EPPC Hertog Fellow Yuval Levin warns conservatives that relying solely on a “thoroughly oppositional mind-set” in politics “threatens to make us forget what we seek to defend and advance, and so to reduce American conservatism to an outlet for nostalgia or outrage.” Instead, Mr. Levin counsels, “today’s Right needs both a firmer grounding in the foundations of the conservative tradition in American politics and more practical policy proposals that can speak to the public’s needs and wants.”
Audio recordings of two presentations at EPPC’s recent Faith Angle Forum – “The Islamic State: Understanding its Ideology and Theology” and “Religious Liberty and the American Culture Wars” – are now available online. A third session, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’s presentation titled “A Religious Response to Religious Violence,” will be posted soon.
EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel extols the late Cardinal Francis George as “a man of erudition and humility who thought things through, who had the courage to follow his convictions, and who could be trusted to speak for the Church, not just for his point of view or his ‘party.’”
Contrary to the mainstream media’s cheerleading, EPPC Senior Fellow Peter Wehner points out that, in Hillary Clinton’s career as First Lady, senator, and secretary of state, “the things she has her fingerprints on have, much more often than not, turned into disasters.”
Reviewing Randy Boyagoda’s biography of Richard John Neuhaus, EPPC Fellow Stephen P. White observes that “the ongoing debates over the role of religion in public life … underscore and confirm Neuhaus’ insight into the necessary role of religion in public life and the myriad threats to that role.” (See also EPPC Senior Fellow Wilfred M. McClay’s recent review of the book.)
An ostensibly pro-abortion essay in the Washington Post is evidence that “the conscience is a cooperative master, easily mollified by the flimsiest justification,” writes EPPC Senior Fellow Mona Charen.
EPPC Senior Fellow Bruce Cole and co-author Roger L. Beckett warn that a new report by the U.S. Department of Education indicates that history and civics “are continuing their slide toward becoming an afterthought in American education.”
EPPC Fellow Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry describes the Manif movement, which emerged in opposition to same-sex marriage in France, as “an endlessly intriguing phenomenon, because it shows that there is the material for a Catholic revival in France.”
EPPC Senior Fellow James C. Capretta and co-author Lanhee J. Chen advise Congressional Republicans that if they spend the next year “advancing a realistic and appealing agenda through reconciliation, the party will be in a much stronger position to make demands during the inevitable negotiations that will occur with the president and his allies in Congress.”
EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel finds that the “non-stop brouhaha” over Pope Francis’s forthcoming encyclical on humanity and the natural world “seems quite out of proportion to what we actually know, ahead of time, about the Catholic Church, environmental issues, and the encyclical-to-come.”
EPPC President Ed Whelan, a leading contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos, reflects on the blog’s first decade of commentary on Supreme Court confirmation battles and constitutional law.
EPPC Distinguished Senior Fellow George Weigel ponders the question, “What might the evidence of a genuine ‘conversion’ on the part of Raúl Castro and the totalitarian regime he leads look like?”
