From Ethika Politika, our friends, and around the web. Compiled by David Mills.
The Editorial
With a Christian lack of sentimentality, Andrew Haines explains that remembering "even the smallest children lack innocence before God" helps us deal with family life and avoid "the culture war mentality" that "drives some to objectify life and family as unconditionally good." Even though families are needed for human flourishing, they don’t provide the answers we’re after, he argues in Augustine on Evil Children and the Future of the Family.
From Ethika Politika The Last Two Weeks
Futurists and Conservatives. Many conservatives want to restore and others to change rather than conserve, writes Thomas Storck. Conservatism suffers from vagueness about what it is because it doesn't answer the question: conserve what?"
The Nature of Love. "In loving others, we come to recognize the individual as worthy of being loved," writes Samantha Schroeder. Yet "truly willing the good of another might mean withdrawing our love for a season. The winter may be all you can give."
On Liberal Indeterminacy and Its March to Somewhere. "The liberal order makes change an axiom," but has no way to evaluate the nature or the direction of the changes different liberals propose, argues Ryan Shinkel.
Being, Meaning, and False Counterfactuals. Looking at the current public debates, Sam Rocha argues that "the language, rhetoric, and politics of identity amount to little more than a profound confusion between, on the one hand, what it is to be and, on the other, what being means."
Sexuality as Transcendence. The French Catholic philosopher Fabrice Hadjadj, in an interview with a Polish journal translated for us by Artur Rosman, argues among other things that the Devil is not an atheist, that Christianity is not a "spiritualism" but "a spirituality of the Incarnation," and that freedom "is not a mere power to choose" but "connected with something that is perceived as a good."
From Our Editors, Writers, and Friends
Chase Padusniak's Reductionist Thinking is Killing Us from The Intercollegiate Review
Peter Augustine Lawler's Truly Higher Education from National Affairs
Thomas Storck's review of Freaks of Fortune from The New Oxford Review
Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig's Pope Francis' Populist War With the Devil from The New Republic
Other Articles on Our Concerns
An interview with Matthew Crawford from National Review
Amber Lapp's Why Poor Women Are Less Likely to Get Abortions from Family Studies
The John Jay Institute's symposium on Home in a Changing World
