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Interviews
Medicine goes back 5,000 years. Medicine is already 2,500 years old when Hippocrates articulates the Oath, and it hasn't even started the infancy of its science. So for millennia, the medical profession has been in service of those in need—regardless of risk.
There was a fundamental failure of toleration for alternative points of view. I think some of it might be explained by the fact that it was a pandemic. For public health guidance to be effective, people have to comply. To that I would say fair enough, but it’s also equally important—or more important—to have confidence that the policies are sound. People complying en masse with unsound policies won’t do us a whole lot of good. That’s what open debate is supposed to address.
Everyone can have their own beliefs about the ethical principles of human fertility. From a pure accounting perspective, however, the problem is people are not getting married. So, making IVF cheaper, for example, is not solving that issue.
The book’s importance goes beyond the perennial value of Newman; Görres penetrates deeply into the heart of Newman’s character and life. In doing so, she reveals what made him holy, and holiness is of perennial value.
The only way to actually create a better future is to start with the world we actually live in and move forward—which may require “despairing” of the past, which cannot be changed.
Christians should always make the best of any pragmatic agreements they can find with non-Christians on any issue. But the evangelical reasons why we support, for instance, constitutional government should be made clear, not veiled in embarrassment by translating them into the idiom of natural law or human dignity out of a misguided concern to avoid blurring the boundaries between political and religious affairs.
At this moment, what we can do is the right thing. And sometimes the right thing is very risky—going out into the streets and demonstrating your opinions on the situation. It's risky, but I think it’s our right, and I think it’s what is right.
Religious conservatives should be open to the idea that progressives and liberals might be able to take their own path and still find some common ground on the essential question of the goodness of human life.
The belief that childrearing is prohibitively expensive could be understood as a fruit of our collapsing civil society. Some people today don’t even consider that extended family, neighbors, churches, and other little platoons can, at least theoretically, provide real support to parents. They fall into believing that the only places to turn for help are the market and the state. Parents without community support then shift more burden onto themselves.
Book Reviews
The touchstone of moral agency is neither the supposedly pre-modern attitude of “heteronomy,” nor the chimera of liberal “autonomy,” but the reality of productive, creative action under a personal God and Savior within an orderly and meaningful cosmos.
For believers eager to have a voice in a secular liberal society or simply to find peace and a home in such a society, and thus to avoid dispiriting “polarization,” Rauch’s appeal appears to resonate with a surprising power.
Despite some missteps and misplaced emphases, Gordon has given us the best and most enjoyable history of the Bible yet produced.
It is undeniable that the Church calls Christians to aid those who suffer. But real demographic and political realities frame this responsibility.
Called to Liberty may prove useful for those outside the Church who seek a broad introduction to the paradoxes of freedom. Still, more is needed to recover freedom from its current drubbing by both radicals on the Left and reactionaries on the Right—a drubbing that increasingly rejects measure, moderation, and maturity.
What makes the popularity of a work of art wax and wane is one of the most intriguing questions in the history of aesthetic preferences.
McDermott’s central claim is surely right. In everything and in every place, God is providentially at work to effect redemption. If engaging with his work can foster this awareness in us as readers, then that is precisely a “dimensional difference” that will be all to the good, raising to greater consciousness the wonder and beauty of God’s work.
Peterson leads us to the door of the Church, but we must take the step our guide is unwilling to take and enter inside. We pray for Peterson to join us, not because we need an ally—the Truth will fend for itself—but because we hope he can embrace the “ridiculously good” gift of grace, cross the border, and become a brother united in Christ.
Al-Gharbi argues that the central social function of wokeness is not the pursuit of social equality, but the empowerment of the professional class and its own defense of inequality.
Long Reads
Parents’ authority over their children’s education is being challenged as much today as it was a century ago. Pierce remains a solid basis on which parents can insist on their proper place in the family and society.
To be sure, there remain some true-believing via media Protestants who are morally and theologically conservative and continue to attempt to strike the balance between high and low. But whatever their future, they will not be resuming their place at the commanding heights of the culture.
Keeping the person at the center of concern maintains our focus on his or her good rather than on our own fears and insecurities. And, each time we practice accepting another in the fullness of their fragility, we come to a healthier, more honest acceptance of ourselves, too.
The Constitution’s grant of citizenship cannot be a function of Congress’s immigration laws, let alone of a president’s executive order written on the basis of those laws. Only a constitutional amendment could unsay what the Constitution conclusively says on that question: born here, citizen here.
Whenever evangelical ethics relies on a Barthian or quasi-Barthian insistence on doing Christian ethics, I suggest we robustly answer, “nein.” Just a simple, “no.”
Al-Gharbi argues that the central social function of wokeness is not the pursuit of social equality, but the empowerment of the professional class and its own defense of inequality.
Civility is an important but secondary virtue. It cannot sustain itself. We can find hope for a healthier culture in a rather surprising place.
Each of these books presents valuable and insightful contributions to ongoing conversations about the role of the Constitution in contemporary American political life.
Christopher and Richard Hays have presented plausible arguments supported by biblical warrants for welcoming sexual minorities into church membership and leadership. Yet their mercy trajectory approach falls far short of building a coherent, convincing cumulative case to support their vision of blessing same-sex unions in the church.
Newsletters
Our roundup from an eventful month
On a somber anniversary.
On social justice, human nature, timeless beauty, and the power of flexibility
Infiltrating the culture with countercultural thinking about the value of life—and its connection to true, authentic gratitude—is not a religious or political matter, and no ideological camp has the upper hand in the argument. We need civil dialogue across political lines, and that’s what we seek to do.
Procedures are necessary, of course, but we need substance as well. And our pages were full of substance this month, as every month.
A crucial aspect of Public Discourse’s mission is to be a beacon of light and a forum for serious, rigorous, and truth-seeking discourse even when temptations toward despair, radicalization, and provocative polemics abound. At PD, we charitably examine and challenge ideas and arguments—we don’t attack or demonize people, and we don’t serve any worldview, party, or ideology besides the cause of truth.
There are numerous ways that we increasingly strive to defy the natural limits our embodiedness imposes on us, and our pulling away from community and connectedness is just one example. In this kind of world, it’s easy to forget that our physical bodies, and all the limits and inconveniences they impose on us (or others!), matter a great deal. So it’s no mistake that our August essays seemed to touch on that theme.
If ennobling discourse is now countercultural, so too is our journal. Like the Witherspoon Institute, PD is an institution that bears witness to a virtuous (and virtuously “slower”) mode of public engagement: engagement that reflects an open-hearted, honest yearning for the common good.
We do our best to build, strengthen, and defend the basic institutions of a free and flourishing people, institutions of the family, religion, good government, and education. At times we critique and note shortcomings, but even those criticisms are for something rather than against: we are for flourishing, for good institutions, and for the nation.
