Sherif Girgis is a Ph.D. Candidate in Philosophy at Princeton University.
Some people hope that Pope Francis will change the Church's teaching on contraception. He won't. He couldn't even if he wanted to - as Church history and Scriptures show. Part two of two.
Date posted: 2016-09-26
The Catholic Church's teaching on contraception, common to all Christian denominations for 1900 years, is not arbitrary. It reflects a moral truth. And the Catholic Church can never revise it. Part one of two.
Date posted: 2016-09-26
We are all called to defend marriage so that the truth can change hearts, minds, and lives. As the early pro-life activists did, we must invest the long-term political, legal, cultural, and spiritual capital to win down the line. The final installment in a three-part series.
Date posted: 2014-03-19
Marriage as a human good, not marriage law, has an objective core whose norms the state has an interest in tracking and supporting - in a way that respects everyone's freedom.
Date posted: 2013-04-09
In a discipline whose point is dispassionate reasoning and discourse, some would shut down debate and silence dissenters on a deep and complex moral-political issue. And the view they would anathematize, far from irrational, is more coherent and more compelling than their slippery and ill-defined 'default'.
Date posted: 2011-07-26
The view laid out in this Article is not simply the most favorable or least damaging trade-off between the good of a few adults, and that of children and other adults. Nor are there mere arguments on the one hand squaring off against people's concrete needs on the other. We reject both of these dichotomies. Marriage understood as the conjugal union of husband and wife really serves the good of children, the good of spouses, and the common good of society. And when the arguments against this view fail, the arguments for it succeed, and the arguments against its alternative are decisive, we take this as evidence that it serves the common good. For reason is not just a debater's tool for idly refracting arguments into premises, but a lens for bringing into focus the features of human flourishing."
Date posted: 2011-01-23
A response to NYU Law Professor Kenji Yoshino...Yoshino directs much of his scorn at an analogy we use to defend our view (and the view historically embodied in our law) that marriages, being comprehensive interpersonal unions, are consummated and uniquely embodied in coitus -- in acts that extend spouses' union of hearts and minds along the biological dimension of their beings, much as various organs unite to form one body: by allowing them to coordinate together toward a biological function (in this case, reproduction) of the whole (in this case, the couple as a unit).
Date posted: 2011-01-04