That clerical celibacy doesn’t guarantee asceticism is obvious, any more than attending Mass guarantees prayerfulness (trust me on that one). But it preserves the call even when the system is corrupted. Ross Douthat Read Quote
I am not a post-liberal and I do not think that such a return to full 19th-century anticlericalism inevitable or even likely – which is one reason among many that I doubt the bargain many religious conservatives have made with Donald Trump. Ross Douthat Read Quote
There are many families that want to raise kids on one income, or one income and some part-time work, and instead find themselves pressured, financially and culturally, to keep up with the dual-earning Smith-Joneses next door. Ross Douthat Read Quote
The fact that populism is flourishing internationally, far from the Electoral College and Fox News, suggests that Trump’s specific faults might actually be propping up American liberalism. Ross Douthat Read Quote
To analyze Trump is to discover only bottomless appetite and need, and to carve at him is like carving at an online troll: The only thing to discover is the void. Ross Douthat Read Quote
Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms. Ross Douthat Read Quote
Our founders built a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions. Ross Douthat Read Quote
There are voters out there that a moralistic and populist conservative right might win but a flagrantly hypocritical and ethnonationalist conservatism cannot. Ross Douthat Read Quote
Where conservative Catholics have the power to resist what seem like false ideas or disastrous innovations they must do so. Ross Douthat Read Quote
