We live in decadent times. Universal human rights have not been fully attained, yet radical environmentalists insist that flora, fauna and even geological features and structures should be deemed legal persons, a meme known as “nature rights.” The drive to grant rights to the entirety of the natural world has already achieved stunning victories. In 2008, Ecuador granted human-type rights to “nature” in its constitution back, while Bolivia recently passed a law to the same effect. More than 30...

Since I was a child I’ve always loved a good story. I believed that stories helped us to ennoble ourselves, to fix what was broken in us, and to help us e the people we dreamed of being.” So begins Anthony Hopkin’s character, Robert Ford, in his speech marking the finale of the first season of HBO’s mind-bending, techno-philosophical series “Westworld.” Ford is the brilliant co-creator of Westworld, a theme park set several decades in the future in which...

For the first time, we can now mechanically simulate the cognitive process. –Sister Mary Kenneth Keller Sister Mary Kenneth Keller established herself as a strong influence in the world puter science at a time when women in the field were unheard of. At the same time, her work paved the way for what we now understand as the information economy – a key driver of wealth creation. She was the first woman in the United States to earn a...

Along-cherished predisposition on the part of the Roman Catholic Church is that labor unions act as a protection against the exploitation of workers. From Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum forward, the Church has been an outspoken proponent of organized labor, worker safety and human dignity. Thus, es as little surprise that the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops weighed-in when the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in February regarding the Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and...

In early July, an Indian court issued a ruling that accorded the status of “legal person or entity” to animals in the state, saying “they have a distinct persona with corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person.” With this measure, designed to prevent cruelty to animals, justices of the Uttarakhand High Court in northern India declared that “the entire animal kingdom, including avian and aquatic ones, are declared as legal entities having a distinct persona with corresponding...

Disarmageddon” is what The Economist earlier this year called placent, reckless leaders” who “have forgotten how valuable it is to restrain nuclear weapons.” The politics of nuclear weapons – deterrence doctrines, mutually assured destruction and so on – have been the obsessive stuff of international politics since the Manhattan Project. There is, as Alissa Wilkinson and I argue in our 2015 book How to Survive the Apocalypse, something unique about the nuclear age, in which it es terrifyingly clear...

Sacred music is not only a devotional posed and performed to honor our Creator but also a bulwark against human sinfulness and frailties. Composer Arvo Pärt has been creating music of faith that inspires while at the same time subverts several of the most oppressive systems of government of the past century. poser’s lifelong development as a poser also led him to a deeper faith. He converted to Orthodox Christianity in 1972. Theologian Peter Bouteneff observed that Pärt is...

Then God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation: plants yielding seed, and fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them’; and it was so.” –Genesis 1:11 Thus began humanity’s reliance on the earth and its bounty for sustenance, aesthetics and a persistent reminder of – in the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins – “God’s Grandeur.” The Jesuit priest and poet cast a cold eye on humankind making a hash of the environment. He...