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mom with three daughters

Seasons of Motherhood and the Power of Flexibility

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Demanding and inflexible views of motherhood miss a central reality of family life: that children are always changing, and therefore, mothers should expect change in their own roles and practices over time as well.

The Conservative Counterculture

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From a scholarly perspective, the Bud Light boycott represents one of the first battles in the adaptation of political conservatives to their continued cultural disadvantage. Conservatives still operate at a disadvantage in academia and entertainment, but they have created an alternative media system that allows them to have a place at the table and an impact on our culture.
Aquinas

Nein: On Barthian Ethics

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Whenever evangelical ethics relies on a Barthian or quasi-Barthian insistence on doing Christian ethics, I suggest we robustly answer, “nein.” Just a simple, “no.”
transgender symbol

It’s Time for American Elites to Rediscover Human Nature: Lessons from United States v. Skrmetti

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SB1 treats all minors equally, in accordance with their sex, and it discriminates against all medical interventions that reject a minor’s sex. To arrive at that conclusion, we must recognize what constitutes natural human development for boys and girls, and accept the underlying premise that human nature exists and demands respect.
United Healthcare

Luigi Mangione’s Apologists Are Undermining the Pursuit of Social Justice

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What will bring about lasting reform in healthcare is not violent political protest but a revolution at the heart of healthcare whereby we rediscover its connection to the common good.
Jordan Peterson

We Who Wrestle with God: On the Border of Things

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Peterson leads us to the door of the Church, but we must take the step our guide is unwilling to take and enter inside. We pray for Peterson to join us, not because we need an ally—the Truth will fend for itself—but because we hope he can embrace the “ridiculously good” gift of grace, cross the border, and become a brother united in Christ.
Constitution

The Ignoble Lie of Revolutionary Progressivism

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The transformation of the original Constitution into the living Constitution is revolutionary, not evolutionary, a bloodless coup deliberately launched by progressive intellectuals bent on undermining the founders’ Constitution.
surrogacy

Behind the New Italian Ban on Surrogacy

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Should children gestated and born in violation of Italian laws be taken from these putative “parents?” Or should Italian sovereignty capitulate, accepting that whatever adults want, and pay for (even other lives), becomes a right? 
English farm

Farmers’ Protests: Solidarity, Romanticism, and Populism

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Those who want to break the grip of a deadening globalist managerialism will need more than anger and romance. What is vitally needed now is creativity—new ways of living and revived traditions that can offer an alternative to a political economy that is failing everyone.
editor/writer desk

The Best of Public Discourse: 2024

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Enjoy a review of our editors’ favorite essays from the year. 

The Christmas World of I John

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Surprised by Christ

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The small surprises and sacrifices of Christmas—the time, resources, and care our loved ones expend in order to place under glowing trees those bright bundles upon which our own names are written—recall the marvel of Christ’s entry into the world in order to sacrifice himself for those he calls by name. This is the unexpected gift that we ought to be surprised by, over and over, every Christmas—indeed, every morning.
university campus

Residential Undergraduate Education and the Great Abbreviation

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Residential undergraduate matriculation may not be worth what is being charged for it now, but if it continues to atrophy and lose its comparative advantages, it may become worth nothing at all.
Karl Marx

What Can the Right Learn from Karl Marx?

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MacIntyre urges a recovery of the Aristotelian tradition to show modernity the way out of its aporia on moral questions: the fact that “there is in our society no established way of deciding between” the rival moral first principles we’ve lost our comprehension of and are polarized over.
drug use

The False Promises of Drugs: Joseph Ratzinger on True Human Excellence

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The problem with drug use is not just its grave danger to our bodily and psychological well-being, nor that it constitutes a radical assertion of self-will, but that it is a flight from the adventure of the moral life
Christmas carolers

Keep Satan in Christmas

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The experience of hearing and singing and sharing these familiar carols year after year is like the best experience of liturgy, in its combination of familiarity and fresh moments of discovery, when universally known words that have for years rolled across one’s lips in rote repetition suddenly blaze forth with meaning, vividly and achingly true.
Pregnancy ultrasound

Embryo Screening and the New Eugenics

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Genetic screening of embryos allows prospective parents to select embryos for IVF based on the absence of disease and disability as well as the possession of desirable traits. Human life, however, ought to be received graciously rather than rejected or accepted based on our preferences or risk appetite.
Israel

Kafka and Counterterrorism

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While the enemies of the Jews are impenetrable to reason, the murderous among them can be defanged, and their useful idiots isolated as cranks and bigots. A policy that does so successfully is indispensable for the surest guarantor of Jewish life since the Lord Himself fought the battles of Ancient Israel.
death, mortality, cemetary

Houellebecq at the End

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The sadness of Michel Houellebecq lies in the accuracy of his diagnosis and the failure of his prescription. He sees that death is the last enemy, but not that it might be destroyed.
reading

The 2024 Public Discourse Book List

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Our editorial team’s roundup of reads from a year of enrichment, enchantment, and entertainment
father

To Be a Man

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What does it mean to be a man in this confused time, especially if you deny, as I do, virtues applicable only to men, and which, supposedly, allow us to crack the code and know what it means to be a man? I don’t think it’s that special, actually, and I certainly don’t think it is recognizable only in some stereotypically masculine form.
J. D. Vance

The Political Potential of Postliberalism

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Even if Catholic postliberalism is no longer the intellectual avant-garde, populism is poised to shape the next few years of American politics.
Advent

Awaiting the Second Advent

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Christmas hope is grounded both in the reality of Christ’s first advent and also in the reality that he will come again to fully establish the peace his princely rule has promised. This is one of the great paradoxes of the faith: Christ has come, and he is coming. The kingdom has arrived, yet we pray “Thy kingdom come.”
Annunciation

The “Magnificat Gift” of Advent

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Offered daily through the liturgical prayer of the Church, the Magnificat invites every Christian, through Jesus, to see the Holy Spirit in the rare expression of the woman from whose flesh our Savior took his own. The Magnificat is Mary in her own words. It inspires study and imitation of the scriptures by presenting Mary as a gift and invitation, a mother of prayer and listening for all.