Free Republic

In Secular France, Catholic Conservatism Makes A Comeback By James McAuley December 8. CHARTRES, France — For many French voters, François Fillon is more than a leading contender for president in next year’s elections: He is viewed as a crusader in the throes of a holy war. When Fillon handily won both rounds of France’s conservative primaries last month, he campaigned mostly on a genteel conservatism of economic restructuring and strengthened national security. But in a country that firmly defines itself as “secular” in its constitution, Fillon’s unexpected victory represented an astonishing prospect: the political reawakening of Catholic France after...

Party of secularism, socialism, and globalism For the last 8 years, Democrats have taken great satisfaction in referring to the GOP as a “small, regional, party.” Despite big mid-term wins, Dems believed they’d crushed their opponents once and for all. Obama was popular, people were just going to love ObamaCare, and the country was moving left on social issues. Then Donald Trump happened. Now, Democrats have a historically low number of office holders. As Ohio Representative Tim Ryan says in the clip below, Dems are “at the smallest number of Democratic members of our caucus since 1929,” and currently boast...

The soon-to-be White House chief strategist laid out a global vision in a rare 2014 talk, one where he said racism in the far right gets “washed out” and called Vladimir Putin a kleptocrat. BuzzFeed News publishes the complete transcript for the first time.

The challenge of racial division in America today is not just that there are forces pushing us apart, but that we've lost the things that held us together. Relations between black people and white people are probably at their worst in anyone's lifetime, with most of those divisions exacerbated dramatically in the last handful of years. The reasons for that have more to do with the manipulation of racial animosity than the reality of the racial situation. Politicians and activists, each standing to benefit by pitting people against one another, have whipped up an internal and seemingly unresolvable conflict between...

As dawn broke in Istanbul on Saturday, Turkey's largest city, it was still unclear whether an attempt by the military to wrest control from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had been successful. A defiant Erdogan addressed crowds in the city, telling them that the coup had been quashed. "The government is in control," he told supporters.

Australia has a program in its schools that, at first glance, you’d have to be crazy to be against. It’s called Safe Schools, and it is an anti-bullying campaign.Well, at least that’s how it has been promoted.In reality, Safe Schools has become a pro-LGBTQI indoctrination system designed by one academic Marxist with hopes of replacing the Australian flag with a red one, and another who has, in academic theory, supported pedophilia. The program consists of: allowing students to wear whatever uniforms that they want; encouraging schools to allow bathroom use by any gender; promoting homosexual and transgender role-play in...

Tuesday, after FBI director James Comey spent about 15 minutes laying out the legal case against Hillary Clinton and then spent about three minutes declaring that he was going to ignore the evidence and recommend no legal action against Mrs. Clinton, TheBlaze's Matt Walsh declared that "The law is Dead." Walsh wrote: July 5, 2016. 11:15 a.m. One day after America's 240th birthday. When historians conduct their autopsy on Lady Justice, that will be the time of death. That is the precise moment when Justice drew her last labored breath, cursed our ridiculous country and our hopelessly corrupt government, and...

The secular reprobate mind is filled with violence, moral relativism and lawlessness designs and its actions have ravished this nation since the 60's beyond all recognition of what the founding fathers envisioned. Let us first look at the barbaric act of abortion. Since 1973 there has been 55 million abortions of our American children. May I say that NO gun has ever achieved that statistic not even all the combined arsenal of WW2! The abortion agenda of the Left is the holy grail of their godless ideology. The abortion ideology is a narcissistic ideology, which at its core is rooted...

Zoos with humans on display; an academic who wishes publicly that 90 percent of humans would perish from ebola; suicide tourists; “after-birth abortions” – what is the world coming to? In a new book, The Death of Humanity: And the Case for Life, history professor Richard Weikart examines the intellectual currents that produce these shocking phenomena and defends the sanctity of human life. Here, Professor Weikart answers some questions from MercatorNet. ‘The Death of Humanity’ is a sombre title. Are things really that bad? What do you mean by it?My title refers to the way that many intellectuals and scholars...

People often speak of places of sanctuary, where they feel most free and where they can “breathe.” One such place for me—a former high school teacher—is within the walls of a school. There is something invigorating and God-inspired in having people of different ages, backgrounds, and experiences exercise their minds around common subjects and principles, learn the facets of the world, and seek answers about their place in it. Whether in the context of a public or private educational institution, this wide-open breath of a school community has always provided me a true sense of freedom.Presently, however, the air...

FEMINIST CELEB: We need ‘Euthanasia Vans’ to drive around and get rid of all the old people Katie Hopkins suggests that we create “euthanasia vans” that drives door-to-door and kills off the elderly. “We just have far too many old people,” the feminist says. “It’s ridiculous to be living in a country where we can put dogs to sleep but not people.” According to Hopkins, this can be carried out stylistically, you know, with a flair. “Euthanasia vans — just like ice-cream vans — that would come to your home,” Hopkins says “It would all be perfectly charming. They might...

An atheist member of the Arizona House denied the chance to deliver the chamber's opening prayer by majority Republican leaders last month got the opportunity Thursday, only to see leaders rule his prayer didn't pass muster and call up a Christian pastor. The opening prayer by Democrat Juan Mendez included a call to work to help the state and its residents flourish and to "honor the Constitution and the secular equality it brings." But he didn't pray to any deity, which infuriated some Republicans who are Christians. Mendez said before the session that he had been invited to deliver the...

Off the record, a colleague of mine with decades of hospice experience predicted to me that the government would eventually get rid of the requirement that hospices hire chaplains. This particularly caught me off guard because I had just procured such a position with Center for Hope Hospice in Elizabeth, NJ. He elaborated that "the government wants to save money. They say America is becoming more secularized anyway, and so chaplains aren't needed all that much." Not that my shiny new job offer was about to vanish and "go gentle into that good night," but I was nettled by the...

The words that we use matter. When we speak using terms from Torah, our intention is clear. We believe that Torah is the source of our moral values. But once we start using English terms and ideas, we enter a dangerous philosophical minefield. We use words thinking that we’re expressing Torah ideas, but without realizing it, we are employing secular ideas as well. One prime example is "human rights." People use this term as if it's some kind of innate, obvious Truth, yet they fail to explain why it is so. Where oh where do these "human rights" come from...

Which is obvious to anyone not intentionally misreading it. The real news here is not that Antonin Scalia said this, but that it’s the slightest bit controversial. But that’s not something that happened overnight. The secular left and their media servants have spent decades pushing the idea that the establishment clause is about protecting the non-religious from maniacal Jesus freaks - especially the nightmare scenario in which the Jesus freaks get a job with any public entity and are guided in any decision by biblical principles. Scalia is a man who actually knows about the founding of the nation and...

We’ve all heard of people doing something secular in a “religious” way, and one area of life to which that applies is sports and physical fitness.Now, some are suggesting that the culture surrounding training gyms may very well fall under the umbrella of religion.The New York Times noted recently that in a society that is increasingly secular, many people are applying their religious sensibility to athletic activity. Many of the parallels with religion can be found, the newspaper noted, in a Crossfit gym: adherents getting out of bed at an ungodly hour in order to spend a significant amount of time in...

Today is the first day of Advent, which marks the start of the pre-Christmas season. It is observed by many, if not most, of the Catholic faithful. And it is in popularity among Protestants, particularly those of us who count ourselves evangelical Christians. Advent begins four Sundays before Christmas and ends on Christmas Eve. During that four-week period, the Christian faithful prepare for the commemoration of the birth of Christ. Satan hates Advent. That’s because he wants to take the “Christ” out of Christmas. He doesn’t want Christmas to be a Godly “holy-day.” Rather, his aim is to reduce the...

The fact that more than sixty percent of the Irish electorate supported an amendment to the nation's constitution recognizing same-sex "marriage" caught many people by surprise last spring. They may have been clinging to an outdated image of Ireland as a bastion of devout Catholicism. Unfortunately there are further disturbing changes that are being advanced. One is more symbolic. Many, including a former news director of the national radio and television station, are asking that the broadcasting of the Angelus be dropped. It is viewed as an anachronism in an Ireland that has "an increasingly multi-ethnic, multi-faith population," and is...

The death of Europe is in sight. Still hazy and not yet inevitable, but nevertheless visible and drawing nearer—like a distant planet in the lens of an approaching satellite. Europe is reaching its end not because of its sclerotic economy, or stagnant demography, or the dysfunctions of the superstate. Nor is the real cause the massive influx of Middle Eastern and African migrants. Those desperate people are just the latest stiff breeze against the timber of a desiccated civilization. Europe is dying because it has become morally incompetent. It isn’t that Europe stands for nothing. It’s that it stands for...

A remarkable turn for a school named for a minister, via The Washington Post:    A Harvard Crimson poll of the university’s class of 2019 provides a glimpse into the beliefs and practices of incoming freshman, including sex, politics and drug use. Some of the interesting findings included the religious breakdown, especially when compared to other millennials in the U.S.Harvard’s combined number of atheists and agnostics among its incoming class exceeds the number of Catholics and Protestants, as Pew Research Center’s Conrad Hackett noted. The number appears to be a striking contrast with the rest of the U.S. millennial population, those from ages 18 to 34.Pew’s...