Reading Dawson, spiritual vitality is clearly the key to social cohesion and cultural health. Unclear is what happens if our countryside’s soil is polluted with the same norms that make our cities so hostile to religion.

It may be that enough people are bent on purifying our culture of traditional views of marriage that no demonstration of goodwill can suffice. But if we are to be drummed out of society, let us work to tell our story all the while.

A humane economy that supports human flourishing is an economy of communion, linked by the iron-clad bonds of reciprocity; not an economy of autonomy, linked only by the ephemeral grip of the invisible hand.

Marrying was once considered a masculine thing for a man to do. Yet contemporary cultural norms represent marriage—indeed any form of a monogamous, committed relationship—as feminizing, even shameful.

No one is impugning the motives of police chiefs who say they are acquiring the weaponry to save officers’ lives; but good intentions do not necessarily make for good policy, and the military transfer program smacks of a large-scale category mistake.

Ironically, what we need most of all to promote the universal common good is not a world political authority, but a world spiritual authority.

Sheila Liaugminas’s recent release Non-Negotiable, from Ignatius Press, is a timely and succinct compendium and synthesis of resources that aptly express Catholic teaching on human dignity, natural rights, and the foundations of a just society.

This is not a spontaneous disease that we can simply endure, and least of all is it something we can cure with “more education.” It is a system problem, and so long as the system persists it is unrealistic to expect people to behave in any other way.