Transgendered (Male) Athletes in Women Sports

While the 2026 World Cup was underway in North America, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling, which is to say, a judgment rationally argued, siding with member-states that did not permit “Y chromosome” students in public schools to play in on “XX chromosome” sports teams. Not being a writer who fecklessly evades controversial topics for fear of turning away some readers, I will attempt to tackle the jurisprudence and ethics of male athletes who self-identify as women playing in women sports such as American football in public schools.

The full essay is at "Transgendered (Male) Athletes in Women Sports."

Downtown

Like the coronavirus in the early 2020s, HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s and for at least a decade after then paid little or no attention to national borders or even to nationalities. Even though coronavirus freely walked through the boundaries of our various group-identities with the implication being that they are actually artificial demarcated constructions, AIDS showed us that sub-societal cultural differences do exist. In fact, within a given sub-culture and thus group-identity, one set of values may be ethically and psychologically better than another set, so broad-strokes can be understood as over-simplifications.

The full essay is at "Downtown."

Pope Leo on the Ethical Dangers of AI

Speaking on his first “social” encyclical, Pope Leo said the Roman Catholic Church, whose membership stood at 1.6 billion embodied souls around the world, was “called to interpret ‘new things’ of the age in the light of the Gospel and the dignity of the human person.”[1] He was on terre firma from a distinctly religious standpoint in being anchored in the Gospel stories, which include direct and parabolic preachments by Jesus of Nazareth. Regarding the dignity of the human person, which pertains as much to a humanist as a theist, that basis is not distinctly religious and thus can occasion or permit wandering into other domains such that virtually any topic relevant to mankind could be roped in and even subjected to supervening religious criteria even over criteria native to the topic’s own domain!

The full essay is at "Pope Leo on the Ethical Dangers of AI."

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1, Linda Bordoni, “Pope Leo Presents ‘Magnifica Humanitas’ Calling for Disarmament of AI,” Vatican News, 25 May, 2026.

On Religion and Public Policy: Pope Leo on Dumping

The Terra dei Fuochi, or “land of fires,” is a region in southern Italy where “decades of illegal dumping, burying and burning of waste” had been devastating by the time Pope Leo paid Acerra a visit in May, 2026.[1] Lest visual images of hell’s fires reminiscent of Jonathan Edwards’ sermons come to mind, the devastation was squarely in the this-worldly domain of public policy. The pope’s speech can thus be viewed as an over-reach from the standpoint of his native fauna—the sui generis domain of religion, whose referent transcends not only the limits of cognition, perception, and sensibility (emotion), but also Creation itself![2]

The full essay is at "On Religion and Public Policy."

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1. Fortunato Pinto, “Pope Leo XIV Visits Southern Italy’s ‘Land of Fires’,” Euronews.com, 23 May, 2026.
2. I am borrowing here from Pseudo-Dionysius, a sixth-century Christian theologian, who wrote on what I would call God’s radical transcendence. Relatedly, God has been thought of as being wholly other. In both of these characterizations, it follows that the domain of religion is not only distinct from every other domain, but also unique.

Free Will and Moral Responsibility

According to Rousseau, we are born free but we live out our life in chains. Although some people subvert background context and foreground personhood such that the chains are believed to be societally imposed as if people are not sufficiently free to transcend or counter the “binding” external strictures of some institution or society, Nietzsche argues that the sovereign individual is lies at the end of an arduous long process by which our species has become bred to be “to a certain degree necessary, uniform, like among like, regular, and consequently calculable” and thus certain people can be trusted to be reliable in promise-keeping.[1] Such people are free individuals. They are autonomous even against the “Though Shalt Nots” of moral mores, which had their place as virtual societal straitjackets in the development of the species but are legitimately cast off by people who can be relied upon to keep promises without violating them in the heat of the moment. Such people are individuals, but not narcissists, for the latter calculate each moment as to what lies in their self-interest—the feelings of others be damned if they are in the way. It is ironic that moral responsibility applies to the latter rather than to the autonomous individuals because only the free ones can call their “dominating instinct” a “conscience.”[2] Modern society, at least in the West, could use an elaboration on Nietzsche’s description of the autonomous individual in so far as such a person is antipodal to the herd animals on whom moral responsibility should be imposed because they cannot be trusted, for they are not promise-keepers. St. Paul’s dictum to keep the fools at a distance is ironically in line with the second essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, where the Christian ascetic priest is lampooned for its innate weakness even as it seeks to dominate the strong out of ressentiment.

The full essay is at "Free Will and Moral Responsibility."

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 495.
2. Ibid.

Transcending Caritas in Romantic Love

During the High Middle Ages, Troubadour poetry composed primarily in southern Europe included themes including of courtly love, which became associated with marriage. Before then, that institution was associated mostly with property and progeny rather than with romantic love. Interestingly, it was just as love was becoming associated with marriage when the Roman Catholic Church ended its centuries-old gay-marriage liturgy, which, sans property and progeny, was uniquely associated with love (for why else would gays marry?). The irony is that “modern” gay marriage in the West in the twenty-first century may have more to do with sex than love in the sex-centric gay culture of today, though obviously gays are fully capable of genuine romantic love that transcends such superficialities as lust that can be prioritized too highly at the expense of romantic love. Fear of emotional intimacy can exascerbate such misordered concupiscence. Adventurous exuberance combined with this fear need not eclipse more meaningful intimate relations. Indeed, married gays in loving, committed relationships even raise children in loving homes. Although utterly obscene to more conservative folks, such “mixed families” grounded in love warrant respect and even admiration for being based in genuine love even though emotional intimacy can be scary. This is what should be preached from the pulpit. Antipodally, the sex-centric approach to “relationships” in the gay “culture” justly warrants condemnation for being superficial, short-sighted, and utterly self-centered. Yet, whether gay or heterosexual, romantic love need not be selfish. The distinction in Christian theology between caritas and agape is relevant in making this point.

The full essay is at "Transcending Caritas in Romantic Love."

On Embodied Souls in Business: Hinduism and Christianity

A man whose chosen Hindu name is Vridavanath spoke at Harvard’s Bhukti Yoga Conference in 2025 on the plight and ultimate aim of an embodied soul as described in the Bhagavad-Gita. A conditioned soul/self (atman) that has entered the material realm and is thus subject to karmic consequences can come back to the divine source of all: the One that is in all. As material, embodied beings while alive, that is, as both biological and spiritual, we are prone to getting locked into dualities of attachment and aversion, which in turn play right into suffering. We forget that we are wearing material masks, and that our real identity (atman) is greater than our material roles that we assume in our daily lives. Through our actions, we bind ourselves by the law of karma. Before being born into the material realm, a person’s unembodied soul (atman) knew Krishna, but as embodied, the soul/self relates to other corporeal bodies rather than to other people as spiritual beings and thus in compassion. Why does Brahman or Krishna—the respective impersonal or personal notions of Absolute Truth—create the world with separateness from the divine included?  Furthermore, how is a devotee of Krishna to navigate working in business, given the separateness woven into the very fabric of our daily existence as material and spiritual beings?

The full essay is at "On Embodied Souls in Business."

The Pope on AI: On the Ethical (Rather than Religious) Dimension

In June, 2024 at the international political meeting of the G7, a group of seven industrial nations, the head of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope Francis, spoke on the ethical dimension of artificial intelligence, or machine-learning. Regarding what the Pope called the “techno-human condition,” machines capable of AI are yet another manifestation of human propensity, which our species has had since its inception, to use tools to mediate with the environment. Although tools can be thought of as an extension of our arms ad legs, it is important to distinguish the human from the machine, even as we posit human characteristics onto some advanced machines, such as computers. In the film, 2001, the computer Hal sounds human, and may even seem to have human motivations, but any such attributions come to an abrupt end when Hal is shut down. To say that Hal dies is to commit a basic category mistake. It would be absurd, for example, to claim that Hal has an after-life. So too, I submit, is there a category mistake in taking the Pope’s talk on the ethics of AI as being religious in nature. Just as it is easy to imprint the human mind on a machine-learning computer, it can be tempting to superimpose the religious domain onto another. The Pope overreached in arbitrarily bringing in religious garb on what is actually an ethical matter in the “techno-human” world.

The full essay is at "The Pope on AI."

Lolita

In being able to engage an audience both visually and audibly, and to do so at close range—something we don’t get from watching a play on a distant stage—the medium of film is capable of resonating with, challenging, and rebounding from both heart and mind. That is to say, the medium can engage us at a comparatively deep level and even touch us profoundly. The medium can tug at our ethical strings and even provoke uncomfortable thoughts and feelings precisely because sound and image can conjoin at close range such that we are brought closer to an ethical harm than is likely in our own daily experiences. Some ethical harms, such as that in a young woman not being able to stop a rape by an older man abusing a stark power differential, may simply be too horrific up close to experience even vicariously. A filmmaker can use devices, whether photographic, audio, or narrative, to moderate our exposure without sacrificing the depth at which the harm and its sordid scenario can reach in us. Such exposure to ethical problems or even to situations in which the ethical verdict is debatable can give to an audience a better realization of the ethical dimension of the human condition and improve our ability to render ethical judgements on specific issues and generally. Writ large, the medium of film can do these things for a society, reflecting and even provoking it with just enough directness to be palatable and grasped. The genre of science fiction in particular has been used to serve this purpose. Even by contrasting an original film with its remake decades later, a society’s changing nature can be glimpsed by an audience, especially as censorship guidelines are loosened as per changing social mores and ethical sensibilities of a society. The fictional film, Lolita (1962), and its remake, Lolita (1997), provide us with an excellent case study not only of changes in twentieth-century American society, but also of how powerful the medium of film can be in its treatment of the ethical dimension of the human condition.

The full essay is at "Lolita."

Corporate Social Responsibility Countering Rush Limbaugh

On February 29, 2012—Leap Day—Radio political-commentator and entertainer Rush Limbaugh called a female law student at Georgetown a “slut” and “prostitute” simply because she had said that Georgetown’s student health insurance should cover birth-control—a staple for even 98% of sexually-active married and single Catholic women as of 2012. On the following day, Limbaugh went on to offer to pay for aspirin that the women at Georgetown could “put between their knees” in lieu of birth-control. If you are wondering how that even makes sense, I am with you on that one. What strikes me in particular is the extreme to which Limbaugh went in his rhetoric or appeal for a larger audience for his radio show (and attention on himself). That corporate social responsibility would function as the corrective also surprised me, for CSR is typically merely marketing, window-dressing, or for better public relations.

The full essay is at "Corporate Social Responsibility Countering Rush Limbaugh."