Public Discourse

The Regent University 2013 Commencement Address, delivered May 4, 2013.

There is no right to lose oneself in a game of chance for the state’s benefit, and more than that there is no good in it. Video keno contracts liberty and virtue while accelerating the state’s colonization of civil society.

Donna Freitas’s new book on the hookup culture rightly encourages students to see its harms, but fails to give them moral reasons for opting out of it.

The Boy Scouts are en route to holding that there is nothing to being a boy, and nothing to the boy’s becoming a man; they might as well be the Unisex Scouts, as they are in Canada, where the scouting movement has collapsed.

While the ambition guiding today’s young Americans is not the robust, risk-taking ambition of earlier generations, it is still essential to American life; President Obama’s grandiose goals offer just one example. The second of a two-part series.

As an essential part of our character and a reason for our nation’s exceptionalism, ambition in America has been portrayed both as a sentiment to be contained and a virtue to be cultivated. The first of a two-part series.

Children’s relationship to the political community is fundamentally different from that of adults, because it is mediated through their belonging to a family and living under the authority of their parents.

Lust perverts language itself, calling sex “safe” or “protected,” and cohabitation “honest,” and relationships “mutual,” which are nothing but forays into a jungle, where the strongest and most cunning survive.

Hollywood’s new musical masterpiece illustrates a classical legal philosophy, long lost to our liberal establishment, that serves as a golden mean between tyrannical legalism and libertine antinomianism.

To persuade people effectively that a sexual morality does indeed exist, we need to help them arrive at that conclusion on their own by asking thought-provoking questions and treating them with dignity, love, and respect, not by force-feeding them arguments and statistics.

Our government has failed to admit that its own selfishness is the root of many societal problems it has tried to address.

The plan of our nation’s capital and the architecture of its core buildings and monuments must carry on the classical vision the Founders intended as the physical manifestation of America’s form of government and political ideals.

While globalized technology promises to make human beings more like each other than ever, our places of residence and origin still differentiate us, whether by shaping our cultural beliefs, our habits, or our manners.

Sneering at persons who are not social constructionists has become commonplace. Until defenders of inherent virtues, natural laws, divine beings, and other things that transcend social reality learn to overcome this initial set-up, they will be forever on the defensive.

In the classic Christmas film “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the humane society of Bedford Falls is built on conservative principles, not contemporary liberal ones.

A “Fantasy Slut League” created by high school boys in California suggests the reality of natural law even in those minds whose view of sexuality has been distorted by our culture.

Can the press still prevent a tyrannical majority opinion as it did in Tocqueville’s time? Second of a two-part series.

Progressive journalist Walter Lippman’s 1922 book Public Opinion still offers a relevant critique of the concept of “public opinion” and journalists’ power to shape it. First in a two-part series.

Promoting “genderless parenting” contradicts what the facts show us both about the harms of single parenthood and the benefits of having a mom and a dad.

There is no good reason to be suspicious of people of faith. There is every reason to encourage them and to be grateful for them, because even by worldly standards they make good citizens. But the State does not want to keep separate from the churches. It wants to absorb them.

An assassination attempt on a 14-year-old girl reminds us that we need to promote better education and equality for women in Pakistan.

Conservatives need a literary tradition that matches Russell Kirk’s political tradition in The Conservative Mind; Robert Oscar López’s new book is a pioneer in this effort.

Charles Kesler’s new book shows that President Obama’s grandiose progressive ambitions, like those of his progressive predecessors, accord neither with the American character nor with human nature.

Eugene Genovese was a teller of truth, even when the truth to be told was ugly, embarrassing, humiliating. He told the truth, even when it meant confessing complicity in world historical crimes.

Hannah Rosin’s argument that women are replacing men as victors in a battle of the sexes ignores that happiness requires women and men to be partners, not competitors, in life.

Young women now have to defend themselves not only from stereotypical sexual predators, but also from older women and gay men who seek their eggs.

Constitutional law has often been used to shape economies, but there are limits to the law’s ability to influence economic culture, especially when societal priorities no longer accord with constitutional principles.

Tolerance of wrong-doing is freely given; it is an act of graciousness, and not the paying of a debt. Therefore it rests with the offender, at the very least, to refrain from aggravating the burden of tolerance.

Nathan Harden’s “Sex and God at Yale” graphically shows what moral bankruptcy and relativism has produced at the Ivies.

The question of surrogacy has always been more about us than about the participants in the relationship. Will we use the power of the people to take a child from the arms of her mother when the mother is perfectly fit, loves her child, and desires to discharge her duties to her child?

Governor Christie’s recent veto of a “gestational” surrogacy bill should prompt us to look at the legal history of surrogacy and the terrible injustices that it causes.

A new effort to legalize doctor-prescribed suicide in Massachusetts reminds us that we are not our own to dispose of at will.

Work is at the core of our humanity, and our ownership of what we produce precedes laws demanding that we give it back to “community” in the abstract.

The recent Penn State scandal reminds us that if sports are to instill moral character, we must approach athletics first as an education in the virtues, not as an avenue to fame and wealth.

It’s far too easy when bickering about this or that policy, and particularly when the policy is morally charged, to miss the values modeled by good men and women when we disagree on the means.

We require goods on a human scale, including our political communities.

Neo-Darwinian models of human behavior cannot provide us with authentic self-knowledge; we need to revive the humanist disciplines—rhetoric, the arts, history, and above all things, poetry.

By showing the triumph of the therapeutic over the orthodox in American Christianity, Ross Douthat’s latest book gives Americans on both sides of the political divide much to consider.

How many Solzhenitsyns are occupying the pipelines of novelists in America?

Even if the marriage plot has dissolved, the human drama remains. It just resurfaces in a different context.

The Matrix and The Karate Kid offer two competing views of the relationship between how we learn and how we understand human nature.

Though we feel that we human beings are meant for something, not individually and arbitrarily, but together and truly, we lack the language and even the political sanction to think along those lines.

Jeffrey Eugenides shows what happens to the novel when courtship and marriage lose their binding character.

The Occupy Movement should be an occasion for the American left to rethink its own moral crusades, which turn out to be morally corrosive and hence incompatible with any serious commitment to social justice.

Libertarianism offers the best defense of individual rights that government can employ.

The totalitarians of this age are not petty thugs. They are intellectuals with a vision, and they will see their vision enacted, no matter who they have to run over, because they are certain it is good for you.

Artificial testosterone and estrogen use harms both individuals and society.

The authentic story of modernism is not one of continuity and emulation, but of violent rupture and hostility to tradition. Art should be oriented toward beauty.

The fertility industry is booming because we desire genetic and memetic immortality—the preservation and reproduction of our bodies and ways of life.

The sexual revolution puts forth a vision of paradise in which we rig up some nifty devices to guarantee infertility, consider neither holiness nor virtue, and believe in the blessings of no one and nowhere and nothing.