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Bioethics

Bioethics at America250 

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There is no guarantee that the bioethics of our future will live up to America’s founding promises and insights. Those of us concerned that such a bioethics should exist must, as Lincoln said in honoring the dead of Gettysburg, “be dedicated to the unfinished work” of creating, sustaining, and defending that bioethics. It will be no small task, but I hope to have given some sense of what the shape of that task must be. 
declaration of independence

Are These Truths Really Self-Evident? A Q&A with Rémi Brague 

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Perhaps something in the American tradition could help us Europeans out of the lurch: the ability to change, to realize what had been wrongly done and understand that they urgently have to undo it.
womens march DC

American Apostasy at 250 

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Two hundred and fifty years since our nation’s founding, the public conscience has begun to replace its fidelity to inalienable rights and religious freedom with a state-enforced commitment to radical human autonomy.
Harvey Mansfield

Teaching and the Effectual Truth

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Professor Mansfield is a teacher whose commitments to rigor, to plucky and puckish truthfulness, to political philosophy, and to Harvard University have become suitably legendary. And his effectual truth includes generations of students whose ways of thinking and indeed ways of living he has influenced.
labor unions

Voluntarism, Free Speech, and American Labor’s Growing Political Divide 

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What unions need is more internal flexibility. Workers need a way to voice their displeasure with union politics. And if voice isn’t enough, they need a realistic way out.
female athlete

Female Fertility and Athleticism: Two Sides of the Same Coin 

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Perhaps the greatest lesson we can learn from the Olympian mothers is that women are more than their bodies, and that we are all called to integrated human excellence, body and soul. 
summer reading lkst

The Bookshelf: The 2026 Public Discourse Summer Reading List 

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Here’s what our editors are reading this summer.  
pagan celebration

The Paganism of Hasan Piker 

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The West was built on the belief that there is a truth about the good that no act of will can overturn. That belief is now openly contested. The question is whether we still have the vocabulary—and the conviction—to defend it. 
Independence Hall

A Plea for Strict Construction 

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The true beauty of the American Founding is that it is rooted on the hope that “societies of men are really capable … of establishing good government from reflection and choice.” Throughout this book, it is evident that our author wonders at how the almost providential wisdom of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 achieved that—and such wonder is the very basis of political philosophy. It is only by recovering such a sensibility that Americans may make our Constitution efficacious once again. 
Homeschooling

Americans Are Skipping School

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For the best insights on homeschooling America, I hope we can combine these approaches, appreciating the richness of variety in research without neglecting either scholarly rigor or attention to the particularities of homeschooling and of studying homeschoolers. I have tried to do something like this here, and I hope that other research will draw on what I have argued, even if critically. Holding different viewpoints in tension should be key to any effort to approach an accurate understanding of homeschooling’s role in American life.
lecture hall

Disability at the Elites 

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What counts as serious? At what point does difficulty signal a disability? Much of that is up to the disabled one, whose lived experience is decisive.   
the talmud

AI, Magnifica Humanitas, and the Law of the Golem 

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The Talmudic and rabbinic tradition diverges from the latest encyclical, and the divergence highlights a paradox in the papal logic. Leo XIV’s strongest move, his categorical prohibition against the use of AI to make “lethal or otherwise irreversible decisions,” demands a more principled distinction between the Switchblade and the CyberKnife.
in God's image

The Imago Dei as History: A Review of Tomer Persico’s In God’s Image

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Despite the drawbacks of his approach and the unfortunate flaws in execution, Persico succeeds in showing that history is not a never-ending succession of contingent self-descriptions. It is one ultimately constituted by our questioning search for God who, as Abraham Joshua Heschel reminds us, is always himself “searching for man.”  
American constitutionalism

Written Constitutions, Judicial Review, and the Limits of Constitutional Hope 

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From the covenants of seventeenth-century England and colonial America to the doctrine of judicial review developed by Madison, Hamilton, and Marshall, the visible institutions of modern constitutionalism owe more to Christian traditions of covenant, jurisdictional pluralism, and Augustinian anthropology than is commonly recognized. 
American constitutionalism

The Forgotten Foundations of Constitutional Law 

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Long before the separation of powers and judicial review were given written form, Greek philosophy, Roman law, Christian theology, and the medieval doctrine of paired jurisdictions laid the deeper architecture of constitutional government.  
embryo

Can We Humanize Our Brave New World? 

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The elimination of suffering will not produce joy. If we seek to be truly free, we must acknowledge our responsibilities to one another. We will flourish to the extent that we all can flourish. 
Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton: Philosophical Christian and Scourge of Nihilism Par Excellence 

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Rather than consign Scruton to the camp of the nihilists, I think it is more just to be grateful for his efforts to liberate and defend the soul and to fight so courageously against the ubiquitous “culture of repudiation.” 
seminar

The Seminar and the Recovery of Civil Discourse 

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The seminar cannot, by itself, heal our public life. No educational form can bear that burden alone. But if we want a society capable of civil disagreement, we will need to create and sustain places where we can safely learn it.
Jefferson

Hamilton, Jefferson, and the Fight for Power in America 

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Taken as a whole, Rosen’s book offers a learned and sober account of the relevance of Hamilton’s and Jefferson’s principles to America’s past, present, and possible future. 
John Adams

John Adams and the Structures of Liberty 

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As we approach the semiquincentennial, it is important to reflect on the spirit of 1776 and the principles of the Revolution that have shaped the American ethos. But it is also a time to reflect on how our various governmental structures uphold and preserve liberty. 
Pride and Prejudice - Mr Darcy

Gen Z and Men Who Yearn 

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For a generation marked by a noticeable gender split on political beliefs as well as by ever declining marriage rates, it would seem that young women still retain a desire for a specific vision of manhood. But what exactly is that vision?  
war

Pessimism Abroad 

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The broad acceptance by self-described conservatives of casual war, initiated without the approval of the clear constitutional authority of Congress, is in sharp contrast to the caution and prudence at the heart of the conservative disposition.
NC legislature

Imperfect Pro-Life Lawmaking in Post-Dobbs America 

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By re-energizing a state’s pro-life base and attracting enough swing voters to tip the scales, the movement can make real, even if “imperfect,” progress toward ending elective abortion in America.  
agricultural land

Against False Technological Necessity 

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AI can shift how we communicate with one another, what work looks like for many roles, how relationships unfold, and how we order our lives. Much of our reaction to these projects reflects the understanding that this technology has the power to reshape the way humanity marches into the future, and not always in a way that serves the greater good.