I spent part of the Christmas Season in the American state where I spent most of my childhood: Vermont. Known

Whilst escape from the city for the sake of prayer and meditation is a recurring motif of Western literature, and one that plays an important role in the life of Jesus Christ, one of the great achievements of our civilisation has been that of sanctifying the city.

Today’s Russia is not yesterday’s Soviet Union. What Putin does to his country is unacceptable, but unlike the leaders of the communist state of the last century, he does not have an ideology that compels him to eliminate the economic and political system of the West.

The authors argue that the high courts of the Council of Europe and the EU are actually more ‘conservative’ than the Supreme Court of the United States on almost every polarising topic today.

Health is to the political class what money is to bankers: an inexhaustible source legitimation of their exercise of power.

Language is the first domino in the war over reality—and pronouns have nothing to do with politeness and everything to do with ideological submission.

Where the rest of the world’s leaders seem intent on impressing us with themselves, she appears to respond in the opposite manner—with quiet duty.

Government says that a person is not alive until deep into the pregnancy. The motive is instrumental: when we legally sever the beginning of life from conception, we allow for another moral value to be elevated above life itself. That moral value works as an ulterior motive for the legal definition of life.

We are in a situation in which a democratic decision-making process has been abandoned in favour of deferral to the ‘experts’ chosen by the media. This cannot be good.

Nobody knows the war hawks in Moscow better than the Ukrainians, living as they do in the ominous shadows of Putin’s birds of prey. But the Russians are not the only ones throwing war-stirring rhetoric around.

Senior clergy persistently talk about the primacy of ‘pastoral care,’ implicitly presenting themselves as exemplars. Now they refuse to extend such care to those who want nothing more than to worship God as did their forefathers in the Faith.

Does any government actually need more funds than it already has?

Government has a negative impact on the economy through spending, taxes, and its budget deficits. The most hard-hitting impact does not come through taxes, as conventional wisdom suggests, but through spending—spending governed by ideological preferences, which determine what money is spent, where, and when.

The UN Security Council meeting followed multilateral talks with the Taliban in Oslo, designed to illicit human rights assurances from the Islamist extremists in exchange for releasing needed liquidity and aid money into the country. With Norway as host, a 15-member contingent of the Taliban, humanitarian aid groups, and diplomats from the U.S., UK, and France, met for three days of closed-door sessions at a hotel outside the capital.

Zemmour regularly claims in his speeches his affiliation with the former RPR, and his desire to achieve a “union of the Right.” He hopes to gather within his candidacy all the families of the French Right attached to national identity, sovereignty, a certain economic liberalism, and a (moderate) social conservatism.

Of the three dominant types of welfare states, it is not easy to extract one that would be palatable to both social conservatives and social democrats—it is possible though. The path to a compromise can be found by navigating the dynamics between political methodology and political theory.

While Finland has already declared that it is not pursuing a NATO membership, Sweden still remains open to the idea. So long as the possibility remains open in the current international political climate, it undeservedly transplants the Ukrainian struggle for independence onto the Nordic scene.

The government-commissioned report is concerned about what it calls the “disappearance of the common systemic space.” But it identifies the problem without trying to find the multiple reasons for this space’s absence.

Thankfully, the authors of the European Economic and Financial System plan had the wisdom to include an executive summary. After all, there’s no way anyone’s going to read the whole thing. And we don’t have to read the whole thing because it’s obvious. As we all irresistibly jump on the bandwagon, we will learn that planned capitalism is the answer.

In politics, a term can have multiple meanings, to the point that, through rhetoric and semantic confusion, people can be convinced to assiduously pursue their own disempowerment.

A single-payer system is nothing more than a promise of health care. If and when you actually get health care is a different matter, yet its American proponents continue to ignore this problem in Europe, fantasizing that it will not come to America.

Criminalizing the speech of half a billion people is a serious matter and those pushing for it must come up with something more convincing than ‘hate is hate.’ Enough is enough!

In my experience, it was at the Masses that were less spectacularly arranged, externally less festive, where I sensed true Christian festivity. My favorite Mass is still the uninspiring Mass of the average Catholic parish. 

The psychological games played by Ukraine’s abusive uncle are ruthless. He distorts the truth, and his lies create deep furrows. But, like all lies, they rest on shaky foundations.

If the Partido Popular (PP) hopes to reconsolidate the Right and return it back under its centrally placed umbrella, it might be advised to follow the leads of Isabel Díaz Ayuso and Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo.

When a myriad of local voices make the same complaint, we are in the presence of a genuine (as opposed to media generated) universal.

New speech-restriction laws, whether national or at the EU level, would amplify a disturbing trend underway in Europe, where the right to free expression is gradually being replaced with a new legal default. What speech is not explicitly permitted, is banned.

Three important dates see out the month, each reminding us of heroism, martyrdom, and virtue: the anniversary of the murder of France’s Louis XVI in 1793 on January 21; the feast of Blessed Charlemagne, first Holy Roman Emperor and King of France, on January 28; and the feast of Charles Stuart, King and Martyr on January 30.

Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as other countries like Greece, are the gatekeepers of Europe, protecting their neighbours from a destabilising foreign influx. Their governments continually face hard choices but are steadfast in their commitment. There can be no compromises with extortionists.

The euro itself is only part of the failure. An entire structure of government institutions, laws, and even constitutional provisions were erected around it in order to secure its success. It all looked impressive two decades ago; today, the structure itself, from the European Central Bank (ECB), to the so-called Stability and Growth Pact, is a package of sordid evidence that even under democratic governments, central economic planning is a bad idea.