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One thing that the New Testament, the Apostles’ Creed and the general teaching of the Christian churches does not allow you to hold is that Christ was a great moral teacher, a social worker or a political revolutionary, but not divine and
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“Advocates of redefining “marriage” as sexual-romantic companionship or domestic partnership to accommodate same-sex relationships are increasingly confirming the point that this shift erodes the basis for permanence and exclusivity in any relationship.1”
― Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism
― Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism
“The true liberal-arts ideal rejects the reduction of reason to the status of passion's ingenious servant. It is an ideal rooted in the conviction that there are human goods, and a common good, in light of which we have reasons to constrain, to limit, to regulate, and even to alter our desires.”
― Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism
― Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism
“Robust support for marital norms serves children, spouses, and hence our whole economy, especially the poor. Family breakdown thrusts the state into roles for which it is ill-suited: parent and discipliner to the orphaned and neglected, and arbiter of disputes over custody and paternity.”
― Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism
― Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism
“Conscience as “self-will” is a matter of feeling or emotion, not reason. It is concerned not so much with identifying what one has a duty to do or not do, one's feelings and desires to the contrary notwithstanding, but rather with sorting out one's feelings. Conscience as self-will identifies permissions, not obligations. It licenses behavior by establishing that one doesn't feel bad about doing it—or at least one doesn't feel so bad about doing it that one prefers the alternative of not doing it.”
― Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism
― Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism
“At the heart of her doubts about secular liberalism (and what she described as “radical, upscale feminism”) was its embrace of abortion and its (continuing) dalliance with euthanasia. At first, she went along with abortion, albeit reluctantly, believing that women's rights to develop their talents and control their destinies required its legal availability. But Betsey (as she was known by her friends) was not one who could avert her eyes from inconvenient facts. The central fact about abortion is that it is the deliberate killing of a developing child in the womb. For Betsey, euphemisms such as “products of conception,” “termination of pregnancy,” “privacy,” and “choice” ultimately could not hide that fact. She came to see that to countenance abortion is not to respect women's “privacy” or liberty; it is to suppose that some people have the right to decide whether others will live or die. In a statement that she knew would inflame many on the Left and even cost her valued friendships, she declared that “no amount of past oppression can justify women's oppression of the most vulnerable among us.”
― Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism
― Conscience and Its Enemies: Confronting the Dogmas of Liberal Secularism
Peter’s 2025 Year in Books
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