Liberty University - School of Law - March Blogs: "All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us "good," and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us, could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things now stand, everything is up for grabs.

Nevertheless:
Napalming babies is bad.
Starving the poor is wicked.
Buying and selling each other is depraved.
Those who stood up to and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot--and General Custer too--have earned salvation.
Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.
There is in the world such a thing as evil.
{All together now:} Sez who?
God help us."

The Way We Live Now: The Human Factor: "To say that a human life is ''priceless'' does not necessarily mean that it is worth more than any amount of money. It may just mean that money is the wrong yardstick to use when our decisions involve the loss of life."

We don’t pray greatly because we don’t desire greatly.
We don’t desire greatly because we won’t let ourselves- we are afraid to hope.
To risk desire is to risk disappointment- and a life of prayer is a risky thing.

And so we pray easy prayers and mistake them for mature prayers: “God, if it’s your will, please heal so and so. God, if it’s your will, please give me a wife or a husband or a friend. God please change my heart.” The problem isn’t that we want too much- the problem is that we want too little and too weakly.

The truth is, we suspect, deep down inside, that God really couldn’t care less. And we’d rather not face that suspicion, or the disappointment of hoping and not having an answer, so we insulate ourselves with weak desire, small hopes- easy prayers.

Distributive justice is a large idea. It draws the entire world of goods within the reach of philosophical reflection. Nothing can be omitted; no feature of our common life can escape scrutiny. Human society is a distibutive community. That's not all it is, but it is importantly that: we come together to share, divide, and exchange. We also come together to make the things that are shared, divided, and exchanged; but that very making -- work itself -- is distributed among us in a division of labor. My place in the economy, my standing in the political order, my reputation among my fellows, my material holdings: all these come to me from other men and women."

A lot of people think graduating from high school is a right. And if getting a highschool diploma is a right, as opposed to something that a person earns, then we should save taxpayers a lot of money and print the high-school diploma on the back of the birth certificate, and simply make it valid on the 18th birthday. If you're going to give out diplomas in high schools, and in college, they should stand for something -- that this person achieved a minimum competence.

Doing that requires really asking people to put as much effort into studying science and math or other subjects as they put into twice-a-day football practice, hockey, soccer or cricket. You'd better be willing to ask them to work their tails off to do well in school, because that's what is going to power the nation. That's a hard choice for politicians, because they've got to say no to somebody. It?s much easier to say we're all in this together, we all graduate together, we're all equal. That's not the way you achieve national competitiveness.