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While we continue to seek ways to extend robust legal protection to prenatal children and to persuade our pro-choice brothers and sisters that such laws are necessary to forge a truly just society, we should all be able to come together to stop unwanted abortion. 
Americans are just a month away from choosing our next president. Voting is a great responsibility, and we at Public Discourse seek to inform readers with a variety of viewpoints and arguments all coming from thinkers who share our basic moral commitments.
While I do not intend to vote for Biden, I am adamant that a Christian may in good conscience vote for him so long as it is not because of the evils he supports. Recognizing this fact is crucial for those who care about Christian witness in a fallen world. When our moral witness becomes entirely tied to prudential political judgments, we swap our faith in a transcendent redeeming God who offers us salvation for a politician or party who promises to create heaven on earth.
The duty of Christians is to be the soul—even more specifically, the conscience—of our civilization. The options this November, and the trajectories they promise, are not acceptable, and in choosing between them we risk forsaking our calling by soiling our witness.
What moral calculations should determine how we vote?
Voting always requires a weighing of consequences. The paramount question for the conscientious voter in 2016 is, “Which outcome among the feasible alternatives will promote the greatest good or prevent the greatest harm?”
Though many liberals are eager to denounce regulations of the right to vote as “voter suppression,” requiring citizens to show that they can cast a properly-informed ballot ensures that the right to vote, like other rights, is exercised prudently.
What might have seemed like the next progressive triumph-in-waiting is instead running off the rails. How? Why?
Chernow’s biography denies us the gift that Mark Twain would so generously bestow on his fellow Americans. For her 250th birthday, America deserves better. 
The Holy Spirit is still reliably and certainly at work in aiding the selection of the successor to the Chair of Saint Peter. That the process of getting there often leans on friendships, acquaintances, impressions, hope, and trust should not concern us. We’re human, after all. It couldn’t be otherwise. 
Pro-union conservatives have raised real questions about the tensions latent in conservative thought. But they haven’t shown how unions can resolve those tensions.
One of the film’s deeper provocations is a question we should all ask ourselves: How much time do we spend online? How much of our political outrage is merely performance—anger stoked by algorithms and designed more to entertain than to inform? How often do we confuse the trivial with the profound, devoting our attention to surface-level controversies while neglecting the slow, difficult pursuit of real knowledge? 
McConnell will be the deciding vote for fifteen more months. That’s the countdown for a retirement-eligible judge who wants to be replaced by a conservative. 
Whether state and federal governments will support school choice remains to be seen; there seems to be considerable political pressure in both directions. But on the social level, while we may continue to criticize each other’s school choices, increasing numbers of families seem unwilling to bypass choice.
President Trump plays extreme hardball by American standards, some of it blatantly authoritarian. Conservatives lose credibility when they deny this. But Trump’s election and reelection were, in part, a reaction to decades of undemocratic progressive change in the courts, bureaucracy, and public education—itself a kind of hardball. Liberals who deny or downplay these phenomena only feed populist anger.
If the Court wants to stand apart from the toxic politics of the moment, it needs to focus on where the law leads, not where the DHS flight is headed.  
When it comes to politics, everyone seems fully convinced that they have genuine knowledge. Many even maintain a dogmatic confidence about their political views. What explains this? 
If nothing else, the ANES data should be yet another reminder that there is no longer any “great silent majority” of socially conservative voters. We are, at best, coalition partners with a political movement that has the tendency to default into a lifestyle libertarianism and the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of the tech bro.  
Rather than emphasizing the church as a sacramental reality imbued with the presence of God, or a conception of the church as a pilgrim people, Pope Francis voiced a preference for the church as a field hospital with a battlefield task: Heal the wounds! Start from the ground up. Encounter those on the margins. Accompany those who feel left out. 
President Trump has a real opportunity to put a lasting mark on a court that’s quietly important to the country—and personally important to him—by selecting two young conservatives for its vacant seats. He shouldn’t let Delaware get in his way.
Political actors of all stripes fail to honor principles of public justification and mutual respect when they try to shame, bully, or force their opponents out of the public square. Movement progressives ought to remember this, and ensure that their political activities uphold such norms—even for those whose views they might find profoundly objectionable or immoral.
Republicans couldn’t have filled the seat without Justice Barrett. Mitch McConnell knew this, and for that reason insisted that she needed to be the nominee.
If the academy can produce teachers able to communicate to students the perfectly useless joy of learning, then it may continue to make its most valuable contribution to our civic life.
Congress has declined into a destructive cycle of revenge. To preserve the institution and strengthen our politics, politicians must take the risk to forgive.