Brian Brown Suddenly, Paul Ryan is big. Columnists in The Economist, The New York Times, and other moderate-to-liberal publications are writing in admiration of his leadership. While this respect is certainly merited, it won’t last. Because ultimately, Ryan’s character is contrary to the established norms in both parties, and antithetical to deep-rooted ideology on the [...]

Kevin Vance What’s a good, culturally sensitive westerner to do when culture seems to prevent some Africans from heeding his advice to practice “safe sex”? This is the conundrum that was recently illustrated in a New York Times feature titled “Cultural Attitudes and Rumors Are Lasting Obstacles to Safe Sex.” I expected a long litany [...]

Kevin Vance In light of the recent health-care debate, Edward Feser has posted a useful primer on the concept of “rights” in Catholic moral theology:

A beautiful punchline. “As it’s happening, incremental decline is extremely seductive. Great powers aren’t Chad or Rwanda, where you’re sliding from the Dump category to the Even Crummier Dump category. Take a city like Vienna. Once upon a time it was an imperial capital. The empire busted up, but the capital still had magnificent architecture, [...]

The system is broken. So they all tell us. Obama won an election on it, but McCain’s rhetoric was similar. So was Sarah Palin’s, and she will probably try to win her own election on it in a few years. Scott Brown just did. The exact context of the statement might vary—it might refer to [...]