Blake, Nathanael
17 Articles at Lifeissues.net

Nathanael Blake has a PhD in political theory. He lives in Missouri.

Articles

John the Baptist Was a Witness for Life and a Martyr for Marriage

June 24th is the feast day marking the birth of John the Baptist, and it is also the anniversary of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade's false declaration that there is a constitutional right to abortion. John the Baptist is an appropriate hero of faith for us this month: he began his life as a witness for the sanctity of unborn life, and ended it as a martyr for marriage.

Date posted: 2023-06-22

Reflections of a Stay-at-Home Dad

For stay-at-home fatherhood to be a palatable option, our culture must value parents caring for their children at home as much as it values parents making money outside the home. The occasional stay-at-home dad will be respected only if the culture already respects the stay-at-home mom as much as the girlboss.

Date posted: 2023-05-17

Sending the Wounded to the Front

Transgenderism is culturally powerful and financially lucrative - every troubled teenage girl who identifies as trans is worth a fortune to the medical-pharmaceutical complex. Greed and ideology are a potent combination, so it is no wonder that almost all safeguards have been abandoned when it comes to transitioning children. But this greed may be their undoing. ...[L]awsuits may bring down the medical and pharmaceutical cartels that profited from hurting them. The transgender monolith will fall as its victims stand up to it.

Date posted: 2023-03-21

Liberal Individualism Is Undermining Itself

By making the false ideal of independence the basis of our political and social order, we end up denigrating actual, dependent human lives. But life begins in dependence and remains inseparable from unchosen obligations. We have responsibilities to others, for which we have not signed a contract.

Date posted: 2022-11-24

The Problems of Putting off Children

A vision of control based on ambition, education, and income has come to dominate professional-class perspectives on having children, but we should reject these mistaken cultural pressures and remember that truly abundant life is achieved through giving and receiving love.

Date posted: 2022-05-21

OK, Groomer: Why Some in the LGBT Movement Are Focusing on Kids

The recent debates surrounding Florida's anti-grooming bill raise questions not just about education, but about who has the right to direct the moral formation of children. Activist educators believe they should hold this power, regardless of parental concerns. But their agenda is based on the false idea that children can be intrinsically LGBT, and it is therefore necessary to stop educators proselytizing on behalf of such identities.

Date posted: 2022-04-28

Liberalism Has Become a Dirty Joke

Conservatives may hope that liberalism's better angels prevail. But the ravages of ideological liberalism, especially the damage done by the sexual revolution to family and community, require active redress. Conservatives, drawing on the wisdom and traditions we have sustained (and which have sustained us), must help our culture relearn essential parts of being human.

Date posted: 2022-01-23

The Contradictions of Absolute Academic Freedom

The official moral relativism of absolute academic freedom makes universities self-negating institutions. No wonder many student activists are eager to fashion and enforce new norms and taboos: they realize, however inchoately, that a community of inquiry and instruction must also be one of practice, and that the liberal university fails to integrate these elements.

Date posted: 2021-10-21

Baby Is a Punk Rocker: On the Givenness of Life

Excessive efforts to control the givenness of our children's lives reveal our doubt that life is a good gift in itself. They also show a vision of human flourishing that is dependent upon material prosperity, personal achievements, and social status.

Date posted: 2020-12-29

Liberalism as Christian Personalism?

For a political order supposedly built on faulty philosophical foundations, liberalism has been surprisingly resilient. Political theorist David Walsh argues it is the political expression of the Christian epiphany of the person that has been differentiated by modern philosophy. Yet Even in Walsh's defense of liberal modernity, the menace of Luciferian possibilities flickers at the edge of vision.

Date posted: 2020-12-06

We Were Parents

When my wife and I mourned the miscarriage of our child, we were not mourning the loss of "potential life." Hope for a potential life is what we had when we dreamed and prayed for pregnancy; hope for the potential of an existing life is what we had during the pregnancy. When our pregnancy ended, we mourned the loss of a life, of an irreplaceable human person whose particular genetic composition will never be repeated.

Date posted: 2019-05-19

What We Don't Know: Does Gender Transition Improve the Lives of People with Gender Dysphoria?

The studies assembled by the What We Know Project do not prove that transition is the best treatment for gender dysphoria, let alone that it should be the only permissible treatment. Rather, they show that the science is not settled.

Date posted: 2019-05-11

Outrage Mobs Might Be More Forgiving If They Believed in Hell

Without a Christian framework, but with a strong sense of sin, seemingly minor wrongs and slights are seen as representative expressions of the injustices of society as a whole. But there is no one to grant absolution to the repentant, or to redeem the world from its fallen state. Each wrong is indelible, and so there is only sin and punishment. Forgiveness becomes impossible when every discrete wrong is bundled into a secularized version of original sin.

Date posted: 2019-04-09

What's Scariest: Facebook, Google . . . or Us?

Facebook or Google taking over the world is a distant, speculative fear. Being harassed, humiliated, shunned and unemployed are immediate fears. We increasingly live in a digital panopticon ruled as much by mobs as by the overseers.

Date posted: 2018-05-20

The Romance of Ordinary Marriage

It is fashionable to mock as bland and boring the ordinary men and women living out their married lives together, but they are often engaged in a quest far more challenging and romantic than anything the bohemian libertine will attempt.

Date posted: 2018-03-24

The Consuming Self

Americans increasingly identify with our consumption. When combined with political tribalism, the result is the increasing refusal to do business with members of other political or cultural groups. In the end, an identity based on consumption will only consume itself.

Date posted: 2017-09-09

St. Louis's Unholy War on Religious Liberty

An ordinance passed in St. Louis, Missouri, prohibits discrimination in housing or employment on the basis of "reproductive health decisions." Promoted as an anti-discrimination measure, the law's actual purpose is to destroy the self-government of religious and pro-life organizations.

Date posted: 2017-09-01