From Ethika Politika, our friends, and around the web. Compiled by David Mills.
Editorial
Catholic social teaching can be articulated, even in official statements, in a way that leaves it two or three long steps from being the kinds of generalizations from which we can derive practical applications. David Mills argues in The Laity's Necessary Insights. The laity (those not called to exploring the principles) make it practical through insight and practice.
From Ethika Politika
Till We Do Us Part?. Cohabitation is not only wrong, argues Michael Bradley, it doesn't even do what it's supposed to do. As a test of whether two people ought to marry, it fails.
Little Boxes of Ticky Tack. Many people like to make fun of McMansions, and some to complain about alienating suburbs, but the trendier tiny house movement is not necessarily the answer to that alienation, writes Kamilla Ludwig.
Unbaptized: A Review of Marilyn Robinson's Lila. In previous books, Robinson has described the decent, bourgeois, law-abiding, and Christian. In this one, she describes someone the opposite of those. Grace abounds.
Summer Reading
Matthew J. Franck
From Our Writers, Editors, and Friends
Rachel Lu's Five Ways to Ensure Safe Sex from The Federalist.
Thomas Storck's Liturgy That Speaks to the Soul from The New Oxford Review.
Dylan Pahman's Show Me the Way to Poverty from the Law and Liberty Library.
Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig's Feminists Should Not Give Up on Pope Francis from The New Republic.
Her Liberate Women From Full-Time Work, also from The New Republic.
David Mills' The Government Data Hack from The Stream.
His Liberalism's Self-Justifying Beliefs from Aleteia.
Deacon Jim Russell's Letting Go of "Gay": Healing the Need to be "Out" from Crisis.
From the Archives
Artur Rosman's Catholic Letters: Nihilism and Literary Criticism.
David W. Cooney's Distributism Basics: Distributist Economic Society.
Other Articles on Our Concerns
Daryl Cameron and others' Empathy is Actually a Choice from The New York Times.
Melissa Chadburn's Resilience is Futile: How Well-Meaning Non-Profits Perpetuate Poverty from Jezebel.
Karl Schmude's Dangers to the Soul (an interview with Piers Paul Reed) from The University Bookman.
