In his short and perplexing concurrence on Hobby Lobby, Justice Kennedy offered a path to resolving the dispute over the Affordable Care Act’s contraception mandate.
It’s one thing to be asked to provide contraception, another to contribute to a plan covering it, and another to tell the government your religious objections to it.
It’s unfortunate that the Obama administration’s initial, parsimonious exemption for religious groups helped ignite the firestorm that led to Hobby Lobby.
The Ayn Rand libertarianism that Paul Ryan has flirted with is fundamentally incompatible with Catholic teachings. But can Catholics still be economic libertarians?
Republican leaders happily rode the Tea Party tiger when it was convenient. Now, Cantor has fallen to the forces he and his colleagues unleashed and encouraged.
New evidence shows that government-funded, early childhood interventions can actually help instill many of the virtues whose absence conservatives lament.
Even if use of solitary confinement brings short-term order to some penal institutions, it does serious damage to inmates and exacts a steep moral cost.
The National Climate Assessment report makes clear that the emission of carbon is causing climate change; this is not a hypothesis, but a scientific fact
The court majority failed the empathy test and lost a chance to balance honor of religion’s role in public life with the rights of those of all faiths.
A decade ago, who would have guessed that controversies about male circumcision would roil European countries and achieve resonance in the United States?
According to Thomas Piketty, the U.S. is the most inegalitarian nation in the world, and on current trends may soon become the most inegalitarian nation in history.
Republicans in nine states have pushed through laws with strict photo ID requirements as well as a variety of limitations on early voting and absentee voting. Why?
It’s bad enough that college is so expensive. But the toll exacted by the extra burden of student debt threatens the common good higher ed is meant to preserve.
That the ACA hit its sign-up goal ought to give everyone pause over how reckless its opponents have been in making instant judgments and outlandish charges.
It’s a sign of how politicized the American Catholic Church has become that its different factions were lobbying over the message the bishop of Rome should send.
After Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoes bill affecting gay marriage, similar bills in other states will give us another master class in how to hold a culture war.
The GOP’s obduracy on income inequality has kept the federal government from adopting any policy that might increase the take-home pay of low-income workers.
Social and religious conservatives should have been the first to oppose the effort to allow businesses to discriminate against same-sex couples on religious grounds.
With ACA enrollment numbers up and the troubled website stabilized, it’s worth looking back at the madness that gripped the Chicken Little pundits a few months ago.
The presence of the Amish in America poses a conundrum: How do a people who espouse a slow and simple way of life not only survive but thrive in a hypermodern world?
The conventional wisdom seems to be that Americans, feeling ripped off by the Affordable Care Act, are ready to pounce. But how does that correspond to reality?
February 11 marked the end of a dismal experiment during which the right wing did all it could to make the United States look like a country incapable of governing.
