The Humanitas Forum

Everyone wants a good, meaningful, and productive life.  Many people think that is just what we have in contemporary American culture.  “Not so,” according to psychologist Barry Schwartz.  If it were true, we would not be experiencing an explosive growth …

Anxiety and discouragement and even despondency are reflected in the mood of many Christians these days—as well as anger.  What will happen in the aftermath of the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage?  Obviously, religious liberty will become front and …

No, the sky is not falling, but things will never be the same again.  Or more precisely, the vulnerability of religious liberty has become unquestionably clear.  Even secular law professors agree. 

The Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision last week does not …

Indeed!  What is next?  This is the question raised on all sides—left, right and center.  How do we get on in a culture so deeply divided by the debate over same-sex marriage?  The Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges…

Attention is a finite resource—a fact rarely acknowledged in our culture of busyness and 24/7 connectivity.  But we need to attend to attention because it is “the faculty by which [we] encounter the world.”

This is the case made by …

Yes, what Bruce Jenner has done is as profoundly American.  It advances a strain of American culture clearly articulated in the late 1800s by Walt Whitman’s epic poem, Song of Myself:  “I Celebrate myself, and sing myself, And what …

As the media and much of the American public celebrate the transition of Bruce Jenner to Caitlyn Jenner, there is an unreported down side to the realities of “gender fluidity.”  Only a few journals, blogs and websites have discussed the …

The barbarians “have already been governing us for quite some time.”  That’s one of the lessons that Alasdair MacIntyre has tried to teach us—a lesson that for some Christians has been slowly sinking in during the 34 years since After …

Friendship, like family and community, has fallen on hard times in our modern world.  Mobility, busyness, digital technology and numerous other factors have contributed to the thinning—if not the disappearance—of “true friendship.”  Friendship has become “the characteristically modern relationship,” according …

Few books reward close reading—and rereading and reading yet again—as richly as does C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves.  Each of the “four loves”—affection, friendship, Eros, and charity—has fallen on hard times in our modern world, something Lewis had …