Archives - Public Discourse

If 1:1 programs are not a particular benefit to character development, spiritual development, or the Church’s care for the poor, the argument for their pervasiveness among most Catholic schools appears weak at best and imprudent and negligent at worst.
To what extent can migration be legitimately regulated and enforced, and under what circumstances may migrants already residing within a country be returned to their place of origin? 
Contrary to some critical readers, the liberal democracy that Hopeful Realism can affirm is far from neutral.
Requiring sportsbooks to treat all customers alike would satisfy liberal values of nondiscrimination and freedom while satisfying the socially conservative impulse to rein in a destructive industry.   
Altruistic surrogacy can avoid the extremes found in its commercial form, such as material exploitation and inhumane contract terms. However, the fundamental problem of surrogacy remains: a child is conceived in the interest of others; the biological mother is merely a means to an end.  
What we need is not more polarization, but more earnest engagement.   
Technology has always claimed our treasure, but as it increasingly claims our attention also, the need for resistance takes on a spiritual dimension.
In a postmodern and increasingly siloed society that now lacks any universal moral codes or even reference points, it isn’t clear that the value of humanity itself can be successfully defended—at Yale or anywhere else.  
The Founders understood humanity’s inherent corruption and recognized that both civil and religious liberties rest on the common principle of faithfulness to God. If we lose sight of fidelity to God, we risk losing the moral foundation on which our liberties are built.  
The lesson here is as simple as it is profound. The market, meaning the right to quit and get another job on better terms, is the best protection for the worker.
Trauma-informed care promises to reveal and resolve the connection between present aberrant behavior and past mistreatment by others. But its political corollary valorizes victimhood, and its questionable logic has the potential to trap rather than free those who suffer from past wounds.  
What are the ethical issues surrounding government debt? This is a good time to start taking that question seriously.
A friendship begun in 1985, forged in shared Christian faith and encounters with human misery driven by animus toward religion, would become the ground on which a historic legacy would be built.
It is good to oppose communism. It is not good to oppose communism out of support for clerical fascism. 
China’s rise forces scholars and policymakers to confront an uncomfortable reality: that modernity no longer belongs to the West.
American self-government has not benefited from two generations of the Sullivan standard. 
There is something severe in this kind of wisdom, but also merciful. We cannot command that the past return what it has rightfully taken. We cannot bargain with time, or exempt ourselves, or those we love from the common fate of all mankind. We can only determine what shall be made of the days that remain to us. Stat sua cuique dies (“each has his appointed day”) as Jupiter spoke in Virgil’s Aeneid, reflecting on the mortality of mankind. That appointed day comes for each of us; what remains within our power is not to escape the limits of our nature, but to determine how we shall live within them. 
The New Dark Ages, which I hope will be widely read, is a brief, brisk, and persuasive book about the damage our screen life is doing to our social and political life. He puts the matter starkly in his introduction: “As reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.”
AI will make many cognitive techniques obsolete, and preserving them for their own sake would mistake difficulty for formation. Schools and workplaces should instead preserve or rebuild the learning functions that cultivate judgment, prudence, and human agency. 
Theory, though it blazed brightly for a time, was doomed to burn out. It simply could not give a deep account of the human condition and of those things that are most important to being human—e.g., love, altruism, friendship, gratitude—that fully reflect the human experience. 
Americans are fighting over who decides what’s true. Jews once argued for truth itself. Can Jews teach America how to argue yet remain united? 
So long as the pro-life movement is part of the GOP coalition, the attractiveness of the pro-life message is affected by the attractiveness of the GOP. And it’s hard to grow the pro-life tent if the pro-life movement is bound up with a hard-right GOP that is repellent to centrist and center-left voters. 
What modern culture discards as redundant, the ancient poets understood as the foundation of memory, identity, and human connection. 
In his day, Brownson advocated for a “long-term, multi-pronged rediscovery of the true Constitution,” an ordered liberty founded on a balance of unity in diversity based on natural law and the pursuit of the common good. He challenges us to “rediscover the true Constitution.” Now would be an appropriate time to follow his advice.