Douglas Knight

A five step neo-Darwinian refutation of neo-Darwinism:
1. A person is, in Richard Dawkins’ beautiful phrase, “a gene’s way of making another gene”. So forget religion, forget values, forget ideals, its all about reproduction; handing on our genes to the next generation.
2. Europe today is the most secular region in the world.
3. Europe today is the only region in [...]

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Cardinal Keith Patrick O’Brien Homily preached at Mass for Pentecost 2009 St Mary’s Cathedral, Edinburgh
Before any society can prosper and endure it must give support and encouragement to the institution of marriage and the place of the family. As a society we have failed utterly to do this and have instead in recent [...]

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While many factors have contributed to this truly diabolical, bureaucratic onslaught against the family, we might begin by looking within. The churches’ failure or refusal to intervene in the marriages they consecrated and to exert moral pressure on misbehaving spouses (perhaps out of fear of appearing “judgmental”) left a vacuum that has been filled by [...]

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The current reference in legislation to a child’s need for a father is being removed because of the alleged offence such a clause is causing to single women. Removing this reference, for the sake of a tiny minority that currently does on the whole have access to assisted reproduction, sends a powerful signal to the [...]

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Whatever the origins and convolutions of the (complex and often incoherent) intellectual and emotional background that implicitly, if not explicitly, endorses atomisation and household fragmentation, the foremost element has been the animus against marriage and two-parent families. Anti-family activists have expressly sought to undermine any economic, social and legal need and support for marriage by [...]

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Melanie Phillips on the economic crisis
I see this financial breakdown, moreover, as being not merely a moral crisis but the montary expression of the broader degradation of our values – the erosion of duty and responsibility to others in favour of instant gratification, unlimited demands repackaged as ‘rights’ and the loss of self-discipline. And the [...]

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Church teaching, reflected in Scripture and Tradition, affirms that it is a man and a woman, united in marriage, who, together with their children, form a family. This community is the basic cell of society and the foundational and determinative point of reference according to which all other forms of family relationship can be assessed [...]

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The Berlin Gemaeldegalerie appears if anything to be one of the most user-friendly artistic sites in Europe. So why – unlike other museums in cutting-edge Berlin – isn’t it crawling with culture vultures?
It’s hard to avoid the obvious here: given the centuries in question, the gallery’s collection is inevitably, ineradicably, inescapably Christian. Such is true [...]

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The British, never fond of children, have lost all knowledge or intuition about how to raise them; as a consequence, they now fear them, perhaps the most terrible augury possible for a society. The signs of this fear are unmistakable on the faces of the elderly in public places. ..
The British may have always inclined [...]

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The dramatic escalation of child protection measures has succeeded in poisoning the relationship between the generations and creating an atmosphere of suspicion that actually increases the risks to children, according to a new study from the independent think-tank Civitas.
In Licensed to Hug Frank Furedi, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent, argues that children [...]

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The central role of intra-family gifts
This leads us to the other essential feature of family economics, but one which Becker’s “neoclassical” theory omits. Like Adam Smith, Becker presumes that all economic transactions, including those within marriage, are essentially self-interested efforts to maximize one’s own utility or satisfaction. Now, family members do acquire their incomes [...]

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A contributing factor to post-abortion trauma is silence from the Church. The common reluctance to preach on the matter because there are some women in the Church who have had abortions and it will hurt them is misguided and harmful. There is a crying need to acknowledge the grief of abortion – silence pushes this [...]

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Last weekend, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued a wonderfully concise and eloquent statement on embryonic stem cell research. When printed out, it comes to barely more than six double-spaced typewritten pages, but within that relatively small compass may be found all of the elements essential to a well-formed Catholic conscience on this [...]

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Karl Barth Church Dogmatics III.4 3.

1. When marriage is seen in the light of the divine command it is surely evident that the decision for the way of marriage is for some, as the choice of the unmarried state is for others, the matter of the supremely particular divine vocation. (p.183) [...]

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This essay represents what might be called a radical friendly amendment to the revisionists by exploring a hitherto unexamined logical leap in the famous story line. To be fancy about it for a moment, what secularization theory assumes is that religious belief comes ontologically first for people and that it goes on to determine or [...]

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Not only do we have an entirely novel definition of marriage that excludes procreation from its purview. That would be dramatic enough, since it shifts the focus of our most basic social institute from inter-generational concerns to those of present personal gratification, and in doing so eliminates many of the responsibilities that belong to marriage. [...]

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Anastasia de Waal argues that while Labour thinks it is being liberal, its position on the family is actually highly conservative. Its policy is currently determined not by its own priorities, but by Conservative policy and past notions of the repressive ‘traditional’ family. Labour therefore considers family structure to be solely Conservative moralising territory and [...]

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The Bible gives one consequential answer to these two queries: the human being is created in the image of God, and God himself is love. It is therefore the vocation to love that makes the human person an authentic image of God: man and woman come to resemble God to the extent that they become [...]

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On May 15 the California Supreme Court “overturned the gay marriage ban,” according to news media reports. What the court really did was command a radical redefinition of marriage, the most basic institution of any society. It brought same-sex “marriage” to the largest state in the union and front and center into the presidential [...]

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