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Oxford University

Liberalism in the U.S. and the UK: A Q&A with Lord Nigel Biggar 

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The typical liberal virtues of respect and tolerance are far too thin. They need a wider array of supporting virtues: humility, docility, temperance, courage, etc. And that such traits are virtues is not obvious to every worldview.
family of three

Constitutional Parental Rights: No “Substantive Due Process” Required 

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Indeed, because our Constitution recognizes the right of both mother and father to the custody of their joint offspring, that Constitution surely permits—if not requires—all the states of our Union to publicly favor, once again, the lifelong “union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.” 
The Odyssey

Nolan’s Odyssey: A Shaky Middle Ground 

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Nolan’s Odyssey is a post-Christian story par excellence. One question, however, remains: will this moral middle ground hold, or will we eventually return to a truly Homeric past?  
Vaccines

Attorney General as State Theologian: Florida’s Vaccine Mandate and the Freedom of the Church 

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If the Florida bishops determine that immunizing their students is required for the common good, then their policy of mandatory vaccinations is, contra the Florida AG, supported by Catholic teaching.
FTC

Unaccountable Commissions or All-Powerful Kings? 

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There’s a way between the rule of an unaccountable bureaucracy and the reign of a king: constitutional government.
conservatism

The Augustinian State of Social Conservatism 

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An Augustinian reading of the present moment would help social conservatives resist both triumphalism and despair. The renewal and invigoration now visible among many social conservatives may be a genuine mercy: a sign that the moral imagination—worn down though it is by the exhaustion of ambient progressivism—has not been entirely extinguished, and that many still perceive the disorder produced when freedom is detached from truth, embodiment, family, duty, and the created order.  
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

C. S. Lewis and Questioning the “Right” to Happiness

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For Lewis in 1963, the Declaration and its “inalienable” right to the “pursuit of happiness” for all men was at least as countercultural then as when it was first written. Lewis urges his readers to again feel the incredible weight of it, not to be disillusioned or to complain that the American dream is dead, or is only now for some, or that the pursuit of happiness means nothing.
megaphone

Look Here! Attention and the Law 

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What steals our attention shapes our lives. 
Happy young people hanging out

Don’t Worry. Be Conservative.

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The war on spiritual poverty is worth fighting, and we need foot soldiers and generals who are willing to wage it. 
AI
  • AI

Is AI Taking Over the “Religion of the Book”? 

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An AI does not only “remember” all the words. But as any ChatGPT user can testify, it finds connections between different sources, summarizes them, generates challenging questions, and even deduces new insights. It can therefore seem as though these machines are well-versed in almost any topic.  
Oxford

Anscombe’s First Lectures at Oxford

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Despite Anscombe’s oft-repeated claim that she got everything she knew at this point from Wittgenstein, in these lectures Anscombe is not simply repeating Wittgenstein, but is in fact going beyond Wittgenstein in a number of ways.
Lord of the Rings

Magnifica Humanitas and Gandalf’s Cheerful Courage 

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It is in the martyrs, both those who have shed their blood for God but also those martyrs of “everyday life,” the martyrs of charity, that we most clearly behold the splendor and magnificence of humanity.
SC in England
  • Law

Time Immemorial  

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The stubborn persistence of time immemorial in a time when it should, by rights, long ago have ceased to be in constitutional law, tells us something crucial about what binds a community to its law. We should listen. 
college rally

The Real Campus Speech Crisis Isn’t Censorship—It’s Dogma 

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At a moment when Americans can barely speak across political lines, we are graduating a generation that never learned how. That is not a campus problem. It is a democratic emergency. 
American slavery

Who Will Fight for “Evil”?  

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old books

The Bookshelf: When Words Are Deeds 

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The nation’s semiquincentennial, which we marked on July 4, was the occasion for a number of new books about the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. I’m sure I’ll get around to reading some of those in future—if they’re good, they’re durable—but lately I’ve been revisiting some older works on the subject that still hold up. I’ll get to those in a moment, but first I want to consider what we have been celebrating this year. 
Notre Dame

The Lamp that Burns Forever 

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Let us cherish our sacred buildings cast in stone. Without them, we are cut adrift from all that we live and long for.
Adam and Eve

The Serpent in the Garden: Artificial Intelligence and the Need for Assayers 

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How can AI be used wisely, maximizing its benefits while minimizing its risks?  
conservatism

Walking Alongside History 

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What Buckley got wrong about conservatism 
China

Morality as Strategy in the West’s Approach to China   

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To help China find its true calling in the world, the West cannot rely solely on material power; it must also recommit itself to its traditional moral principles. 
Gordon Wood

An Intellectual Feast: Reflections on the Death of Gordon Wood 

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Though America’s ideals were riddled with ironies and inconsistencies, the nation still emerged as a global beacon of ordered liberty and republican democracy. No one better explained the history and significance of that American nation than Gordon Wood. 
the unvierse

Human Dignity without Metaphysics? 

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A culture that continually invokes dignity while refusing to discuss its foundations may discover that the concept gradually loses its internal coherence. If man possesses a unique and inviolable worth, then reality itself must contain some explanation for that fact. 
people talking to each other

No Less a Talking Sheep 

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If reason and speech are constitutive of who are, it would not be surprising that less talking with one another would have to do with the dumbing down of ourselves, even a diminished humanity.
child wrapped in gay pride flag

Eleven Years After Obergefell, Who Will Speak for the Children? 

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The work, eleven years in, begins with honesty; the admission that Obergefell was not a neutral expansion of rights but a substitution of one set of duties for another, and that the duties it displaced were owed chiefly to children