- September 13, 2023
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Introducing America After Dobbs: A Public Discourse Resource
Interviews
- August 17, 2023
- Sexuality & Family
- August 17, 2023
- Culture, Interviews, Sexuality
“My book is based on a series of dangerous ideas that have led us to where we are now. Beginning with the insidious theories of John Money, these ideas progressed through the fields of psychology and psychiatry and eventually infiltrated our educational and legal systems—corrupting many of the country’s most powerful institutions.”
- July 20, 2023
- Education & Culture
- July 20, 2023
- Art, Christianity, Culture, Fine art, Interviews
That’s really what I want out of this whole project: for us to see that it’s all saying something, whether it’s a cheesy T-shirt, or a simple country church building, or a medieval cathedral. I want us to really pay attention and ask, “What is it saying? What is true and good and beautiful in what it’s saying, and what is not?”
- June 15, 2023
- The Human Person
- June 15, 2023
- Healthcare, Human Dignity, Interviews, Medical Ethics, Science, Sexuality, Transgender
We align with people who are pro-reality, who respect core community values such as truth and honesty, and who see the human being as a whole: body and soul. There is no metaphysical “gendered soul” separate from the body. Teaching body dissociation to kids (“born in the wrong body”) has led to a tidal wave of self-hatred, body dysmorphia, depression, anxiety, and self-harm.
- April 20, 2023
- Sexuality & Family
- April 20, 2023
- Interviews, Marriage, Natural Law
Micah Watson and Ryan Anderson look back on his Piers Morgan interview, how the debate on same-sex marriage played out, what that might mean for our debates on transgender ideology, the nature of political discourse in America today, the future of the conservative movement, and what to look for in the next decade.
- March 17, 2023
- Business & Economics
- March 17, 2023
- Capitalism, Economics, Interviews
Key Founders believed that America’s future was to be a polity in which free and dynamic commerce would play a powerful role in defining society, as opposed to, say, the priorities of aristocratic or feudal societies. The “republic” side of this political economy equation is that this commercial society would operate within the context of institutions and sets of virtues that draw upon classical, religious, and moderate Enlightenment sources.
- February 20, 2023
- The Human Person
- February 20, 2023
- Abortion, Interviews, Medical Ethics
It’s very rewarding to practice excellent women’s health that is collaborative, integrated, holistic, and listens to their bodies. Children are not STDs. Fertility is something to be collaborated with rather than suppressed.
- February 2, 2023
- Politics & Law
- February 2, 2023
- Censorship, Christianity, Conservatism, Constitutional Law, Interviews, Marriage, Religion and the Public Square, Voting
“What I see in modern America is something maybe a little bit different than what other folks see. I think the nation vis-à-vis its laws is far more just than it has been at virtually any point in its previous history. Racial discrimination is outlawed de jure. You have an extension of the First Amendment to all American communities. You have greater religious freedoms in a concrete way than we’ve ever enjoyed in the history of the United States. We have a lot of problems, but we’re better than we’ve been.”
- January 19, 2023
- Sexuality & Family
- January 19, 2023
- Family, Feminism, Interviews, Sexuality
“Masculinity is more socially constructed than femininity. The script is more important. It has to be nurturing, not in the same way as mothers, but by being similarly other-centered. Creating a surplus, caring for others, sacrificing for others. The question then is, what are we going to build that script around? That sense of being needed, giving, other-centered? My answer to that is fatherhood.”
- December 8, 2022
- Sexuality & Family
- December 8, 2022
- Feminism, Interviews, Sexuality, Technology
The final frontier for equality between the sexes—the missing tech fix—was always, how do we deal with reproduction? How do we deal with the different reproductive roles between the sexes? How can we use tech to flatten those differences? So reproductive inequality is the final frontier in replacing the sexes with the atomized, sexless, liberal person.
Book Reviews
- September 24, 2023
- Education & Culture
- September 24, 2023
- Art, Book Reviews, Culture, Politics
Hörcher adeptly elucidates how Scruton’s belief in the intertwining of aesthetics, morality, and politics stands as a bulwark against the often fragmented worldview of today’s modern thinkers.
- September 18, 2023
- Education & Culture, The Human Person
- September 18, 2023
- Art, Book Reviews
By co-creating with God, we imitate his goodness, participate in his governance, and bring more of creation into the divine unity.
- September 17, 2023
- Politics & Law
- September 17, 2023
- Book Reviews, Politics
The liberal tradition is an ongoing conversation in which participants speak in a wide range of accents, reflecting the various “nouns” to which speakers are committed: liberal individualists and liberal communitarians, liberal nationalists and liberal internationalists, liberal believers and liberal skeptics, liberal socialists and—yes—liberal free marketeers.
- September 12, 2023
- The Human Person
- September 12, 2023
- Book Reviews, Culture
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.
- September 11, 2023
- The Human Person
- September 11, 2023
- Book Reviews, Culture
In his impressive 2020 book, Carl Trueman rightly exhorts readers to solidify their commitments to God and moral truth in a world of “expressive individualism.” But by reading human nature through the Marxist-Hegelian lens of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor, he undermines the true individualism at the heart of the ethics that he wants to defend.
- September 10, 2023
- Education & Culture, The Human Person
- September 10, 2023
- Book Reviews, Religion, Science
Nicholas Spencer’s new book is an important resource for anyone who wishes to understand the scientific and religious entanglements that have shaped, and continue to frame, our views of God, humanity, and the cosmos.
- August 23, 2023
- Education & Culture
- August 23, 2023
- Book Reviews, Catholicism, Christianity, Religion
In her new book A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, Zena Hitz situates her philosophical ponderings within the context of her own life, here spotlighting a crisis precipitated by her conversion to the Catholic faith. Like Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac at the Lord’s behest, Hitz realizes that unconditional love of God, “wholehearted commitment without compromise,” might demand the renunciation even of what she has held most dear.
- August 20, 2023
- Education & Culture
- August 20, 2023
- Book Reviews, Education, Literature
John Guillory’s Professing Criticism is a thorough and complex work of scholarship. It’s also a bracing call for literary scholars to significantly reform how they think about their profession, and its relationship to their students and reading public in general. At its core is a challenge that is simultaneously reasonable and radical: professors of literary study must be more modest in their aims and promises to suit the realities of their field in the twenty-first century.
- August 16, 2023
- Politics & Law
- August 16, 2023
- Book Reviews, Constitutional Law
Such a substantial proportion of this book is devoted to textualism, originalism, and traditionalism that it is hard to escape the sense that Sunstein protests too much by repeatedly claiming that his moral-philosophizing “reflective equilibrium” is “the only game in town.” And in truth, he leaves his own preferred approach woefully underdeveloped.
Long Reads
- September 7, 2023
- The Human Person
- September 7, 2023
- Long Reads, Religion
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.
- August 3, 2023
- Education & Culture
- August 3, 2023
- Education, History, Liberal Arts, Long Reads
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.
- July 5, 2023
- Sexuality & Family
- July 5, 2023
- Long Reads, Marriage, Motherhood
Prioritizing support to homemakers who care for children and the elderly is not only the right thing to do—it’s also a smart economic decision for the federal government.
- June 8, 2023
- The Human Person
- June 8, 2023
- Abortion, Long Reads
We will never offer our beloved sisters the ghoulish pseudo-compassion of the abortionist’s knife. We will offer, instead, the healing balm of genuine compassion, compassion born of love, compassion that offers, not a quick and easy, but deadly, “solution,” but rather an open-ended, open-hearted, self-sacrificial commitment.
- May 14, 2023
- Politics & Law
- May 14, 2023
- Long Reads, Philosophy, Polarization, Politics, War
The New Right’s embrace of the “politics of war” is utterly reckless. No amount of friend–enemy Manichaeism or state-of-emergency governance will transform American pluralism into moral unity.
- April 5, 2023
- Sexuality & Family
- April 5, 2023
- Bioethics, Long Reads, Transgender
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.
- March 3, 2023
- Education & Culture
- March 3, 2023
- Long Reads, Philosophy, Polarization, Technology
Present-day Americans are a people consumed by anger—an anger that rests on deep pools of sadness, isolation, loss, and fear. In spite of his reputation for dry, unemotional logic, Thomas Aquinas has a great deal to say about the way in which disordered passions can undermine our capacity for getting at the truth. His work can teach us how to resist the vices encouraged by social media, pursue truth in concert with others, and achieve rational disagreement.
- February 16, 2023
- Politics & Law
- February 16, 2023
- Conservatism, Long Reads, National Conservatism, Nationalism
By deviating from the American political tradition, national conservatives double down on rather than challenge many of our political ills.
- January 4, 2023
- The Human Person
- January 4, 2023
- Christianity, Long Reads
As our dependence on technology reshapes the moral imagination of our culture to see human beings as psychological wills that need not respect material limitations, so the old order that was built upon the vision of human beings as both body and soul will become increasingly implausible. The things that make Christianity stand out from the wider culture—belief in the incarnation, the resurrection, and embodied human nature as a real, universal thing with moral consequences—are antithetical to the terms of membership in the emerging world order.
Newsletters
- August 26, 2023
- August 26, 2023
- Public Discourse
Reflections on college drop-off and the centrality of kids to the human experience - plus, a roundup of this month's essays
- July 30, 2023
- July 30, 2023
- Public Discourse
A welcome from the new managing editor, plus a review of this month’s essays.
- July 1, 2023
- July 1, 2023
- Public Discourse
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.
- May 27, 2023
- May 27, 2023
- Public Discourse
Nature has to be understood and respected for people to be happy.
- April 29, 2023
- April 29, 2023
- Public Discourse
Public Discourse continues to believe that a free and flourishing society is possible. But it depends on the hard work of strengthening our roots—marriage, families, communities, and institutions. We do this work not because we want things to be fixed in place, but because without healthy roots we’ll be thwarted in the task of lifting our sights to the true and the good.
- March 25, 2023
- March 25, 2023
At Public Discourse, we intend to play the role of moderation and calm. We know our society is in the middle of a Revolution—and not a good one—and we know conservatives are experimenting and fracturing in their responses. We try to read and understand all the trends, all the possibilities, and stay calm and reasonable as we host debate and conversation about the best way forward.
- February 25, 2023
- February 25, 2023
- Public Discourse
A lot of readers might wonder: what makes Public Discourse different from other journals? In recent years, a lot of publications have become foot soldiers in the culture wars. Their content is more about political messaging rather than serious thinking. We at Public Discourse aim to be a voice of integrity that readers trust most: we readily acknowledge when interlocutors are right, and we strive to give debate its due. We also think tone and conduct matter, which is why you don’t see our team engaging in Twitter crusades.
- January 28, 2023
- January 28, 2023
- Public Discourse
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.
- November 19, 2022
- November 19, 2022
- Public Discourse
There’s a lot to commend about EA. It endorses good stewardship of resources; it recognizes the dignity of every human being; and it pushes back against the kind of presentism that disregards generations to come. But some iterations of EA should give us pause. Its core defect is its tie to utilitarianism, which is ultimately untenable as a philosophy.
