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Public Discourse

What We Don’t Know Just Might Kill You

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The fertility industry has absolutely no interest in doing the studies and the research that are needed to protect women.
Public Discourse

Eight Hundred Years of Prayer: Lawyers, Faith, and the Common Good

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It isn’t too late for America’s noble experiment to succeed. But that depends on the courage and commitment of American people of faith. Adapted from a homily delivered on January 15, 2015, at the Red Mass of the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska.
Public Discourse

Challenging Unjust Laws Takes Prudence, Courage, and Common Sense

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In the real world, human goods are often in conflict with one another. This reality forces us to make difficult choices and trade-offs that cannot be eliminated or adjudicated by following simple rules.
Public Discourse

Resist or Accommodate Evil: There is No “Third Way”

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When conscience flirts with the idea of accommodating an unjust law, it must politely, yet firmly, reject the sirens of seduction.
Public Discourse

Here Come the Irish: Notre Dame Marches for Life

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The March for Life, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, is the largest annual civil rights event in the world. As long as it continues, the University of Notre Dame will be there.
Public Discourse

Complementarity: Lessons from Little House in the Big Woods

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The family is only whole and safe when it is founded on the complementarity of masculine and feminine.
Public Discourse

Protecting the Vulnerable: Why We Must Fight for the Inviolability of Life

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A new book clearly examines and answers the most important questions surrounding medical law and ethics, especially in the realm of end-of-life issues.
Public Discourse

Sex Education in America: How Yesterday’s Extremists Shaped Today’s Sex Ed

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In order to influence the future of sex education, we must have a nuanced understanding of its colorful past.
Public Discourse

Reconsidering Locke and the Origins of Modernity

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In a new book, Steven Forde offers a compelling portrait of a “non-Lockean” Locke who is neither morally corrosive nor oblivious to the tension between individual rights and the common good and whose philosophy develops in response to the new empirical science that shattered the classical and medieval worldviews.
Public Discourse

Charlie Hebdo, Intolerance, and the Problem of Double Standards

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The terrible massacre in Paris could be a “teachable” moment on the meaning of tolerance, but it will require soul searching by America’s cultural leftists.
Public Discourse

Bureaucratic Bloat in Higher Education: Getting Rid of the Middle Men

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When college administrators fancy themselves businessmen selling “information delivery systems,” students suffer.
Public Discourse

Teach Your Children: Assisted Suicide and My Family

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No one wants pain. But the debate about assisted suicide is not just about those who are terminally ill and in pain. It is about all of us. By voting for assisted suicide, we are implicated in an intrinsically immoral act.
Public Discourse

Stephen Colbert Meets His Maker

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The most prominent Catholic character on television consistently employed religious themes and theological motifs on his award-winning TV show—never more glaringly so than in the series’ grand finale
Public Discourse

The Mission Creep of Dignity

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Dignity, rightly understood, has less to do with autonomy or independence than with intrinsic worth and the ability to flourish.
Public Discourse

Charlie Hebdo and #MuslimApologies

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In the wake of Islamist attacks, non-Muslims express concern and confusion not because they are indifferent, but because they are afraid. They want to understand. Muslims have an opportunity to embrace this opportunity for understanding.
Public Discourse

Women, the Pill, and the Sexual Revolution

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Jonathan Eig’s new book tells the story of the invention and popularization of the contraceptive pill. A pleasant, biographically-inflected history, the book repeats standard post-sexual revolution rhetoric, untroubled by too much complexity.
Public Discourse

The Real War on Science

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The evisceration of its epistemology constitutes the real war on science.
Public Discourse

The Mario That Might Have Been

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With his intelligence and his oratorical gifts, Mario Cuomo could have been the true champion of the little guy—the littlest of all—if he had kept the Democratic Party from becoming captive to the abortion interest.
Public Discourse

Flirting with Death

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Did New Jersey’s Assembly approve an assisted suicide bill without understanding it? The bill is bad public policy, shot through with dangerous loopholes and contradictions that threaten to push many vulnerable citizens of New Jersey toward death.
Public Discourse

Joyous Surrender: A Rhapsody in Red (and Green)

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Christmas isn’t tasteful, isn’t simple, isn’t clean, isn’t elegant. Give me the tacky and the exuberant and the wild, to represent the impossibly boisterous fact that God has intruded in this world.
Public Discourse

Christianity and American Political Thought

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A new book examines the philosophical and religious roots of American government. Amid scholarly disagreement, one thing is clear: America is a nation founded upon the truth of human freedom and equality—whether one arrives at this truth by way of Calvin or Locke.
Public Discourse

Gay Weddings and the Shopkeeper’s Dilemma

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One option for pro-marriage business owners: obey the law and serve gay weddings, but make it known publicly that you believe that the law forcing you to do this is unjust, needs to be changed, and is obeyed only out of your respect for law and the democratic process.
Public Discourse

Leo Strauss and American Conservatism

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Contrary to popular belief, Leo Strauss was not a conservative, let alone a neoconservative. Yet Strauss and conservatism share an important aim: challenging the dogmatic dismissal of the past as irrelevant to our flourishing in the present.
Public Discourse

Catholic Higher Education in Ruins

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The dream of a sex-positive socialist Catholicism based on Marx and liberation theology tells kids to stop complaining when they suffer the consequences of adults’ sexual selfishness. Sexual radicalism and extreme pro-LGBT advocacy have no positive role to play in Catholic higher education.