walking to work today I happened to see a car with a “Go Vegan!” bumper sticker right next to a “Darwin fish” sticker. This isn’t particularly surprising, and in my neighborhood there are plenty of cars expressing such progressive sentiments. But after thinking about it a bit, I decided there was a subtle, but significant,…

More on the mysterious meanings of “conservative,” “liberal,” and “moderate” from Get Religion: What I have seen so far has — surprise! — raised more questions for me about the way the mainstream media use certain loaded words. This time around, I am wondering what the word “moderate” means when applied to members of the…

We’re hearing a lot about how the Republicans are showcasing their “moderates” at the convention in an attempt to woo swing voters. The puzzling thing about this claim is that the so-called moderates don’t seem to necessarily have much in common, nor are they necessarily moderate in any straightforward sense. Consider: the three prominent “moderates”…