Josef Pieper: Prophet of Pietas
Fifty years ago, Josef Pieper accurately prophesied the most defining dilemmas of our age and pointed us to the virtue of pietas to solve them.
False Choices: Religion’s Role in the American Revolution
In eighteenth-century political reasoning and rhetoric, ministers and statesmen were not obliged to choose between pragmatism or piety, orthodoxy or heterodoxy, reason or revelation. As we grapple with the role of religion in the American Revolution, we should not impose false dichotomies routinely used by modern scholars but were unknown to their subjects.
Our Little Platoons Need Reinforcements
In Alienated America, Tim Carney paints a picture of a nation riven by a social capital divide, a divide that has led to the rise of populism and socialism. Our task is to rebuild civil society. This work need not wait for enabling legislation, the seizing of the means of production, or a national declaration of fealty to Rome. It can—and should—be undertaken today.
The Pursuit of Happiness Rightly Understood
The right to the pursuit of happiness is coherent only in the full theological context of the Declaration of Independence.
Why the Gay and Lesbian Equality Movement Must Oppose Surrogacy
As gay people, we cannot insist on the right to carry out practices that harm the rights of others. Rather than being an LGBT rights issue, surrogacy is a women’s rights issue and a children’s rights issue; and like the sale of human organs, it is not an activity that should be promoted or indeed permitted.
Parental Love, Transforming Love
As George Eliot’s Silas Marner illustrates, the reason parental love can change a person is that it requires constant self-sacrifice. But could this story take place today? It seems far more plausible that a lonely man like Silas would retreat ever more into solitude, abated only by pornography, Tinder, and a loosely bound world of online connections.
A Case of Stolen Jurisprudence in Kansas
Kansas’s Supreme Court randomly festooned its recent decision on abortion with impressive terms, without making the slightest effort to learn the terms’ meanings. The court identifies “common law” with judicial opinions and thus shoehorns innovative judicial decisions into its discussion of “natural rights.”
The Handmaid’s Tale: One Dystopia Begets Another
The Handmaid’s Tale is at best a thought-provoking literary work, and at worst a straw-man argument against traditionalism and conservative values. Atwood fails to deliver an intelligent critique of conservative Christian values, and her book does not reach the caliber of Orwell’s tales.
Back Row America
Members of Back Row America are rooted in a particular neighborhood or town that they do not want to abandon in pursuit of the American Dream. Or they are churchgoing Christians who find hope in their faith. But neither place nor faith is part of the mental geography of the Front Row.
Conservative Women and the Intra-Conservatism Debate
Women have an understanding of conservatism that goes deeper than policy ideas, because we uniquely understand human relationships. The men that are the standard-bearers of conservatism need to make a greater effort to cultivate conservative women’s voices in the public square.
Dementia, Dualism, and What Makes Us Human
In many ways, demented patients present the greatest challenge to the question of what makes us human. Victims of dementia seem to lose all power of reason, recognition, speech, and memory. Their minds disintegrate, and all that seems to be left is the physical form. That, too, rapidly fades. Because of this, we tend not to see them as humans, but as something inhuman or formerly human—merely masses of flesh to be tossed aside. But this is a mistake.
The Problem with Athletes Using the National Anthem to Protest
Degrading our sense of nationhood by degrading national symbols will not end inequality or injustice. It will only move us closer to a state in which the government can no longer function, because the people behind it no longer perceive themselves all together to be part of a nation with a common purpose.
Eugenics and Other Evils
The eugenic search for good genes comes at the cost of human dignity and human equality, and leaves by the wayside the dogma of the sanctity of human life. Rather than warning us that eugenics can happen here, Thomas’s dissent lays out the case that it already has happened here, and the state has a compelling interest in preventing its return.
Immoral Conduct and Moral Witness
Does the sexual depravity of Martin Luther King, Jr. negate his work and witness in the cause of racial justice?
Adoption and a Pro-Life Anthropology
Every child’s existence is a gift not simply to the mother and father but to the entire human family. Adoption is the institutional way of upholding the gift of the child, whether his or her biological parents recognize that child as a gift or not.
Montesquieu and the Monetary System
We take our monetary system for granted, complacently trusting that the experts are doing their jobs well. Yet our current system strays very far from what the public would actually prefer.
Casualties of Surrogacy
We have no business building a multi-billion-dollar fertility industry at the risk of the health and well-being of women and children. A woman’s body is not designed to carry another woman’s baby. This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the Heritage Foundation.
Liberalism Is Failing Because It Rejected Orthodox Christianity
Helena Rosenblatt’s The Lost History of Liberalism correctly identifies liberalism’s need for moral virtue, but does not draw the further conclusion that her book suggests: liberalism is failing because it has rejected orthodox Christianity.
Pro-life Laws Don’t Establish Christianity and Religious Liberty is Not a License to Kill
It makes no sense to claim that laws restricting abortion tread on the free exercise of religion because they do not allow abortions to be performed by people who have no religious objections to them. No serious interpretation of religious liberty allows people to do whatever they want simply because their religion allows or promotes it.
Ben Shapiro and the West’s Moral Vision
One might expect a book by Ben Shapiro to be about the task of “owning the libs” or “drinking liberal tears.” In fact, the reader comes away with a starkly different impression. In The Right Side of History, Shapiro argues that the cultural and political malaise of contemporary America is due to its being severed from its Judeo-Christian roots.
The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time? In Defense of School Choice
Faced with a national educational disaster that permanently cripples so many of America’s neediest children’s life chances, it is not “anti-public school” to advocate for voucher experiments. It is true to our republican aspirations to enable at least some of these kids the chance to attend a private school.
Tocqueville on Liberty, Inequality, and American Exceptionalism
No one affords a greater understanding of American exceptionalism—what it is and what it is not—than Alexis de Tocqueville.
The Book History Teachers Have Been Looking For: Wilfred McClay’s Land of Hope
Wilfred McClay’s new textbook on American history outshines the competition, thanks to its balanced approach, its superb narrative style, and its reintroduction of topics and themes that have long since fallen from the pages of most classroom editions.
Of Convocations and Coming Out: What Arthur Brooks Gets Wrong about Our Cultural Divide
Arthur Brooks is right that we urgently need to learn to disagree better, but he’s wrong about what it will take to do that. Brooks demonstrates just how easy it is to slip from the transcendent and infinitely difficult command that we love our enemies to the comforting illusion that we have no enemies.
