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cities

Learning How to Govern by Running Our Cities Better

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If local politicians expect to be reelected, they have to focus on solving problems that are immediately relevant to their communities and the real people who live in them.
Christmas tree in living room

Worlds of Christmas Wonder

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Perhaps our longing for Christmas past reminds us that here we have no lasting city—not even a lasting home. In this way, our celebration of Christ’s coming points us toward what it makes possible: our coming to him in heaven, when our longing will be fully satisfied, when we will truly come home.

Surprised by Christ

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The small surprises and sacrifices of Christmas—the time, resources, and care our loved ones expend in order to place under glowing trees those bright bundles upon which our own names are written—recall the marvel of Christ’s entry into the world in order to sacrifice himself for those he calls by name. This is the unexpected gift that we ought to be surprised by, over and over, every Christmas—indeed, every morning.
Christian conventions

Christians Need Stronger Conventions, Not State Power, to Influence Culture

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Deep, broad cultural change often results not primarily from government imposition or propagation of ideas, but from committed social entrepreneurs who pilot alternative conventions. Public pronouncement of Christian values, absent change in underlying social conventions, is a poor substitute for deeply rooted change internal to the church.
Hand of a person casting a vote into the ballot box during elections

There’s No Easy Fix to Our Broken Presidential Nominating System

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For the foreseeable future, there will be no institutional barrier to demagoguery, viciousness, or incompetence to be found within the nominating processes. The only barrier will be the voters themselves.
The golden apse of the Basilica of Saint Paul outside the walls in Rome, Italy.

The History behind the Formation of Christendom

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In Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, Peter Heather wishes to dismantle some of the conventions that have governed how the story of Christian history is told.
closeup of a man showing an intersex-inclusive progress pride flag peeping out from a bush

What the Surge in LGBTQ Self-Identity Means

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People of all faiths have heard enough talk about children’s “bodily autonomy,” or their supposed ability to express informed consent. As we are witnessing, mothers and fathers remain a powerful bastion of reason in our new post-gender turn, because they display with and in and through their bodies the reality that Roe sought to hide or ignore.
Closeup of the document of Juneteenth National Independence Day Act. Juneteenth is a holiday celebrating the emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States.

The Making of Juneteenth

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The principal irony of Juneteenth is that slavery was still a legal institution in the United States on June 19, 1865—if not in Texas because of the Emancipation Proclamation, then certainly in Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery would not be blotted out until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. This would not, however, be the only irony in the history of American emancipation, and certainly not the last.
Teen Worship

Christianity’s Uncanny Habit of Renewal

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Renewals, revivals, and awakenings are unpredictable, by definition. Christians should not credulously accept them as de facto works of God just because they’re on the news, or on YouTube. But sometimes they produce godly results that last for generations: lives transformed and renewed, people called into vocational ministry, and communities brought to greater wholeness.
An eary mist covering an English grave yard with about fifty grave stones

Black Is Beautiful

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All those we love, and we ourselves, will one day go through that great black door of death. We need to acknowledge that fact and not try to evade or soften it. Without God, life really is a tragedy, and our mourning is a meaningless biochemical reaction. But our story doesn’t end there. The door has another side: a side of light, with a waiting, loving God.
Young African American man sitting and lifting a dumbbell with the rack at gym

Is “Self-Improvement” a Real Thing?

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As we decide what habits to adopt or discard in 2023, it’s important to carefully sort through the advice on offer to see if it’s based on a sound vision of human nature and of what constitutes a good life. Thankfully, the Public Discourse archives can offer guidance here, as on so many other topics.
Photo of Cardinal Pell in wine cellar

Seven Days with Cardinal Pell

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I consider myself lucky to have gotten to know George Cardinal Pell a bit—and that after his 80th year.
Painting of Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson’s Religion of Reason

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Readers of Thomas Kidd’s book, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh, are left with a portrait of a brilliant, morally flawed, and often contradictory, overindulgent, and undisciplined man—a combination not uncommon in great men. The biography is careful and balanced in its presentation of the evidence, revealing a man of monumental achievements and profound failings.
climate change, earth, sun

Unsettled Science

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In a carefully researched and insightful book, Steven Koonin highlights the significant uncertainty underlying climate models and statistics, the limits of technical and political responses, and the need to reassert the core values of scientific independence and integrity that drive social progress.
school, classroom, education

Sex and Gender Ideology in New Jersey’s K–12 Curriculum

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New Jersey’s sample lessons for K–12 state-required sexual orientation and gender identity instruction sparked parental outrage. The sample curriculum contradicts basic biology, offers age-inappropriate lessons about sexual abuse, and imposes an LGBTQ religion on public school children. Nonetheless, New Jersey parents still have the power to influence what happens in the classroom.
Three crosses at sunset

The Bookshelf: Classic Hollywood’s Religious Uplift Project

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The Hollywood “religious epic” movie genre of the postwar period was all about uplift, toleration, and offending exactly no one. Though entertaining at its best and an important part of the story of America’s rising pluralism, this genre proved finally to be too anodyne and unable to do justice to Scripture or the life of the early Church.
Photo of kids wearing masks

From Masks to Gender Ideology: The Political Power of Parental Pushback

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The majority of parents are very angry about everything that has happened—not just the masking, not just the closing schools, but the combination of all of that. And it’s the fact that the people on the school boards, and Democratic politicians, by and large, just refuse to admit that this was wrong, and that it had consequences. And when they refuse to do that, why on earth would anyone vote for them again?
Abraham Lincoln photo

The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa, Prudence, and Statesmanship

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In his recent book, Glenn Ellmers argues that the political philosopher Harry V. Jaffa can help us meet the manifold challenges of the crisis of the West. Jaffa’s teachings on statesmanship and prudence provide a path to reverse America’s decline.
LGBT flags

The Autonomous Self Is a Coercive God

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Jim Breuer and Dave Chappelle are current darlings of the Right, because they refuse to bow to the orthodoxy of sexual identitarianism. Yet their own emphasis on autonomy and free speech shares in the same inadequate conception of modern humanity, which, in its never-ending quest for self-realization, inevitably descends into the very coercive behaviors it claims to eschew.
Woman writing

Eight Years at Public Discourse: A Grateful Retrospective

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At the end of this month, Serena Sigillito will step down from her current role as editor to a new, more auxiliary role as editor-at-large. To mark the occasion, here is collection of nine essays, one from each calendar year of her tenure at PD, that were particularly formative for her.
Classroom

The Death of Gratitude in the American Classroom

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Encouraging people to be gracious, and to recognize what others have provided them through no merit of their own, is not about “guilt tripping” them. It is to encourage a particular way of existing in the world. Gratitude acknowledges the plenitude of goodness that surrounds us every moment of every day in millions of small acts of people we do not know.
Constantine the Great Statue

America, Liberalism, and Catholicism

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Resist the temptation to outsource your thinking to a team or a party. Rooting for a team is appropriate in sports, and partisan politics may be a necessity of a political system like ours, but both are detrimental to the intellectual process. Catholics should not think of discussions about the Church’s relationship to American liberalism as a Battle Royal between competing camps—but as a conversation among friends seeking the truth in community. Adapted from the introductory remarks delivered on April 15, 2021 at the University of Dallas’s conference on America, Liberalism, and Catholicism.
Pope Benedict XVI

A Healthy Secularity Is Possible: A Response to Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley

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Catholic citizens can hope for a society where the faith is more broadly shared, but we cannot escape the responsibility of political deliberation about our society as it is—riddled with its pluralism and confusion—not as we would have it be. A healthily secular society can acknowledge the freedom of the Church and a positive role for the Church in society, understanding that the state is rightly focused on natural norms and goods, not supernatural ones.
in god we trust

It Is Right and Just Offers Inspiration, Not Serious Catholic Politics

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In their new book, Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley provide a rousing exhortation for Catholics to unapologetically live out their faith. Unfortunately, the book contains too many generalizations, overstatements, and imprecisions to be a thoughtful guide to Catholic politics. Any serious Catholic politics must recognize that the problem of pluralism cannot be solved by dominating non-Catholics and imposing our view of the good on them.
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