What makes our own society unique, is not its freedom from religion but rather the peculiar nature of the religion upon which our theocracy rests.

The recent controversy over the termination of a pregnancy at Phoenix's St. Joseph's Hospital, which Phoenix bishop Thomas Olmsted determined to have been a direct abortion and thus a grave moral evil, has generated a secondary controversy over the meaning of the Church's traditional moral principle of "double effect."

Aquinas holds that lying is wrong primarily because it violates the nature/purpose of enunciative speech. This paper raises the possibility that 1) enunciative speech has more purposes than that identified by Aquinas and 2) that some kinds of falsehoods build up rather than destroy society. I am going to identify some principles in Aquinas' own thought that I believe lend support to the claims I am making.

When I talk about abortion, I often surprise most of my audience, even some prolifers, by saying that not only is abortion always evil but that it is not a complex issue, that deep down we all know that it is evil; that Mother Teresa is very clearly right when she says If abortion isnt wrong, nothing is wrong.

Several years ago, the editor of a Catholic encyclopedia asked me the write a dozen or so entries on Catholic social teaching, including one on social justice. I read into the literature. But I found that social justice, if it can be said to exist at all, is a pretty threadbare idea.

A column by Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, a Catholic writer for the Washington Post, makes the claim that "Catholic social justice demands a redistribution of wealth."

For C.S. Lewis, the invention of romantic love in the age of the troubadours was far more momentous for the development of the West, and far more broadly influential than, say, the Protestant Reformation. Lewis compares the Reformation to a ripple on the vast ocean of romantic love.

Ed West meets the woman known as the Mother Teresa of Cairo for her work with the citys garbage people.

When teaching about virtues and the moral life, I often think of a discussion I had with a college friend.

Just as there are bad people with religious beliefs, so there are good people without them. So what does religion add to morality and why is the addition good?