Rev. Ben Johnson

Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure. Gene Dattel. Encounter Books, 2017. 312 pages. Long before they exploded into violence at Charlottesville, race relations seemed so intractable that Alexis de Tocqueville wrote “the white and black races will [never] … be upon an equal footing.” Nearly two centuries later, this seems to be another doleful example of Tocqueville’s prescience. Continue Reading...

The necessities of life include food, water, clothing, and shelter … but should the government cost more than all of them put together? A new study has found that politicians extract more in taxes than working families pay for their basic human needs. Continue Reading...

The government of Poland recently funded media outlets that agreed to cover the EU’s international wealth redistribution program, the EU Structural Funds. The fact that one of the recipients was a Catholic weekly raises numerous moral and ethical questions. Continue Reading...

The fall of the Berlin Wall remains the greatest symbolic victory of freedom over tyranny in the modern age. Yet the triumph of liberty finds itself threatened by corruption and a propaganda war wrapped up in religious sentiment, according to a prominent Eastern European commentator. Continue Reading...

The violent reaction to President Trump’s Phoenix rally and the ongoing fallout over Charlottesville show the issue of the Alt-Right, and its Antifa antagonists, is going nowhere. Americans struggle to understand what kind of “conservatism” the Alt-Right represents, as well as the nature of the protesters. Continue Reading...

The Spanish government is currently run by the center-Right People’s Party, led by Mariano Rajoy. However, should Spain’s socialist parties return to power, they have announced their intention to remove Catholic education from the curriculum and replace it with a secular curriculum that teaches fidelity to the government. Continue Reading...

As children in the U.S. return to school, their European contemporaries have or soon will join them. However, they do so in a context that recognizes fewer of the traditional rights that society has accorded parents over the education of their children, especially whether they are taught to uphold or disdain their family’s moral and religious views. Continue Reading...

Over the last two decades, global poverty has plummeted and the world’s poorest people have steadily climbed out of the shadow of death. Yet many Christians cannot distinguish between dire poverty and income inequality, falsely believe both are worsening, and oppose the very policies that have lifted the world’s poor out of malnutrition. Continue Reading...

As the UK sets out its negotiating policies for Brexit this week and next, it is no secret that European nations remain deeply divided over the role of the European Union. Continue Reading...

On Saturday, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote a column that appeared to promote the same kind of identity politics that exploded in violence one day earlier in Charlottesville. He began: I’m a white man, so you should listen to absolutely nothing I say, at least on matters of social justice. Continue Reading...