Under the Fir Tree

When “choice” becomes the highest public good, the weak don't become safer. They become easier to sacrifice. Tolerance is often praised as a civic virtue, but in reality it begins as a wound. I tolerate only what I judge to be wrong, offensive, or dangerous, and only when I have the power to resist and yet refrain. There is no tolerance where nothing in me protests. There is no tolerance where I am indifferent. Tolerance isn't the absence of moral judgment. It's moral judgment under restraint. Modern liberalism likes to imagine it's found a way around this. It dreams of a public square so neutral that no conviction can stain it, a state so hygienic that no moral odor clings to its hands. But this is a fantasy. A referee who can't be offended can't tolerate anything. He merely permits. He doesn't stand above the conflict; he's already defined it in a way that hides his own involvement. That illusion collapses most dramatically in abortion, because abortio...

Inspired by Archbishop Sample's Reflection Last Year In years past people stepped into Washington’s hard cold as witnesses. A witness doesn’t come to win a vibe. A witness comes to say what’s real. And what’s real is simple: a human life isn’t a problem to manage. It’s a mystery to receive. Yes—Roe and Casey have been overruled. At last. They were named for what they were: a legal permission slip for the strong to decide the fate of the weak. On June 24, 2022, the Court said plainly that Roe and Casey are overruled, and that abortion regulation is returned to the people and their elected representatives. Fine. But don’t confuse a courtroom sentence with a converted nation. The wound has only changed rooms. It hasn’t stopped bleeding. Our age is tidy with its sins. It rinses its hands in scented words. It won’t say killing; it says choice. It won’t say child; it says tissue. That’s how the lie stays warm: it wraps itself in soft syllables until conscience nods off. The vocabulary ge...

They say the next thousand days will rewrite civilization. For a Catholic, that's not long; it's a long weekend. Rome burned, plagues came, nations rose and fell, and the Church kept saying the same Creed. History sprints; the Creed walks. If AI really is forty years ahead of schedule, civilization may get an upgrade. Human nature won't. Start with the "intelligence inversion." If a mind-on-a-chip can do your job for fifty cents a day, the market hasn't discovered that you're worthless; it's discovered that it was looking at you wrong. You were never just a thinking tool. You're an image of God. When a culture prices only brainpower, an AI bargain bin feels like doom. When the Church sees a billion-dollar server farm humming like a beehive, it still points to a candle before the tabernacle and says: that is where the universe turns. If a machine can pass your exam, maybe the exam was too small for you. Then the automation cliff. If autonomous agent...

CARING ABOUT YOUR NEIGHBORS You asked about my politics the other week, and I had trouble answering fully. Here's my attempt at a better explanation. Localism is simply this: power kept near the people who live with it. Regionalism adds texture: different places are allowed to stay different. Decentralization is the guardrail: no single center gets to swallow everything. America was built on all three. It’s been trying to forget that ever since. The colonies started as little experiments, not one sweeping project. A Puritan village, a Quaker town, a rough coastal port—they didn’t match, and they weren’t meant to. The continent was too large for a single script, so freedom came disguised as clutter: charters, compacts, assemblies, town meetings. Authority was layered like an old stone wall—parish, town, county, colony—so no single layer could pretend to be the whole landscape. The town meeting was the first civics class: you argued with people you’d see at church and market. You cou...