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What is Freedom?
SERIES ON HUMAN FREEDOM: PART THREE The third installment in our series looks at what we mean when we use the word ‘freedom’, and is based on a presentation given by a guest discussant at the first...
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Religious Freedom and Same-Sex ‘Weddings’
Several media outlets over the weekend reported that the British Government is poised to allow civil partnership ceremonies to be held in places of worship and to include religious elements. Under...
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Freedom of Speech and Privacy: A Conflict of Rights?
Does freedom of speech include the right for newspapers to print gossip? If we were to be given £1 for every time we had heard the admonition not to ‘tell tales’ during our schooldays, there might be...
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The Wasteland of Legal Highs
From a guest blogger: ‘What shall we do to-morrow? What shall we ever...
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Assisted Suicide and the End of Love
From a Guest Blogger: Terry Pratchett’s recent documentary Choosing to Die is rightly controversial. When such a prolific writer as Pratchett, suffering from Alzheimer’s, makes a television programme...
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Afghanistan, Zimbabwe and the Just War principle
The world has just marked with due solemnity and regret the tenth anniversary of terrible terrorist attacks upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Much has been written in recent days analysing...
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Chimps may be ‘97% Human’, but they’re 0% Homo Sapiens
Climate Change is certainly unpleasant, but is it wrong? From a guest blogger: What is it that St. Peter’s Basilica, Climate Change, the Euro Crisis and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy have in common? I shall...
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‘One Nation Under CCTV’ Or Welcome to the Dictatorship of Relativism
‘Modernity’, wrote Hegel, ‘is the secularisation of religion’. In many ways this is true of twentieth-century Europe during which we saw one responsibility after another pass from churches into the...
View ArticleIn Creating a ‘Super Humanity’ We Would Forfeit Liberty
In a recent lecture at Davos Julian Savulescu argued that it is not beyond the reach of modern science to create human beings with considerably greater powers of intelligence, physical strength and...
View ArticlePress Freedom and Press Responsibility
The Royal Charter being set up in the wake of the Leveson Report marks an end to a period of 300 years in which government did not regulate the press. It is unprecedented in this country’s democratic...
View ArticleReasons to Hope in the Pornography Debate
The availability of pornography is nothing new, but reasons for prohibition need to be re-articulated, and sometimes re-discovered, as one generation succeeds another and re-evaluates what it has...
View ArticleSexuality, and the Conflicted Contortions of Modern Liberalism
Andrew Brown in a recent blog for The Guardian argues that Catholic attitudes to gay sex fail to account for human beings. Though his conclusions are different, in terms of argumentation Brown often...
View ArticlePhysician-Assisted Suicide is an Affront to Human Liberty
Liberty is a premise upon which physician-assisted suicide is routinely advanced. Some of those suffering from serious and incurable illness or distress seek to argue the case that their suffering is a...
View Article‘British Values’ and Extremism Disruption Orders
‘Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves’ – William Pitt the Younger Earlier in 2015 Baroness Warsi declared that Britain...
View ArticleIslam: Friend or Foe?
2016 was in many respects an atypical year. In the political arena, two events confounded and unnerved the grandees of establishment media: Brexit, and, in the U.S.A., the Republican nomination for the...
View ArticleElection Reflection III: Liberalism’s Illiberal Endpoint
This is the third and final part in a series of reflections on the 2017 UK General Election. Shortly after the recent General Election the leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, offered his...
View ArticleSchumacher and Subsidiarity
In our current malaise(s) it is worth musing on the work of the great German-born economist E.F. Schumacher (1911–1977). Schumacher brought the social teaching of the Catholic Church, in the form of...
View ArticleNewman’s Age
In the coming year Pope Francis seems now likely to canonise the English Cardinal, John Henry Newman, completing a first step taken by Pope Benedict XVI who beatified him (declared him ‘Blessed’) in...
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