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Public Discourse

The Single Life: Where Do We Go From Here?

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Conservatives need to face the fact that a significant contingent of women will remain single. We need to start addressing what it means to live as a single, religious, educated woman in our society.
Public Discourse

“Be Fruitful and Multiply”: The Imperative of Creativity in Art and Religion

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Painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s vision of creativity reflects the theological concept that man is made in the image of God.
Public Discourse

Religious Freedom and the American Settlement

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Steven Smith’s new book implies that it is still possible—though difficult—to recover what made the U.S. a land of free and flourishing belief.
Public Discourse

Against Scientism

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Steven Pinker understands the limits of scientific knowledge no better than the fundamentalist understands the limits of biblical knowledge.
Public Discourse

Philosophy and Morality in Public Discourse

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If we want to move public discourse in the right direction, we should rely on the many assumptions we share with most of our contemporaries.
Public Discourse

Crowdfunding, Selfies, and Mommy Blogs: Finding Community in the Internet Age

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It’s common to worry that the internet is isolating us. But could it also be helping to create new forms of community?
Public Discourse

American Hope: Don’t Conflate Political Culture and Christianity

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If we have to make proof of Christian faith dependent on a willful attitude about politics in order to wage the culture wars, are they really worth fighting?
Public Discourse

How Good Intentions Make Bad Art: Christian Reviewers and Aronofksy’s “Noah”

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Good art helps us see reality how it is. Thus, the artist must attend to what is, looking at the world as carefully and deeply as possible—even the parts that make him uncomfortable.
Public Discourse

Where Is the Virtue?

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Our culture has become soft. We suppose that sex is too trivial to require virtue, yet we also believe it is so significant that to suggest any restraint upon its consensual exercise is an affront to the most important fount of human dignity.
Public Discourse

In Defense of the Innocent

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Although Nigel Biggar’s new book on just war has many strengths, the author gets himself into a moral muddle over the question whether the deaths of innocent non-combatants can be deliberately chosen in war.
Public Discourse

Abortifacients, Emergency Contraception, and Terminating Pregnancy

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If there is any plausible reason to believe that emergency contraceptives cause—even occasionally—the death of embryo, then they are morally equivalent to abortifacients.
Public Discourse

Conscience and the Moral Status of the Fetus

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The American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists claims that mothers and doctors have a moral obligation to take care of fetuses—unless they want to terminate them.
Public Discourse

Just Money

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If a society regards governmental manipulation of money as the antidote to economic challenges, a type of poison will work its way through the body politic, undermining justice and the common good.
Public Discourse

Lady Edith and Pregnancy Dilemmas

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For many men and women, the multi-faceted realities of pregnancy pose complex questions about moral responsibility that defy rigid characterizations.
Public Discourse

An Anxious Author: Hope and the Spirit of Joseph Bottum

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Why bother with American culture? Bottum recommends despair.
Public Discourse

Timeless Beauty: Conservatism’s Modernist Problem

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Conservatives who reject modern architecture have reasons to do so. Traditional architecture is predicated on the ideal of beauty as an objective reality, while modernism exalts subjective preferences.
Public Discourse

What Can a Modern Philosopher Teach Us About Natural Law?

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As a philosopher, Locke was both historically great and uniquely ambivalent. This combination provides extraordinarily fertile ground for uniting modern and pre-modern insights that seem opposed.
Public Discourse

Aristotelian-Thomism in the Modern World

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Our modern intellectual context is profoundly at odds with genuine Aristotelian-Thomism. If we want to infuse the public discourse with sound philosophy, we must soberly recognize the obstacles before us and confront them in the spirit of devotion to truth. The first of a two part series.
Public Discourse

“Is This the Upshot of Your Experiment?” Hawthorne and Bioethics

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By revealing the agonizing human cost of scientific obsession, Hawthorne reminds his reader that potential good must never override basic consideration of one’s fellow man.
Public Discourse

Covetous Envy: The Forgotten Deadly Sin

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Modern rhetoric of income inequality is driven by covetous envy that betrays America’s tradition of applauding those who succeed. Caritas, humility, gratitude, and goodwill toward others are a healthy society’s answer to the ancient curses of envy and pride.
Public Discourse

If a Company Can Be African American, Can’t It Be Religious?

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A business owner brings his values and his entire self—his faith no less than his race—to his daily work. The government shouldn’t force him to violate his conscience.
Public Discourse

We Are Not Just Our DNA: The Ethical Dangers of Three-Parent Embryos

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The creation of three-parent embryos is not an innocuous medical treatment—it is a macabre form of eugenic human cloning.
Public Discourse

Stanford, Marriage and Abortion Controversies, and the Mission of a University

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Trying to silence others because one fears what they might say is no way to learn. And it is no way for a university to be a university.
Public Discourse

Declaration Man: How Justice Clarence Thomas Earned His Enemies

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For Justice Clarence Thomas, the foundation of all our law lies in the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, beginning with human equality.