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bioethics

A Common Good Framework in Bioethics and Policy

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The public bioethics conversations of the twenty-first century will be much more nuanced and complicated than the abortion debate of the last fifty years. If we want to speak thoughtfully about how these and other technologies are shaping our future, we will need to move beyond a reductionist approach to human dignity.
Campus protests

Student Protests and the Old Gods

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The protests are not simply about Gaza, but concern incompatible ways of life and value. They are another moment in the long rejection of Western metaphysics, anthropology, ethics, and epistemology by Westerners coming of age in a culture that teaches them to despise their own civilization.
newborn

The Miracle That Saves the World

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Inviting people into joy, both then and now, means also inviting others into possible pain. We must embrace the joys with the sorrows to lead full, rich lives as human beings.
Agrarian life

Rooted in the Nation: Whittaker Chambers’s Agrarian Conservatism

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Conservative political action can, in fact, be a bulwark of counterrevolution. This is why Whittaker Chambers was a “conservative of the heart,” even if he did not consider himself a “conservative of the head.” In the final analysis, he was a witness to the permanent things.
oath

Disintegrating Conscience in a Fragmented Age 

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Although one might find oneself disagreeing with Smith, as I have on occasion, one will be better for it. And I can say that with a clear conscience.  
Religious freedom

Religious Freedom Deserves a Right of Its Own

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Religion is a basic good for all human beings everywhere, therefore religious freedom is a universal human right. It is neither unfair nor parochial, but a requirement of justice.
studying literature

English for the Dazed and Confused

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Give young Americans the story of literature from the Puritans to the Modernists. Make it a tradition and hand it down as an ingredient in their formation as citizens and tell them that they stand in the shadow of American greatness. This is not only a matter of knowledge and skill. It’s for their health. 
statute depicting a person lamenting/grieving

Social Wounds, DEI Advocacy, and the Good of Lamentation

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There are reasons for hope available to us all, believers or not, but the possibility of lamentation as a form of prayer provides an especially potent way of ensuring that lament is enlivened by hope rather than rendered morbid by despair. 
anti-feminism

The End of Feminism

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In reality, the initial question of “Should we reject feminism?” is reductive to the point of making little sense. It invites no clear “yes” or “no” answer because the term “feminism” has no clear and consistent definition, and “feminism’s” effects have been both good and bad in ways that are now deeply intertwined. 
self-made

Reality Is Discovered, Not Made: An Interview with Tara Isabella Burton

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As this idea of self-creation, telling our own story, self-determination has become seen as the fundamental element of human life, that means those of us who participate more fully in self-creation are more human, and those of us who participate less fully are, in some sense, less human.
seedling symbolizing hope

A Reflection for a New Year

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The antidote to despair is not perfect politics, an impossibility, a mere ideology; the cure is hope. Moral panic reveals despair at the state of things: craving the fullness of the kingdom of heaven now, but upon discovering decadence and depravity—and who can deny our time’s troubles—responding with the sadness of despair. Despair cannot be overcome with certainty or perfection, but only by hope and the truth of concrete action undertaken in the light of hope.
Nativity Scene

Chesterton’s Christmas

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In “The God in the Cave,” G.K, Chesterton explains that when Christians celebrate the Nativity, they are celebrating an event that changed the course of history and permanently transformed the DNA of human society.
establishment clause

There and Back Again: The Supreme Court’s Establishment Clause Journey

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We stand at the dawn of a new era in an important realm of constitutional law. As we step into this new dispensation, Agreeing to Disagree will serve well as a road map and guidebook to what comes.
history

Journeys of the Mind: Peter Brown and the Excitement of History

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Many of us find it difficult to be forced to revise our assumptions and change our views, but for Brown, it seems to be one of the great joys in life.
mortal beauty

To What Serves Mortal Beauty?

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The dark side of overvaluing beauty is to seek to manipulate it into our own image, to manage it for ourselves. Hopkins says to leave it alone.
immanent frame

Life in the Ruins: Keeping Faith within the Immanent Frame 

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There is no romance without the real presence of God, no sacramental imagination without the sacraments, and the wonders of fantasy cannot be asserted of primary reality itself.
Death at 50

“Death” at Fifty: Ernest Becker and the Immortality Project

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By embracing the fact that we do not belong to ourselves, we are not “our own person,” we may discover that responsibility for our dignity in both life and death belongs to God and to others, as it does to our own choices. The acknowledgment of human vulnerability and dependence may well be the antidote to the fear and anxiety at the root of the modern denial of death. 
Francis of Assisi

Francis of Assisi, Father of Modernity

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Francis of Assisi teaches us that those who want to embrace the joys of this life must also embrace suffering. Our forgetfulness of this truth could explain the current crisis of our civilization.
AI/ GPT3

What Makes Us Human?

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At the moment, large language models are nothing like us, however easy it is for us to anthropomorphize their outputs. But as AIs develop, it will become increasingly necessary to ask: How much do we want them to become like us? Answering that question will certainly require human wisdom.
AI

Tech Evangelists: The AI-Made Pseudo-Religions of Tomorrow Sound Uncannily Like Those of Yesterday

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Treating data centers, just like fleshly human bodies, as irrelevant or inconvenient, and claiming the world wide web, not the material world, as sovereign over our “true” selves, makes this kind of thinking into a form of techno-theology.
Family

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

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Reflections on college drop-off and the centrality of kids to the human experience - plus, a roundup of this month's essays
Ivf embryo transfer

Procreating Alone

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If sexual attraction is one powerful force that God built into the world to counteract the individual’s inclination to self-absorption, then the combination of technological and cultural assaults on this urge doesn’t threaten only the formation of families, the basic unit of society. It also threatens something even more foundational: the nature of the person as a social being.
woman hands bound prisoner in room, hands bound

A Christian Case for Racial Reparations

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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.
Delivery and installation of a modular frame house. Frame construction of small houses. Modular housing construction. Your house. An inexpensive house.

Better Housing Would Make Families Happier

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Modern life in the United States is atomizing, lonely, and hard on family bonds. Improving the housing stock would help alleviate these challenges.
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