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antique library with old bookshelves

The Bookshelf: Movements and Clerks 

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We do well to remind ourselves, as the late Christopher Lasch did, that what we now call the “laptop class” can make itself too independent, too insulated from the buffeting winds that others must struggle against.
Venezuela turmoil

“Operation Absolute Resolve” and Just War Tradition 

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Was the removal and arrest of Nicolas Maduro justified according to the just war tradition? The answer is yes, with a small caveat.
Bust of John Henry Newman, doctor of the Church

Newman’s Conscientious Maximalism 

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Our obligations are not limited to what human beings in positions of authority spell out for us. 
girls' basketball team

The Lady Griffins and Aiming Students Higher 

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The Academy of Classical Christian Studies’ Lady Griffins basketball team captured the attention of millions with their decision to forfeit their championship. This decision didn’t happen in a vacuum; it grew out of an education that seeks to aim students toward higher things.  
Pope Leo XIV Inauguration

Two Leos on Church and State

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The contemporary Leonine texts suggest that the Pope’s primary concern is about the downstream political consequences of religious liberty.
girls having coffee together

Body Literacy Is the New “Sex Ed” 

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A culture that teaches girls to silence their pain, medicate their cycles, and dismiss the body’s signals is a culture that will inevitably reap infertility, despair, and declining birthrates. A culture that teaches body literacy, by contrast, will raise young people who see their fertility as a vital sign of health and an essential part of their future.
gene editing

The MAHA Case for Advanced Genetic Editing 

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If the goal of medicine is to protect and restore life, then our efforts and investments should flow to therapies that treat the sick, not to technologies that eliminate them before they are born. 
person reading a fantasy novel outside under a tree

The Falcon’s Children: Ross Douthat’s (Mostly) Fantastic Fantasy 

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Is this tale imperfect? Yes. But it’s one that’s worth hearing regardless. 
Israel

What Is Zionism? What Is Christian Zionism? 

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Basic decency provides more than enough grounds for Christians to oppose hateful and irrational attacks against Jews and Israel. We should treat these episodes as tests of our courage and discernment, because that’s exactly what they are. 
Capitol Hill

The Powers of the Senate 

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There’s no point in writing laws if the courts won’t follow them. It’s the trial judges, not the president, who are sapping Congress’s power. Perhaps it’s time that Congress does something about it.  
immigration and family separation

The Dignity of the Family and American Democracy 

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There appears to be an intractable choice between family separation, on one hand, and a nation that does not enforce its own laws or protect its own borders, on the other. How to proceed? 
Maduro

The End of a Regime? Understanding the Extraction of Maduro

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The story of Maduro’s extraction is not a tale of foreign intervention. It is a story of internal collapse, human suffering, and the eventual recognition—by Venezuelans and by the world—that a government cannot indefinitely destroy the lives of its citizens without facing consequences.
Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt and the Limits of Expertise 

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We do not need experts to tell us how to get our kids out of the machine.  
Harvard Law

The Return to Tradition in the Law 

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If feats like the medieval preservation and subsequent revival of Roman law show us anything, it is that the steady, often thankless work of patient scholarship and steady teaching can provide sound footing on dry land. 
Plato

Gorgias and Good Rhetors: A Response to Thomas Schacht 

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Taking all things together and balancing the good with the bad, you have not a moral horror, but a very good country indeed, which is why people from around the world still yearn to come here. If anyone tells you otherwise, he’s a lying rhetor. 
Historic American courthouse

The Judicial Oath and the Judgment of History

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My oath, with God as witness, to uphold the rule of law must matter more than the judgment of any peer or historian.
Roger Scruton

Rationalism in Conservative Politics 

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Ideas about the political conditions for human flourishing sometimes have unforeseen consequences. But the consequences of refusing to traffic in these ideas are foreseeably very bad indeed.
Christmas

Gaudeat Ecclesia, Now and Always 

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This Christmas, as we enjoy our cozy families and gifts, may we marvel in Christ’s appearance in Scripture and in our world, with all of its paradoxes.
Calvin Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar” 

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Henry Ford sought to mainstream anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States. In a 1925 address, Coolidge decisively broke with Ford’s movement. 
tech

People, Place, Prayer, the Past: A Review of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine 

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Kingsnorth sees the problems of technology; but he also realizes (and acknowledges) that he is embedded in the Machine. What he proposes toward the end is not a naïve and impossible utopian withdrawal but selective resistance to the Machine, resistance that can take various forms but that will always involve some level of complicity. 
Christmas reading list

The 2025 Public Discourse Book List 

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A roundup of reads from PD’s editorial team and the Witherspoon Institute staff
entrepreneurship and innovation

Entrepreneurship, Prosperity, and Living Contra Mundum: A Q&A with Robert L. Luddy

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You need people to have the tenacity, the wonder, and the willingness to say, “I can do some things better than what is currently being done in the marketplace.” And that’s the nature of entrepreneurship.
Jane Austen novels

The Genius of Jane Austen 

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Jane Austen was an extraordinary writer of fiction, but she was also a profound teacher of human nature, the arts of life, and the way to happiness. Her novels are, as it were, about her “important nothings”: about the sport of laughter, love and friendship, and the splendid challenge of being human.    
Sailing to Byzantium

Monument of Unageing Intellect

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It is plain to this grateful reader that the tradition of the university has deeply formed Professor Hankins and Professor Guelzo into the kind of people capable of bringing to fruition the Herculean labor of love and learning that is The Golden Thread.