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Public Discourse

A Lesson for Aspiring Academics: On Alice von Hildebrand’s Happy Failure

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In her memoirs of teaching at Hunter College for nearly forty years, Alice von Hildebrand shows aspiring academics the importance of perseverance, courage, and love in the face of hostility toward one’s moral and religious views.
Public Discourse

Due Process and the Logic of the Law: A Response to Hadley Arkes

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To properly understand due process, we must grasp the key distinctions between law and decrees and between law and morality. If judges are authoritative arbiters of the “logic of morals,” we have subjected ourselves to an unelected, life-tenured legal elite whose reach exceeds our grasp.
Public Discourse

Rending the Rainbow Veil: How to Make Your Church a Safe Space for Christians with Same-Sex Attraction

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Church communities should strive to be safe spaces where those with same-sex attraction can take refuge, openly sharing their experiences. We must affirm their dignity as children of God and lovingly refuse to encourage any behavior that is contrary to their good.
Public Discourse

Lessons from Vincent Van Gogh: Celebrity Culture and the Rights of Domestic Workers

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Our treasured religious beliefs tell us time and time again to care for the poor and the destitute and to love the strangers among us. We know that domestic workers and underprivileged laborers deserve our care and attention, but in our celebrity-suffused culture, we often forget this truth.
Public Discourse

Birth Certificates, Fatherhood, and Same-Sex Marriage: Sotomayor v. Sotomayor

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Which Justice Sotomayor will show up in the next landmark family-law case: the Sotomayor who affirms the “precious” rights and duties of biological parents? Or the Sotomayor who insists on full "marriage equality"?
Public Discourse

Recovering Lincoln’s Teaching on the Limits to the Courts–and Giving the News to David Blankenhorn

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History clearly demonstrates that the legislative branch can legitimately act to counter the rulings of the judicial branch. This is as true for marriage as it was for slavery.
Public Discourse

Why Christians Shouldn’t Be Zionists

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God has not left behind Israel and its land—he has expanded them.
Public Discourse

Attention, Low-Income Women of Oregon: Your Reproduction Is Now the Government’s Business

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Oregon’s implementation of its new contraceptive metric is an alarming sign that nationwide governmental monitoring of America’s low-income women’s reproduction is on its way—along with flagrant disregard for women’s privacy and religious freedom.
Public Discourse

More Than We Wish to Know: Chen Guangcheng and the Truth about Chinese Human Rights Abuses

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We hear endlessly of “change” and “reform” in China, and the United States has premised its policies on these promises. The memoirs of Chen Guangcheng paint a very different portrait.
Public Discourse

Michel Houellebecq and the Islamist Future of Europe

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A best-selling new novel taps into an angst that has become an obsession in Europe.
Public Discourse

Diversity in the Christian University

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Within a Christian university, the legitimate goods of diversity must be balanced against a notion of unity, an idea of the particular “constitution” of a place—its heritage, its tradition, and the constituency it serves.
Public Discourse

Fresh Theological Arguments for Zionism

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Two new proposals, one by a leading Jewish theologian and the other by a group of Christian thinkers, provide fresh arguments for theological understandings of Israel.
Public Discourse

Faith and Fragile Families

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Two teenage alcoholics were about to split but, by the grace of God, hung on. The result: a sanctifying, generous, and gracious marriage with fifteen children and countless important lessons.
Public Discourse

The Case for Private Property: A (New) Natural Law Analysis

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At a time when debates about economic inequality occupy significant attention in the public square, Adam MacLeod offers a fresh way forward for thinking about private property and its contribution to the common good by rooting property rights in a robust account of freedom and human flourishing.
Public Discourse

Criminalizing Scientific Controversy: Climate Change, Galileo, and Our Modern Inquisition

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The proposed federal investigation into those who question man-made climate change is more dangerous to science than the Inquisition.
Public Discourse

Jews, Marriage, and Religious Freedom

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The same traits and tendencies that make Orthodox Jews appear uninvolved in political battles have also helped them preserve the belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.
Public Discourse

Commercial Surrogacy: Stop It or Just Regulate It?

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When motherhood becomes a mere avenue to a paycheck, both the woman and the child she carries are wronged. Surrogacy undermines the dignity of both women and children.
Public Discourse

Mind the Gap: Neuroscience, Transhumanism, and Human Nature

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Before we rush to embrace transhumanism, it is crucial to ask what it means to be human.
Public Discourse

The HHS Mandate: The Legal Argument that Should Prevail at the Supreme Court

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The Eighth Circuit Court has created the opportunity for religious freedom to win again in the Supreme Court. But it is Judge Daniel Manion of the Seventh Circuit Court who supplies the arguments that should triumph, for everyone’s freedom.
Public Discourse

Celebrating the Remarkable Intellectual Achievements of John Finnis

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A superb collection of essays engages, challenges, and praises the work of the formidable John Finnis. Always acute in mental power, Finnis is also at turns witty and profound.
Public Discourse

Ultrasounds and Ultimate Moral Choices

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By pointing out the ways in which prenatal ultrasound alters our fundamental familial relationships, philosopher Peter-Paul Verbeek makes us more aware of its moral effects.
Public Discourse

To Whom Do Children Belong? A Defense of Parental Authority

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Parents have unique authority over their children because they bear non-transferable obligations toward their children. The state must respect the right of parents to fulfill their duties toward their children. The second in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

To Whom Do Children Belong? How Same-Sex Marriage Threatens Parental Rights

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Same-sex marriage further encourages the state to encroach on the domain of that indispensable pre-political community, the family. The first in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Defining Diversity

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Administrators and faculty are quick to appeal to and develop programs around “diversity.” But what is diversity? It is neither a virtue, nor a basic good, nor even a generally positive descriptor. The commitment to diversity at many universities requires more scrutiny than it is typically given.