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Founding

Is the American Founding Christian, Secular—Or Something Else?

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In The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer successfully refute the still (somehow) influential interpretation of the American Founding as a secular-not-Christian project. However, they do so without successfully establishing their preferred alternative, the Christian-not-secular interpretation. There is a vast middle between these two extremes whose existence slips through the authors’ fingers again and again like a well-greased elephant.
Photo of the Federal Reserve

How the Fed’s Hubris Has Contributed to Inflation

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The Fed has overestimated its power to manage the economy, and hubris is a dangerous thing in monetary policy. Starting in March 2020, the Fed increased the money supply significantly and the inevitable result was inflation. Unfortunately, the Fed continues to believe in its ability to fine-tune the economy.

When Intelligence Is Stupid

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Perhaps maturity requires moderating our admiration for the intellectuals, the clerks, and the clever types. Surely a person of good judgment, stolid character, and immoveable rectitude is every bit as praiseworthy as the inventive and the quick—and in political and social life far more important.
flag, house, sky

The Christian Roots of Good Old-Fashioned American Individualism

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Social conservatives used to have a much more nuanced understanding of the development of modern liberalism out of the medieval Christian world. Our insistence on individual immortality, an idea hammered home by the almost preposterous teaching of the resurrection of the body, ought to make Christians dyed-in-the-wool individualists.
Chinese National Congress gathering

The CCP’s Fake Democracy: How the CCP Controls China and Fools the World (Part I)

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The CCP regularly employs violent tactics to persecute and silence its opponents and operates with impunity as a shadow power. China’s political structures enable it to maintain monolithic control of the nation. By discussing my own experience under the CCP and shedding light on its opaque structures, I hope to show that comparing the CCP’s authoritarian regime with democratic governance is like comparing barbarism with civilization: there is no comparison.
Montrose Graduation 2021

To Find Your Life’s Mission, Follow Your Questions

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What are the small and humble questions that should animate all human lives, that work to reveal to us little by little our unique mission? Questions like these: “Who or what am I responsible for today? How can I use my time well? What ought I do in this situation? How do I treat this person with the love and dignity she deserves?” We find our life’s mission not by seeking after some “castle in the air,” but by fulfilling the very concrete duty of each moment, one moment at a time.
William and Mary

Freshman Orientation: An Introduction to Monolithic Higher Education

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My snapshot of freshman orientation highlights some of the failures of higher education. Too many universities today no longer teach students how to think but what to think. Instead of a marketplace of ideas, campus has become an echo chamber of ideas. But outspoken students (and faculty) can save the university by thoughtfully and deliberately making their voices heard.
Big group of kids

Why Not Have a Bunch of Kids?

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Humans are, hands down, the single most fascinating set of creatures on the planet. If you want to understand how humans work, just make a few, sit back, and watch them do their thing.
Student working at laptop

What I Wish I’d Known When I Started Graduate School: Tips for Writing and for Combating Impostor Syndrome

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Whatever your raw intelligence, whatever your background, what you have control over, and therefore what you should focus on, is your actions. The cure for impostor syndrome is to do what intellectuals do, and you’ll become an intellectual.
Mother holding baby

Seeing beyond Roe

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Now that Roe v. Wade is on the brink of being overturned, we need to have conversations across the partisan divide and heal our nation’s wounds.
Food on Table

On the Sacredness of Food

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If life is sacred, food must be sacred too, since it makes life possible. And the higher the order of life which is given up to be food, the more sacred the food. That’s why vegetables are harvested, while animals are sacrificed. That’s why the Catholic Church considers the sacrifice of the Mass, when God offers his body as food for our corporal and spiritual nourishment, the source and summit of the Christian life.
Person Looking out on Water

The Unavoidable Uncertainty of This Pandemic

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An excessive desire for certainty about COVID-19 is leading to counter-productive responses. We must make decisions based upon the limited information we have, and then execute those decisions with conviction. But let us have the humility to admit when we are wrong.
Public Discourse

Between Gods and Men: Natural Law and Religious Pluralism

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Only natural law stands “between gods and men.” It employs human reason and observation, yet it admits of a divine creator behind nature—and therefore something inherently normative about naturally given ends. Without this intermediary, neither conflicts between divine law and human law nor conflicts between different religions can end in anything other than continuous conflict.

When Reason Does Not Suffice: Why Our Culture Still Accepts Abortion

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The pro-life movement is really asking for a moral revolution. If the child lives, the mother’s life will not be the same, because if we accept the principles that allow the child to live, none of our lives can be the same. There is no way to guarantee a world safe for the unborn child that is also a world of total sexual and economic autonomy. In any world in which autonomy is the highest ideal, the child—that incarnate sign of our dependence and existential poverty—must go.

The Ultimate Catholic Showdown? Liberalism vs. Integralism at Harvard

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A recent conference on Christianity and liberalism brought together high-profile Catholic scholars who strongly disagree about whether Catholicism is compatible with liberalism in general and the American version of it in particular.

Why the Government Shouldn’t Force Bakers—Or Anyone—to Express Support for Same-Sex Marriage

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Antidiscrimination laws are fully within the government’s authority—but only when the government is not using such laws as part of a campaign to compel people to express “by word or act” their support for a government-prescribed orthodoxy. The second in a two-part series.

The Wisdom of the Neocons

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Drawing on the wisdom of the neocons might point us towards a harder, but ultimately more fruitful, approach to our current political problems.

The iPhone and Us

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On this tenth anniversary of the birth of the first smartphone, the day of reckoning is at hand: how will we Millennials produce the next generation of great books when the smartphone has killed our capacity to concentrate?

The Future of Pro-Life Legislation and Litigation

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In her landmark 1971 paper, Judith Jarvis Thomson tried to defend abortion by appeal to norms of justification consistently applicable in a range of other cases. By contrast, the courts in and after Roe and Casey have treated the right to abortion as an unquestionable legal principle. This inverted approach is doomed to fail as it continues to reveal the anomalous character of abortion rights.

What’s in the Games?

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Our interest in the Olympic Games can teach us something about the goodness of playing, and watching, sports.
Public Discourse

What Makes a Society Thrive?

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A collection of essays helps the public understand the elements that make up a society where people can flourish, the reasons for our society’s current problems, and some avenues for potential reform. Below is an adaptation of the editors’ introduction to that collection.
Public Discourse

For Baby, #AnotherBoy, and Millions More: Why I’m Speaking Out about Miscarriage and Abortion

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Having carried life in my womb, I cannot look away. I cannot cloak reality in another name: early pregnancy loss is death, and willful termination is killing.
Public Discourse

Rethinking the Conservative Approach to Transgenderism

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Conservatives do not take the introspective reports of transgendered people seriously, but there are good scientific reasons for supposing that subjective experience of gender is legitimate, even when it contradicts apparent biological sex.
Public Discourse

Nature vs. Synthetics: What’s at Stake in the Dolce and Gabbana Controversy

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Dolce and Gabbana, whether they use the term or not, are strong advocates of natural law.
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