Letters to the Editor: October 2026

Are All Governments Illegitimate?

I share Jason M. Morgan’s outrage at the criminal acts of so many governments throughout history, in particular, the activities of our own government currently in the Middle East (“Does God Minister Through Government?” Cultural Counterpoint, Jul.-Aug.). But ought we to conclude, therefore, that governments as such are illegitimate?

The wisdom of mankind appears to disagree. I would venture to say that no people anywhere have ever existed without some sort of governing authority, whether an informal council of elders, a king, or the bureaucratic panoply of the modern state. More to the point, the Catholic tradition disagrees. Morgan quotes St. Paul’s words from Romans 13 that the “higher powers…are ordained of God.” But oddly, with no support in the text, he asserts that these words were “tactical.” Toward what end? In an effort to fool the Roman authorities or to persuade otherwise revolutionary Christians to keep quiet? Paul’s words here are hardly the only place in the New Testament where obedience and respect for civil authority are enjoined (see, e.g., 1 Pet. 2:13-17). The entire tradition follows in that wake.

St. Thomas Aquinas is as clear as anyone when he writes, “The fellowship of society being thus natural and necessary to man, it follows with equal necessity that there must be some principle of government within the society” (De Regno, ch. 1). As is Pope Leo XIII: “As no society can hold together unless some one be over all, directing all to strive earnestly for the common good, every body politic must have a ruling authority, and this authority, no less than society itself, has its source in nature, and has, consequently, God for its Author. Hence, it follows that all public power must proceed from God” (Immortale Dei, no. 3). I could instance literally dozens of like quotations.

It is one thing to be enraged over the frequent injustices perpetrated by states and the efforts they make to fool and bamboozle their citizenries. But the state is necessary, albeit affected by the same sin and concupiscence that has affected all of us since the sin of our first parents. But let our legitimate anger about the misdeeds of states not lead us to reject what is part of our theological patrimony: the necessity and, hence, the legitimacy of governments.

Thomas Storck

Westerville, Ohio

One need not oppose the state in all its forms to agree with Jason M. Morgan’s condemnation of dumb wars. And he is right to criticize many just-war theorists; they are indeed like high priests who have gotten into bed with secular powerbrokers. But Morgan is surely aware of the many just-war theorists who were against the 2003 invasion of Iraq and Israel’s recent operations in Gaza. It is curious that he makes no mention of them, implying instead that all were in support.

Likewise, Morgan’s recommendation of the histories of James C. Scott and David Graeber sits oddly with his assertion that “history is the art of learning nothing.” I’ve learned much from reading their work, despite and because of their irreligious anarchism in thrall to a secular Eden story. Morgan evidently agrees with their views of the state. Believers and irreligious anarchists have often found common ground in some things, and some of those things have been true. In this case, however, what aligns the believer and the irreligious anarchist is a historical, philosophical, and theological error.

In The City of God (Book IV) St. Augustine tells an apocryphal story he seems to have picked up from Cicero of a pirate hauled before Alexander the Great. “What do you mean by infesting the seas?” Alexander asks him sternly. The pirate replies, “The same as you do when you infest the whole world; but because I do it with a little ship, I am called a robber, and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.” I can grant with Augustine, and Morgan, that the state is fundamentally exploitative. But some forms of exploitation are worse than others. If we were the “miserable peasants” of premodern times, our families and communities suffering the rape and pillage of various mounted warbands, we might welcome, at least sometimes and temporarily, the bigger warlord who sweeps away the little ones.

Of course, with Scott and Graeber, there is another choice: If we judge the ruler bad enough, we might hoist the black flag or escape the clutches of government and flee to the mountains, forests, or islands. Even today, in some pockets, this remains an option. But two points need to be stressed. First, even in this extreme option, government in some form will follow us, with the strong continuing to exploit the weak. Second, we cannot have it both ways. Who exactly lies under the umbrella of “we plebs” and “us miserable peasants” Morgan describes? I can grant the sufferings of the people of Gaza, Ukraine, and Iran, but I have difficulty giving a place to academics like Morgan, Scott, Graeber, or myself.

Morgan condemns as a “deal with the Devil” the notion that no matter how bad the ruler is, the alternative is worse. If the ruler is bad enough, the alternative is indeed better. But Jesus’ injunction to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s was practical and wise counsel to ordinary people.

There are times to stand against a corrupt government, to refuse to pay taxes, even to take up arms. But with St. Thomas More, man is made to serve God “wittily, in the tangle of his mind.” All governments are deeply flawed, some more deeply than others. But some emperors have indeed exhibited signs of a conscience. And some governments are worthy of our allegiance.

Padraic Rohan

Quincy, Illinois

Hobbesian pessimism is a tempting ideology, particularly in our era of bureaucratic autocracy. How could it not be? Jason M. Morgan rightly identifies all the hypocrisies that besiege our current political situation. But this was foretold in the Book of Samuel, when the people demand a king like the other nations. All the ills of the modern state can be found in that text. The historical books of the Old Testament provide a bouquet de maux of the excesses of kings and their ministers. However, not once does the text ever advocate for the cessation of some form of government.

During the time of Moses, the unruliness of the people required the establishment of a government ruled by judges. This was a necessary safeguard against vice and a structure for the promotion of virtue. Aristotle sees the art of politics in the same light. A well-ordered society requires a means to punish vice and reward virtue. In this, both revelation and reason agree. Catholic theological anthropology takes this a step further. Man, created in the image and likeness of God, has a will oriented to the perceived good. The trouble is that man, in himself, is unable to perceive infallibly what is good in every particular or universal case. As political animals, we form various levels of community to help us achieve the good even in the midst of bad actors, both public and private.

William Golding’s Lord of the Flies novelizes the Hobbesian view of human nature. In 1973 anthropologist Santiago Genovés organized his Acali rafting expedition to test it. He believed and hoped his crew would demonstrate this chaotic devolution. However, to his frustration, the opposite happened. Since then, more and more data has demonstrated, fairly conclusively, that the natural state of man is ordered to the creation of just and well-ordered societies. There is no real evidence that the state arises out of thuggery and barbarism. Rather, the contrary is true.

The mechanism for thwarting injustice is law, and law is made when common custom isn’t enough to settle all disputes. For there to be law, there must be a lawgiver and, as a consequence, government. I will not argue the absurd case that all governments are inherently good, just as I would not argue that all law is good. However, good law is good, and good governments can be good. To preserve this goodness, it is necessary for many voices, both lay and academic, to critique law and government in such a way that their voices influence policy. Just-war theory is one such tool. The exemplary historical example was the influence the Salamanca School had over the Spanish Crown in the 16th and 17th centuries. The school’s development of just-war theory was effective at curbing many excesses in the Americas. It was not a perfect solution, of course; a utopia was not formed by their work. However, some good is always good. Just as a partial truth is not a falsity, so too, the achieving of a partial good is not a lost cause.

Prof. Morgan’s principal error is that he would have neither Moses nor David. Instead, he would have us believe in a sort of utopian “noble savage” whereby we could live in anarchic peace. But this is merely the musing of an academic who rightly sees the evils in our current historical context and opts for the destruction of all institutions, rather than the harder work of building up and supporting what is good so that it might be made better. And perhaps it is also a bit of despair that no amount of scholarly discourse can contend with the current political order. It is a temptation I struggle with myself. However, I believe this is the reason Pope Leo XIV didn’t identify the state as the source of evil in Magnifica Humanitas, his encyclical on preserving the goodness of our humanity in the midst of contemporary trials, as Morgan laments. Just as a broken and disfigured marriage can be repaired through strengthening what remains good in that relationship, so, too, the res publica. The evil is not the state. The evil is sin, and the state can be used as a vehicle for sin. The real work, then, is not the abolition of the state but the conversion of those who govern.

Morgan rightly says that pacifism lacks virtue. But so, too, does impiety. Neither of us paved the roads we drive on, nor do we provide for the common defense or build and maintain the public utilities. Yet, all these things must be done. We need either Moses or David. We cannot flourish as social animals without one or the other.

This is the distinction Morgan misses in his reading of Romans 13:1-7. It’s not a distinction of realpolitik on the part of St. Paul. Rather, the distinction is that rightly ordered governance comes from God, while wrongly ordered governance comes from the threefold concupiscence of the world, the flesh, and the pride of life. For this reason we are commanded to obey lawful authority, but we can withdraw our obedience from illicit authority. However, we cannot have no authority. So, perhaps instead of Moses or David, who we really need is Jesus — and a state that is concerned not merely with the material goods of its citizens but also their spiritual goods.

Fr. Gabriel Mosher, O.P.

Pastor, St. Catherine of Siena, Catholic Newman Center

Salt Lake City, Utah

By concluding that “there is no just war, because there are no legitimate states to wage them,” Jason M. Morgan rips off his mask and reveals who he truly is: an anarchist. His complaints about just-war theory ring hollow once he gives himself up.

Morgan can cite Dorothy Day and Pope Leo XIV all he wants, but his real argument is with the American Founders, the Declaration of Independence, and the U.S. Constitution. The government the Founders instituted through those two documents is by no means perfect, but it is the most perfect articulation of the principle that man’s rights are granted by God and are to be secured by representative government. On occasion, this government will be confronted with choices about war. Catholic just-war theory is an excellent vehicle for testing the moral questions involved. But just-war theory assumes a government.

It’s head-scratching that Morgan would write 3,000 words to critique a theory for which he has no use.

Bill Marsan

Brookfield, Wisconsin

Jason M. Morgan calls the U.S. Department of War “pentagram-themed,” implying that the Pentagon is involved in witchcraft and the occult. But a pentagon is merely a polygon, a closed plane figure of five angles and five sides, and a pentagram is a five-pointed star. It’s absurd to accuse the Pentagon of witchcraft.

Morgan claims that Iran was “negotiating with Washington [the Trump administration] in good faith.” This is not the Iran I know. Morgan chastises the just-war theorists for “tormenting the Persians for sport.” This is a horrible accusation. He doesn’t mention the tens of thousands of Iranian civilians tortured and killed by the Iranian regime. Why does he ignore this while attacking “Washington”?

Regarding just war, Morgan concedes that “stopping the Nazis was a just outcome.” Then he writes, “There is no just war.” If defeating the Nazis was a just cause, why would World War II not have been a just war?

Rosalyn Becker

Fort Myers, Florida

Once again, the NOR has allowed Jason M. Morgan to advance his bias-laced propaganda. He doesn’t even get through the first sentence of his latest column without condemning both the U.S. government and all practicing Catholics with his broad brush of assumptions.

Facts seem to get in the way of Morgan’s propaganda. First, Iran has never negotiated “in good faith” in 47 years. This was especially true during the Obama and Biden administrations. I suggest that Dr. Morgan, for all his degrees, take a course on current events, preferably outside Berkeley, California.

I applaud Dorothy Day and her service to the poor. But Morgan’s using her witness as a tool to attack the U.S. government is disingenuous. Her “sinful past,” which Morgan feels qualified to judge, justified the government’s suspicions of her connections to communism, given her devotion to the writings of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Gorky, the last of whom had direct connections to the Marxist-socialist movements of Stalin and Lenin. In the 1940s and beyond, we were at war against both fascism and communism. The Catholic Church condemns communism (cf. Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2425). Morgan must be seething that Archbishop Fulton Sheen, an avowed anti-communist, has been beatified.

While Morgan feels qualified to condemn both our current conflict in Iran and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to join World War II after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he conveniently omits actions executed by Barack Obama: Afghanistan in 2009, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2014, and Somalia throughout his entire presidency. Nor does he mention the Church’s egregious crusades, launched in defense of Christians in the Holy Land who were being attacked by Muslims. Morgan undoubtedly believes those Muslims were “mostly peaceful.” Apparently, he feels we have no right to defend citizens, borders, or the world against the spread of nuclear arms.

Jason M. Morgan clearly and regularly expresses his leftist socialist positions. That is his prerogative. However, the NOR’s decision to allow him, as a regular columnist, to do so with full impunity, except for letters to the editor such as this, gives me cause not to renew my subscription. I suggest you transplant at least some of your editorial staff out of the State of California.

Susan Hettinger

Washington, Illinois

JASON M. MORGAN REPLIES:

I thank everyone who took the time to read and to write.

Susan Hettinger has me pegged incorrectly. Archbishop Fulton Sheen was an American hero, and he ought to be made a Doctor of the Church. Communism is evil. So is socialism. So is leftism. I ain’t in any of those camps. Barack Obama and his cabinet of infanticidal harridans brought untold suffering to women and children in America and openly persecuted the Catholic Church. His actions abroad were just as bad, as Ms. Hettinger rightly points out. What he did does not differ substantially from what his predecessors countenanced in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and Europe. Killing innocents at home and abroad is what governments do.

As for the crusades, insofar as Ms. Hettinger means driving out invaders from the Holy Land, then that was entirely just and should have happened much earlier — and needs to happen again. However, the massacre of Jews and Muslims in Jerusalem was atrocious, as was the massacre of Jews in the Rhineland and the Siege of Zara, a city of Christians. The Venetians put the crusaders up to that one. Governments ruin everything.

I would disentangle Dorothy Day and the Russian writers from a blanket “communism” charge. I don’t cotton much to Tolstoy — I think his Christianity was basically hippie-ism avant la lettre — and Maxim Gorky eventually learned to truckle to state power as well as any just-war theorist. But Fyodor Dostoevsky is a different animal. Read his book The Devils. He was sickened to his soul by the ill winds blowing through Russia and the West, and he, like the great Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, showed the world a profoundly Christian response to the nihilism that underpins state violence. As for Day’s sinful past, I wasn’t judging her. I was praising God, who writes straight with crooked lines. People, like histories, are not -isms and can’t be reduced to ideological puzzle pieces.

Rosalyn Becker and I seem not to agree on what “negotiating in good faith” means. It does not mean that either party is just. It simply means parlay under the white flag is not a signal for snipers to aim and fire. Iranians were tortured by their regime, true. The Ayatollahs have gone on killing sprees, but the Shah of Iran’s SAVAK secret police force preceded them.

Bill Marsan’s argument is circular, but that is not his fault. Just-war theory is tautological. Yes, as Mr. Marsan says, just-war theory presumes the existence of a government. But it does not justify it. Nor can our Catholic faith countenance the Lockean drivel the Founders transplanted in the place of Christianity. Did “nature’s God” give me my rights? Does “nature’s God” ordain the Federal Reserve? As an aside, I would note that Marsan’s Wisconsin had a near-miss lately, as a clearly deranged and utterly racist socialist nearly won the Democratic primary there. Would a Gov. Francesca Hong have been God’s minister? If not, then why not, and what is the difference between one sociopath in a big chair and another?

Fr. Gabriel Mosher’s Aristotelian argument I find much more convincing. I agree that man cannot see the good infallibly in particular cases and so needs a little help from his friends. And I agree that virtue must be rewarded, and vice punished. The state, however, confounds all these. Fr. Mosher brings up an excellent example in Santiago Genovés. Most people act reasonably and peaceably. Communities regulate themselves. Order flows not from documents or the pretensions of “founders” but from our immortal souls, which crave God. The state, by contrast, is the vehicle for the Devil in us to take hold and lord over our brothers and sisters. That is the break I wish to accentuate. There is no natural, or natural-law, progression from ordered communities to constituted governments. And, yes, evidence abounds that proto-states were predatory on pre-existing communities.

I am, respectfully, unconvinced by the Salamanca School example, as it is no comfort to American Indians that, thanks to some latter-day schoolmen, things were not as bad as they could have been.

Fr. Mosher attributes to me a “Hobbesian pessimism” and a wish to instantiate a “noble savage” society. This is wrong on both counts. First, I am no Hobbesian, and I am not a pessimist. My lodestar is the Resurrected Christ. If there is to be a King David, then let him dance before the Ark forever, for a crowned head with nothing else to do is a plague to mankind. Second, David Graeber makes the opposite point about “noble savages.” Rousseau, Hobbes, Locke — these men, and many others, imagined a condition that had never existed and imputed that fantasy onto a people they had never met. There are no noble savages. The only savages are the barbarians carpet-bombing foreign villages, and they are hardly examples of nobility.

Likewise, I encourage Padraic Rohan to revisit Graeber and Marshall Sahlins, as an Edenic state is not what either calls for or finds in the past. Their concern was with dismantling the statist mythology of the present. That we read Sahlins but continue to justify the state is what I mean by history being the art of learning nothing.

Dr. Rohan is right that I did not mention just-war theorists who opposed useless wars, but my concern is with the theory itself, not how it is applied. To wit, I applaud Rohan’s mention of St. Thomas More, who was beheaded by a government for refusing to apotheosize the serial murderer and womanizer who ran it. More’s life exemplifies Our Lord’s teaching that a man may not serve two masters. “The state is fundamentally exploitative,” Rohan writes, “but some forms of exploitation are worse than others.” This distinction simply does not hold water, for reasons that More’s life makes clear. I have never been exploited by my grandmother or my friends. Nobody in my neighborhood has ever executed a cleric — or anybody else for that matter. If they were to do such a thing, I certainly would not try to make excuses for it. Must we accept evil just because, as St. Augustine makes plain, those who do it are too big to be stopped?

I have admired Thomas Storck for as long as I have known of his work. I am deeply grateful that he replied, as I hoped he would. I take the point that my dismissal of St. Paul’s pronouncement in Romans was obiter dicta. I have no organization to defend, but St. Paul was different. Religions do not flourish by resisting kings with armies overmuch. The argument — found in Christian history but also, mutatis mutandis, in the histories of virtually every civilization worldwide — that one must bow to authority because God put it there is, yes, tactical. It is a survival method. I find nothing in St. Thomas’s writings to convince me otherwise.

The essential ideological assertion is that governments do evil, but they must be obeyed. My question is, Why? The obvious answer is given in several letters, namely, that St. Paul or St. Thomas Aquinas or Pope Leo XIII said so. I don’t buy it. Show me a theological justification for rule, and I will show you a distortion of man’s right relation with his Creator. The notion that we need the state, even though it is “affected by the same sin and concupiscence that has affected all of us since the sin of our first parents,” I find least convincing of all. Perhaps I am Pharisaical, but I am not inclined to take advice on morality and a well-ordered society from the Epstein class. Let the princes of the world have the world as their prize, for we know who has dominion here, and whom the Epsteiners really serve.

I’ve never lived in Berkeley or anywhere in California. I grew up in Louisiana and Tennessee, and I live in Japan. I have no allegiance to any state. St. Paul, who learned what state power meant in due course, was not there when Christ was nailed to a cross. He did not stand on the rock as Our Lord’s precious Blood ran over the splinters and His chest heaved in agony. St. John, however, was there. He later had apocalyptic visions that can hardly be construed as pro-government. The two don’t jibe, and where they diverge, I take St. John over St. Paul.

Christ, who as a child was nearly murdered by a psychopathic king, was put to death by another government leader. My answer to just-war theory is the crucifix, and Christ hanging on it. Stand with St. John and the Blessed Mother there. Gaze up at Our Lord. And try, if you dare, to justify the works of government.

Excursions into Eloquent Ambiguity

The July-August 2026 issue had me start reading from the first letter to the editor and not finish until I got through the last book review. Thank you.

In “Pope Leo XIV, His Predecessors & the Death Penalty,” Christopher Zehnder presents the Vatican’s excursions into eloquent ambiguity. I have been an OCIA catechist and now director for the past four years. If the question of the death penalty arises (I’ve been asked about it once in 30-plus years), we are required to give a succinct and clear answer; we cannot rely on ambiguity, eloquent or otherwise. The succinct answer is that allowing a government to execute is an extreme use of its power. This act must not be murderous but, as much as possible, remain righteous killing. Murder is a grievous sin against God. Killing is a sin, too, but guilt may be mediated if it is done to save a life.

The state has the just agency to protect the lives of its citizens and all others who are under its jurisdiction. It is empowered to enact laws to that end. Any law that gives the state the power to execute a criminal must make clear that this is an action of ultimate recourse (it is not a solution to the forces that create such criminals), have substantial and definable limitations, and allow for overseers and critics.

Francis Miller

Bloomfield, New Jersey

Christopher Zehnder emphasizes that use of the death penalty is “to defend against the aggressor and to protect the safety of persons.” Protecting the safety of persons has always been achievable — by putting aggressors in a medieval dungeon or a modern prison cell. Perhaps the purpose of the death penalty is not safety but justice: Life is so precious that if you take another’s, you must forfeit your own.

Clara Sarrocco

Glendale, New York

CHRISTOPHER ZEHNDER REPLIES:

Francis Miller calls the “Vatican’s excursions” into the death penalty “eloquent ambiguity.” I disagree. The “excursions” have not always been eloquent or clear, but neither has the point they make been ambiguous, when rightly understood. As to what he should say to his OCIA class, Mr. Miller may simply insert the following: Bloodless means of punishing malefactors are to be chosen when they are sufficient to defend society from harm, as such means better accord with human dignity. Basically, that is the burden of even Pope Francis’s magisterial interventions on the death penalty, as I argue in my article.

It seems incumbent on an OCIA instructor to deliver to his charges what the current magisterium says on the death penalty, for a Catholic must “adhere” to such teaching with a “religious submission of mind and will” (Lumen Gentium, no. 25). That such adherence falls short of the “submission of faith” owed infallible teachings does not make it optional.

Clara Sarrocco asserts that “life is so precious that if you take another’s, you must forfeit your own.” But the Church has never taught that the state must always execute murderers, only that such killing is justifiable and can even be fitting, all things being equal. All circumstances, however, are not equal — as when one is confronted with claims to clemency or where bloodless means are sufficient to defend public safety. When such circumstances prevail, it better accords with human dignity to use bloodless means. Whether one likes it or not, that is the teaching of Popes St. John Paul II, Benedict XVI, Francis, and now Leo XIV — and, as my article argues, it is implicit in the magisterial tradition on the powers and duties of the state.

Man or Machine?

I confess that, given its title, I expected Alexander R. Sich’s guest column “The ‘Machine’ That Acts & the ‘Soul’ That Does Not” (Jul.-Aug.) to be another superfluous, if accurate, Catholic argument for why artificial intelligence can never be human. To my surprise and appreciation, Dr. Sich had a much more interesting and relevant point: “The greatest risk the current AI moment poses is not that machines might simulate human powers too convincingly…but that we will begin to redescribe ourselves in the image of our machines.” What a fascinating thought to explore — that a terrible risk in much modern technology is its power to undermine our humanity. Certainly, that has been the case with social media and smartphones. Given how many people are treating AI like a person, I fear we will indeed see negative effects in the body politic from this failure to properly understand what differentiates us from sophisticated tech. Kudos for an excellent, thought-provoking reflection.

Casey Chalk

Reston, Virginia

Alexander R. Sich points out a distinction that needs to be shouted from the rooftops: No matter how complex AI systems get, and no matter how closely they simulate human speech and (eventually) action, they are a totally different kind of thing than human beings. He traces that distinction (rightly, I think) to the Aristotelian-Thomistic “source of motion”: AI design engineers, in the case of AI, and intrinsic human nature, in the case of humans.

As Mary Harrington points out in First Things (June/July), “Thomophobia” afflicts most of the public who are in a position to think about the implications of AI. Any attempt to discuss the four causes Aristotle identified and Aquinas Christianized is likely to derail, at least without extensive philosophical preparation, which few are willing to endure. In the meantime, we must deal with public authorities, such as Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who think that once an AI system has the complexity of the human brain we should consider turning it off an act of murder, or AI scientist and former member of Google’s ethics board De Kai, who believes we should treat AI systems like unruly children and devote our lives to training them up with the same love and care we would give to our human offspring.

If our knowledge of the fundamental, permanent distinction between AI systems and humans is ever going to turn into action in the wider world that will prevent some of the worst disasters that could come from ignoring this distinction, and also encourage the sensible and appropriate use of AI for human flourishing in the sight of God, we must do more than write insightful articles in small-circulation Catholic magazines — and letters to their editors in response. But what?

Karl Stephan

San Marcos, Texas

ALEXANDER R. SICH REPLIES:

I am grateful to Casey Chalk and Karl Stephan for something better than agreement: Both perceive the real question. It is not whether a machine will one day resemble us closely enough to fool us. It is whether, fooled, we will forget what we are.

Mr. Chalk identifies the danger: Once we describe ourselves in the vocabulary of our tools, the direction of the analogy quietly reverses. Machines are first said to “remember,” “understand,” and “decide”; before long, human memory becomes mere storage, understanding becomes computation, and judgment becomes optimization. The danger is not that we humanize machines but that we mechanize man. As Chalk suggests, the consequences will extend beyond individual misunderstanding to education, medicine, law, and the body politic.

Mr. Stephan locates the corrective in the Aristotelian-Thomistic distinction between an artifact and a living being. But it isn’t that organisms have no external causes while machines do; human beings also depend on parents and on a hundred conditions they never arranged. Nor does a machine’s capacity to modify its behavior establish that it possesses the kind of intrinsic activity proper to a living subject. The decisive question is what kind of unity a thing has. A machine is one by arrangement — its parts keep their own natures, and the whole is one because we assembled it for a purpose. A living thing is one by its form, and what it does follows from that form, not from our purposes for it.

A program may hold information, chase goals it was given, and surprise its designers. None of that produces someone for whom things can go well or badly. Understanding requires a knower; suffering, a sufferer. The program supplies operations and nothing else. Functional sophistication does not settle an ontological question. And, if performance determines personal worth, the argument does not stop at machines. It reaches infants, the disabled, the elderly, and anyone whose memory or independence has gone.

Stephan asks the indispensable question: What should we do beyond publishing articles and writing letters to the editor? Take the distinction into the rooms where these systems are already being adopted. Engineers can describe what their products do without borrowing the vocabulary of minds. The shorthand is convenient, and convenience is how a category error becomes a habit. And legislators, before they grant machines the standing of persons, should notice what every such grant accomplishes: It relieves some human being of an answer he owes.

The question I put to my students belongs to no confession, though Catholic thought has kept the tools for answering it in working order. It applies wherever technical success tempts us to take a useful description for the thing described.

I hope readers will follow Chalk and Stephan’s example and press Aristotelian-Thomistic analysis wherever current assumptions obscure the nature of things. Its categories work because they begin with a discipline our culture has lost: letting what things are govern what we say about them. Until then, our machines will keep improving, while we forget what we are.

The Necessity of Sacrifice

One of the best compliments I can give Kaleb Hammond’s article “Tolkien’s Insights into the Masculine Soul” (Jul.-Aug.) is that it left me feeling like I should reread Tolkien. Hammond shows a deep engagement with Tolkien’s work, his peripheral writings (such as his nonfiction), the work of other Inklings, and Catholic tradition.

Hammond illustrates well the balance Tolkien sought to give his characters, both good and evil. While Hammond covers numerous characters from the Lord of the Rings legendarium, he pays special attention to Boromir and Wormtongue to highlight the unique corruptions of manly virtue in each — corruptions to which modern man is likewise susceptible. It is clear that Boromir had been granted many gifts, but it is not until his virtue is tested that his corruption is revealed. Inversely, Wormtongue always appears repugnant and ends cowardly, even if his initial desire for wisdom was noble. Their masculinity was corrupted by sin, which lurks at all our doors.

A particular insight of Hammond’s is the intrinsic connection between priesthood, fatherhood, and manliness. This connection is modeled on Scripture, and Tolkien used it to craft his characters to various degrees. In a world that dissects and compartmentalizes to the point of disintegration, it takes a mind like Tolkien’s to reintegrate these roles in a romantic way. And it takes a devoted student of Tolkien like Hammond to make this integration evident for the rest of us.

The overarching theme of Hammond’s article, and of any truly Christian work of masculine virtue, is the necessity of sacrifice. It is the foundation for biblical manhood in the roles of priest, prophet, and king, and it is displayed through its fulfillment (or lack thereof) in the masculine characters in The Lord of the Rings. It is also the deeper reality with which Tolkien asks us to engage.

There has been an inevitable resurgence in interest in the Arthurian legends as the Christian West seeks to reclaim its heritage. We can see this in the popularity of Malcolm Guite’s recently released Galahad and the Grail (the first of a series), the “magical realism” of Susanna Clarke, and the ever-growing discipline of “Tolkien Studies.” Engagement with this resurgence requires immersion in stories that inspire wonder, awe, and courage in boys and men, but it must also include a renewed intellectual engagement in the virtues. The stories of C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, and now Guite continue this tradition. Thankfully, Hammond’s work provides impetus for that intellectual engagement.

Mike Schramm

La Crescent, Minnesota

As a big Tolkien fan, I appreciated Kaleb Hammond’s article. It pairs wonderfully with his earlier article “Tolkien’s Insights into the Feminine Soul” (Nov. 2025). I am concerned about the utter confusion men and women have about themselves — women trying to be men, and men trying to accommodate women by becoming softer and less masculine — which creates self-hate all around. It’s rather demonic and leaves both sexes diminished and confused.

I loved the idea of chivalry Hammond emphasizes, using the examples of Boromir, Faramir, and Grima Wormtongue. He also shows how the roles of priest, prophet, and king were expressed (or not) by each character. His articles make me want to reread The Lord of the Rings in a deeper light.

Shannon Ryan

Erwin, Tennessee

A Self-Defeating Line of Reasoning

When I saw Daniel Sadasivan’s article “Can Bayesianism Quantify True Belief?” (Jul.-Aug.), I immediately perked up. Alas, I was disappointed.

Sadasivan starts well and ends well, but in between is mostly a mixture of sales pitch and inconsistently scrambled eggs. First, he makes the point that the premises of a syllogism can’t be “proven.” Yes, if we narrow our analysis to classic Cartesian reductionism, we begrudgingly concede that, strictly speaking, premises can’t be proven. This is great news (temporarily) for atheists. Then Sadasivan describes frequentism, a form of inductive logic that yields a conclusion statement about the probability of premises, but not about certainty, as in deductive logic. Nope, frequentism fails the proof test, too. All this sounds closer to the scientific method than to the philosophy of religion. Oh, but be careful here, because — wait for it — our whole body of science and even the scientific method have been shown to be “unprovable.” So, this extremist line of reasoning comes full circle and shows itself to be self-defeating.

Philosopher and theologian Norman Geisler was helpful on fundamental concepts in a discussion like this. He reminded us that logic is a gift from God to help us get to truth, and Jesus told us He was the very embodiment of truth. Logic is also undeniable because we must use logic to deny it — uh oh, that’s self-defeating again. By the way, the same is true for truth: it also is undeniable without using a truth claim to deny it. But Sadasivan doesn’t really discuss truth. A funny story is a good illustration here. When told he couldn’t prove the classroom he was sitting in was real, a friend of mine replied to his Philosophy 101 professor that if he (the professor) really believed that, then he (the professor) could jump out the window to prove they weren’t really on the second floor. The professor offered my friend a guaranteed “C” in the course if he didn’t show up for any more of the classes.

Notre Dame’s Alvin Plantinga provided perhaps the most effective counterpunch to the “can’t prove it” dilemma. Some things are so utterly and “properly basic” that life would be impossible, and daily activity futile, if we were to try to follow this tortured thinking. Plantinga points out that the application part must be relevant to reality to escape the label of nonsense and to have any pragmatic utility. His step-by-step deconstruction of anti-logic claims can be found in The Analytic Theist: An Alvin Plantinga Reader. For an excellent essay on this whole discussion, I recommend “The Foundations of Certainty: What Can We Know and How Can We Know It?” regarding the thought of Edmund Husserl from Leszek Kolakowski’s fantastic little book Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?: 23 Questions from Great Philosophers.

Dean Coupe

Roseville, California

DANIEL SADASIVAN REPLIES:

Dean Coupe’s desire to defend objective truth is admirable. However, I believe he misunderstood my article.

Mr. Coupe rightly recognizes the failures of those who deny the fundamental basics of reality. As he observes, a skeptical professor who does not believe he is in a real classroom is still committed to acting as if it were real. Many unreflective nonbelievers, especially those influenced by the New Atheist movement, have never considered that the scientific method might not be able to prove itself. However, the best and most philosophically astute atheists are aware of this challenge. In my article, I attempt to refute not merely the worst ideas of skeptics but the best of them. Those who use the philosophy of Bayesianism as a substitute for true knowledge that is correctly grounded in light of God’s revelation are incorrect. However, they have a more coherent epistemology than many atheists; thus, refutation of their views requires greater subtlety.

This is the purpose of my article, which I outlined at the beginning: “St. John Henry Newman, whom Pope Leo XIV recently named a doctor of the Church, has a different — and, I will argue, broader — epistemology, because it can incorporate the best aspects of Bayesianism as well as crucial aspects of human nature that Bayesianism misses.” I discuss deductive reasoning in the context of explaining Bayesianism. I believe this discussion gave Coupe the idea that I doubt man’s ability to truly know anything. However, it is an objective fact that deductive reasoning requires postulates that cannot be proven using deductive reasoning. This is a basic rule of logic, which is true for Christians and atheists alike. Of course, some might use this fact to deny real knowledge, but this was never done in the article.

Coupe claims that my article does not really discuss truth. This is not true. The article is focused on a quote from Newman that faith is what leads to the further truths at which reason points.

I believe Coupe and I are on the same “team.” We both defend the objectivity of truth, and we both believe that God is the Author of truth, and it is only through Him that we can know anything. However, my article was clear that I was not advocating any denial of our ability to know objective truth. Admittedly, the article was subtle. The readership of certain magazines might benefit from more frequent reminders of why incorrect ideas should be rejected, but for a mature, intelligent, and careful audience, such reminders distract and detract from the primary focus of the article. I believe the NOR has this audience.

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