EPPC Briefly: George Weigel on Pope Francis and the 2014 and 2015 Synods

Francis, Filtered
The mainstream press is happy to filter out the things Pope Francis says “that don’t fit the now-established ‘narrative’ of ‘humane, progressive pope vs. meanie reactionary bishops and hidebound Catholic traditionalists,’” explains EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel.

Time to Start Prepping Post-Obamacare Reforms
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, EPPC Hertog Fellow Yuval Levin and EPPC Senior Fellow James C. Capretta urge the GOP-led Congress to “be ready to respond with a consumer-oriented health reform” if the Supreme Court rules against the Obamacare federal-exchange subsidies in King v. Burwell.

Obama Scuttles. America Retreats. Things Fall Apart.
EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel sorts through the ongoing wreckage of the Obama administration’s foreign policy and laments that ”very little of the world order of which the United States was the linchpin and guarantor will be left on January 21, 2017.”

How Do We Know Real Art When We See It?
EPPC Senior Fellow Roger Scruton outlines three essential elements of all true art – “beauty, form and redemption” – and explains how to distinguish the real from the fake. (See also parts one and two of this three-part series by Mr. Scruton.)

The GOP’s Entitlement Challenge
EPPC Senior Fellow Henry Olsen explains that offering innovative solutions to the very real difficulties that working-class voters face would help “address the GOP’s decades-long empathy gap and recover the party’s historic role as the natural home for the American worker.”

The Tools of Their Tools
From spell-checkers to self-driving cars, automation technologies can relieve users of difficult or tedious work. But a new book by Nicholas Carr highlights the danger of living life on autopilot. In an essay in EPPC’s journal The New Atlantis, two reviewers look at Carr’s book The Glass Cage.

Obama’s Cold War Replay
EPPC Senior Fellow Mona Charen worries that “the opening of diplomatic relations with Cuba is the latest, and one fears, not the last in a string of preemptive concessions” to vicious regimes by President Obama.

A Christian Defense of Israel
EPPC Senior Fellow Peter Wehner argues that “it is a delusion for Christians to believe that life in the Middle East would be better if the enemies of Israel were to prevail.”

The Truth About Religion and Animals
Writing for Time, EPPC Senior Fellow Mary Eberstadt highlights that religious conservatives have provided “the most energetic thinking about [animal welfare] for the last several years.”

A Curious Panel Selection Procedure
EPPC President Ed Whelan exposes irregularities in the case-assignment process used by the Ninth Circuit—the federal appellate court long notorious for its lawlessness—and calls for the court to conduct a thorough investigation into whether that process has been abused for ideological purposes.