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Public Discourse

Blind Resentment

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The struggle against Catholicism in today’s culture is not particularly about religion. It is a revolt against reason and reality. Many have internalized such resentment that they are unable to see truth.
Public Discourse

Why Liberty Isn’t Enough

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It’s important to talk about liberty, but not in isolation. Our language should reflect the truth that reason, justice, equality, and virtue make freedom possible.
Public Discourse

The Culture of Dishonesty: Abortion, Divorce, and Obamacare

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Americans’ acceptance of President Obama’s lies reveals how dangerously comfortable we have become with dishonesty. It will take a profound renovation of our culture to restore truthfulness to its proper place and establish political freedom on a more secure foundation.
Public Discourse

Republicans for (Career and Family) Choice

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Republicans should not try to tell women what they or their families need. The best way to defuse the work-family problem is by sympathetically acknowledging its reality and promising women that they will work to open a wider variety of educational and professional alternatives for them.
Public Discourse

Conservatives and Women

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Contemporary politicians are in a delicate position. If they don’t seem properly sympathetic to the challenges American women face, they are blamed for them. Yet there is no neat solution to these competing demands. The first in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

A Rational Defense of the Humanities

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If all literature is essentially bound by its historical period, then studying the “great books” of Western civilization has little value. But if there are certain eternal questions that are essential to human existence, such a study is invaluable.
Public Discourse

Confusions About Totipotency: Stem Cells Are Not Embryos

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The ability to both produce all cell types and to organize them into a coherent body plan is the defining feature of a human organism. All stem cells lack essential elements supplied by the egg cell and cannot develop into a fetus.
Public Discourse

Dorothy, We’re Not in Kansas Any More

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Legislative battles are heating up across the United States on the issues of surrogacy contracts and the regulation of assisted reproduction. If we are truly concerned for the welfare of women and children, we must oppose such practices.
Public Discourse

What’s at Stake at the Bakery: How Property Rights Got Sexy

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State lawmakers should make it clear that religious and moral reasons are rational and legitimate, and that property owners may act or refrain from action in obedience to conscience.
Public Discourse

Gender, Discrimination, and Marriage

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In the name of equality, same-sex marriage seeks to codify gender discrimination. But marriage welcomes everyone: husband and wife, father and mother, grandfather and grandmother.
Public Discourse

The Evidence for Virtue: Social Science, Natural Law, and Human Flourishing

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Christians have nothing to fear and everything to gain from good social science. It provides a way to talk normatively about human flourishing in terms that are intelligible, legitimate, and persuasive to those outside the community of faith.
Public Discourse

The Rich Get Married, the Poor Get Poorer

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The Canadian dialogue on marriage and economic prosperity lags behind the American conversation, but a new report aims to change that.
Public Discourse

The Limits of Life: Biology and the Philosophy of Nature

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Biology continues to offer us new and exciting insights into the world. These insights need to be integrated into a philosophical perspective that is richer than the reductive materialism that is often linked with the empirical sciences. In this endeavor, biology needs the philosophy of nature.
Public Discourse

Piety, Justice, and Animals: A Response to Charles Camosy

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Both natural law thought and the Catechism agree: animals are not part of the same justice community as human beings, because they do not possess the dignity that comes from existing as a rational being.
Public Discourse

What We Owe Animals: A Response to Christopher Tollefsen

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Animals are not simply “a gift for human beings.” The needless cruelty inflicted on animals by factory farming not only violates a duty to provide them just treatment, but far outweighs the goods that humans gain by eating such meat.
Public Discourse

Nameless Beauty: Conservatism’s Architecture Problem

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The enduring values in which conservatives believe—beauty among them—are more multifaceted and surprising than we sometimes give them credit for. Beauty does not always follow rules, and it is often found in unexpected places and patterns.
Public Discourse

The Rights of Children: Biology Matters

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Every child has a right to be loved by his or her biological parents. Third-party reproduction violates this right by intentionally conceiving a child in a way that will alienate that child from at least one of her biological parents.
Public Discourse

Time for a Return of Fusionism

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Conservatives and libertarians must rediscover the things that bind them together. A return to Frank Meyer’s philosophy of “fusionism” could provide a roadmap to unity.
Public Discourse

Governor Sandoval Takes A Dive In The Nevada Same-Sex Marriage Case

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Nevada’s governor and attorney general have engaged in a cynical political ploy to undermine a decision by the people of Nevada to retain a sound understanding of marriage.
Public Discourse

Politics, Art, and Love: A Lesson from Dante

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Valentine’s Day is usually associated with romance, but love matters in politics, too. In working to change our culture, we must remember that our opponents, like our allies, are human beings whose individual conversions can only be wrought through a combination of love, truth, and free will.
Public Discourse

Community, Contemplation, and Computers: The Role of Technology in Education

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In order to lead students to wisdom, schools must be prepared to integrate technology in the classroom with moderation when it helps to facilitate real, authentic engagement, and they must be willing to set it aside when it pulls students away from such engagement.
Public Discourse

Edmund Burke, Radical

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Thomas Paine’s rationalistic emphasis on freedom, equality, and rights form the basis of our political discourse. Even so, Edmund Burke has something essential to teach us: the way we order our society will always be the consequence, first and foremost, of the way we love.
Public Discourse

Why Easy Stem Cells Raise Hard Ethical Questions

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A surprising new method for making stem cells offers scientists an easy alternative to destroying human embryos. But there is a disturbing possibility that the technique may create not stem cells but actual cloned embryos.
Public Discourse

On Abortion Rates: Good News and Cause for Reflection

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American abortion rates are falling significantly. Although the Guttmacher Institute tries to hide the chief causes of this trend, cutting through the spin reveals that pro-life laws and attitudes help reduce the abortion rate and the abortion ratio.