In view of the efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus, I had thought of writing a post about how pastors, priests, and bishops should be imaginative instead of supine, finding ways to administer the sacraments without having to pack large numbers of people into small enclosed spaces.

One of my natural law students told me this week of a conversation with his six-year-old sister.

He had been learning that according to Thomas Aquinas, a command, in order to be a genuine law rather than an act of violence, must be reasonable, for the common good, made by competent public authority, and promulgated to all.

Though I disagreed with the late Justice Scalia about a variety of things, I have always liked his quip that he didn’t believe in a “living” Constitution, but in a dead one.

As its name suggests, progressivism wants to make progress.  This would seem to mean that it wants to achieve new things that are good, and leave behind old things that are bad.  Who wouldn’t be for that?

But to know whether you are making progress or not, you need an objective standard of what is good.  In short, you need the natural law.

CNN has reported that the president declared that he was not worried after meeting with a Brazilian official who was reported (falsely, as it turned out) to have tested positive for the coronavirus.  However, CNN now has now released the surprising news that the president does not actually want to be infected.

I have been reading a famous speech of Robert A. Oppenheimer, given in 1945 to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists.  Oppenheimer had played a central role in the development of nuclear weapons.  His speech is one of the most tortuously reasoned documents of its kind that I have read.  However, it is revealing.