The precept that every person has a duty to follow his own conscience is not in any way a promotion of individualism, much less moral relativism, that is, a "do your own thing" kind of morality.
During the Second World War, Peter Marshall, a brash young preacher at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, the toniest Protestant church in the nations capital, decided to let a newly married serviceman and his wife use a room on the church grounds for their wedding night.
We have so far been affected by sentimentality and a lack of realism that only undue severity moves or appalls us, rarely the opposite.
A few years back, the Washington Post designed a social experiment to see if commuters would stop a few minutes to listen to one of the worlds top violinists.
I thought to myself, how would I explain the concept of metaphysics to someone who is rich in lived experience but not well versed in philosophical terminology?
In his book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor distinguishes between the enchanted and disenchanted worlds.
Do we have free will? Are we truly responsible for our actions? Or, on the other hand, are we merely passive pawns who are completely at the mercy of impersonal or alien forces?
Though stories of seemingly altruistic animals tug at the heartstrings, humans are nature's sole moralists.
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."
