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In 2011, I was involved in a controversy, when an academic tells you that they're

involved in a controversy that's kind of a cringe-making thing to say, right?

Very low scale.

But I was asked to write some things about whether I thought that it was morally permissible

for a particular pro-life group who had been engaged in some sting operations against

Planned Parenthood to be doing what they were doing.

And I argued that it was impermissible what they were doing because it involved lying. I argued that, I pointed

out, that lying had been considered intrinsically impermissible by St. Augustine, by St. Thomas

Aquinas, and this was also the common position of the natural law tradition and the Catholic

Church for at least a thousand years.

But it was clear at that time that the insights of Augustine and Aquinas had been lost.

And so I started to work on a book that eventually became lying in Christian ethics,

in which I argued that Augustine and Aquinas were in fact correct about lying.

If you understand lying as an assertion, an affirmation of something that's contrary

to what you believe, you affirm that something is true, contrary to what you actually

think is true, that's what a lie is, and I argued that this is always wrong.

Now in a review of that book, one academic said that he thought it was interesting that on the one hand

I was arguing for a recovery of Aquinas and Augustine's views online, but that on the other

...