fbpx
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Search Results For:

Search Results for: slavery

Segregated drinking fountain in use in the American South. Undated photograph. BPA2# 1135.

The United States Should Give Reparations for Segregation, Not Slavery: A Response to Daniel Philpott

By
The United States must apologize for treating blacks with contempt and compensate with reparations those American blacks who lived through racial segregation. But reparations for all black Americans will not erase the wealth gap between blacks and whites, nor improve the significant educational achievement gap rampant throughout the black communities in this country.

How Slavery Is and Isn’t in the Constitution

By
There was an opportunity in 1787 to have torn up slavery by its roots, and that opportunity was missed. But the missing came as much through overconfidence that the march of opinion would wipe out slavery on its own, and as much through the miscalculations of political compromise, as through any conscious policy to foster or promote slavery.

Race, the Legacy of Slavery, and American Promise

By
A new documentary about the Thirteenth Amendment and the disproportionate imprisonment of African Americans is a wake-up call to conservatives who feel threatened by apparently unpatriotic protests or demands for racial justice.

Abortion as a Positive Good: How the Abortion Movement Echoes Radical Slavery Rhetoric

By
Like John C. Calhoun, who famously embraced slavery as a “positive good,” the abortion movement of 2016 has shifted from seeing abortion as a “necessary evil” to celebrating it as good for women and society.

Abortion, Slavery, and Constitutional Meaning

By
Abolitionism provides the example for how to fight for a cause: underscore the humanity of those whose humanity is denied, provide compassionate care for those affected, name the lies that dehumanize and kill, and tirelessly argue for the truth about “who counts.”

Understanding the Slavery-Abortion Analogy

By
In both Dred Scott and Roe, the justices of the Supreme Court had to decide what it means to be a person, whether human beings can be considered property, and what it means to be deprived of liberty. They got it wrong both times.

Slavery and the Constitution

By
Slavery was a great evil, but the Constitution was neither its source nor its guarantor.

End Human Trafficking: A Contemporary Slavery

By
A culture of exploitation and violence, especially sexual exploitation of children, is at epidemic levels here in the United States and around the world. The current Administration’s response is anemic and more must be done.
John Henry Newman

The Liberal Anti-Liberal? On John Henry Newman’s Political Thought

By
For Newman, the discovery of any reasonable political settlement would first require what both the Letter to the Duke of Norfolk and the Oxford Movement had hoped to do: prepare the public imagination for an apostolic church, an institution in which obedience without mental slavery was married to liberty without self-will.
Franciscan Education

The Merits of a Franciscan Liberal Arts Education

By
The point of a Christian liberal education is to take on the mind of God and to be conformed to Christ, or at least to begin to do so, for such a project is endless. This means that a Christian liberal arts school will seek to impart to its students some measure of wisdom and holiness.
Christianity in America

If You Like America, Thank Christianity

By
Mark David Hall’s Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land represents a landmark contribution to the debate over the impact of Christian faith on American law and culture. It is high time for Christians to reframe this debate, asking not “How much do we have to apologize for?” but “How much can we take credit for?”
Karyatides statues, Erehtheio, on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece

The Past As Enemy Country: Why Teachers of Great Books Should Be Teaching History, Too

By
We need to study history as a subject in its own right, acquiring a deep appreciation for the story of Western civilization, with all its abysses of failure and all its deservedly celebrated achievements. We need to help our students understand old texts at a deeper level, in less anachronistic ways. Above all, we need to arm them against the hostility to their own tradition that has become such a destructive force in our culture.
editors' writing desk

From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, July 2023

By
A welcome from the new managing editor, plus a review of this month’s essays.
woman hands bound prisoner in room, hands bound

A Christian Case for Racial Reparations

By
Slavery, Jim Crow, and distributive discrimination assaulted natural rights and the dignity of persons made in the image of God on which these rights are based. They leave behind wounds, the most central of which is the standing victory of injustice, the moral fact of injustice itself that persists in time unless it is repudiated. While constitutional amendments, legislation, and policies have countered and delegitimated these injustices, the lack of a formal apology and reparations has left them still standing.
children caught fish in the lake. boys playing near the water

From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, June 2023

By
Rather than sandlot games and diving contests, June is, for us, a month of contested visions about the body, about sex, gender, race, birth, and death. Perhaps the poet was wrong in declaring April the cruelest month—perhaps that title should go to June. 
President George Washington home at Mount Vernon in Virginia, USA

Reclaiming Museums’ Civic Duty

By
Museums assume, both for the country and the individual, a special trust of preservation and civic encouragement. That encouragement need not involve glossing over the failings of our past. We distort our history both when we whitewash it and when we overemphasize our shortcomings.

Juneteenth: A Conversation on Freedom

By
Juneteenth, coming as it does just weeks before July Fourth, provides a perfect opportunity for us—both individually and collectively—to engage in a season of contemplating and celebrating the complexities and nuances, highs and lows, of this American experiment that has at its core the achievement of freedom.
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

By
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.
Custom library

Leo Strauss on Greatness and Democracy: An Interview with Timothy W. Burns

By and
Leo Strauss was an extraordinarily generous writer, by which I mean that he went to great pains to present the best case he could for the arguments of a serious thinker with whom he disagreed, before offering any tentative critique of that thinker. One never finds in his writings mere polemic or straw men. He invites the reader to take seriously and try fully to understand and spell out the serious and deepest thoughts of those whose thought he is confronting, even if he disagrees.
Lincoln memorial

Lincoln and the Question of Self-Government

By
Lincoln saw the fundamental problem in democracy as one single, monstrous question: “Can the principle that liberates all and produces self-government remain disciplined and restrained enough in practice to retain self-government?”
Regent Street with Union Jack Flags in London, United Kingdom UK

Reckoning with Colonialism

By
As a moral framework for assessing regimes in an imperfect world, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning has much to recommend it.
Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson, America’s Writer

By
Fred Kaplan’s new biography of Thomas Jefferson, His Masterly Pen, gives us the Jefferson we deserve: Jefferson the writer, the listener, and the aesthete.

A Culture of Life Starts with Turning the Other Cheek

By
Advocates must remain clear about the moral stakes of abortion. But the non-violent ethic of life will reinforce the witness of conscience that drives objections to killing innocent human beings. By refusing to retaliate with violence or indignant rhetoric, pro-lifers will enhance their moral witness.
group of surgeons in operating room at hospital

The Surgeries Are Immoral

By
Conservatives should oppose “gender-affirming” surgeries with a positive account of human freedom ordered towards the goods that make freedom a blessing rather than a curse.
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss

Public Discourse © 2023 / All Rights Reserved