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The Euthanasia of Ivan Ilyich: Recovering Good Lives and Deaths in the Age of Assisted Dying

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The direction of our culture is increasingly toward “death pods” where we will die alone, because we, like Ivan, have refused to really live together. Resisting such a culture of solitary and uncared for assisted dying will take legislation, but it will also require that we spend some time with Ilyich and try to recover the goodness of a good life and of a good death. S

Forgetfulness, Forgiveness, and Politics: The Case of Congress

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Congress has declined into a destructive cycle of revenge. To preserve the institution and strengthen our politics, politicians must take the risk to forgive.

Forming a Cultural Mind

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If you want a guide for revitalizing Western academia and culture, read Joseph Stuart’s masterly introduction to the thought of Christopher Dawson.

What Does It Mean to Be a Woman? An Interview with Dr. Abigail Favale on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex

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Feminism is a very fractious world. There’s a lot of different visions of what’s wrong and how we fix it. But all of the modern strands can trace their roots back to The Second Sex.

In Defense of Christian Civilization

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In announcing Christianity’s incompatibility with civilization, Kingsnorth implicitly claims to have noticed a vital truth of the faith that was somehow overlooked by most of the great teachers of Christianity for most of Christian history. This is a rather dubious proposition.

Harmonizing Heaven and Earth: A Response to Kingsnorth’s “Against Christian Civilization”

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The answer to the fear of Babylon, then—Kingsnorth’s “civilizational Christianity”—is not to relinquish the fields where civilization is made in order to pursue a purer form of Christian service. The answer is rather to seek the Kingdom first with such clarity of intention that every domain of human making can assume its rightful share in Christ’s offering of himself and all created things to his Father.

Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious

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Once you concede that the universe might be a bit more than just a collision of atoms doing meaningless expansions and contractions, you are not standing alone next to an enigmatic aurochs, staring with bafflement into its inhuman eyes. No, you are standing in the same place that generations of human beings have found themselves before: at the beginning of a journey, a quest, a pilgrim’s progress, that you have good reason to believe is going somewhere quite important, somewhere of ultimate significance.

Medical Conservatism Is the Antidote to MAHA

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When the next opportunity arrives, it should be used as a chance to demonstrate that Kennedy promises the same outcomes as the existing regime, just with different medicine. And if we want to finally cure ourselves of our failing model of health and wellness, we should start with a dose of medical conservatism.

Why the Founders Chose the Electoral College Design

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The Founders feared tyrannies, especially majority tyrannies. We remain free not because of the Bill of Rights, but because of the dynamic checks and balances in our national and state constitutions. 

Jordan Peterson and the Problem of God

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Peterson is not looking to illuminate the pages of the Bible per se. He seems interested in the Bible only insofar as the stories it contains connect with other mythical or symbolic stories throughout human history, and support his main thesis: that each individual should aim at that which is highest and organize life (and by extension, society) accordingly.

Critiquing Hadley Arkes’s Not-So-Mere Natural Law Theory

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Law necessarily has a moral foundation. Exploring that foundation can help us understand what law can and should be. The project of finding anchoring truths is well worth undertaking, and the natural law tradition has something to contribute to that.
mother and baby

Making Sense of America’s Maternal Mortality Crisis

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Pro-life state laws both pre- and post-Dobbs prevent the intentional killing of preborn human beings, not essential obstetric care such as the treatment of pregnancy complications before, during, and after childbirth. Any misunderstandings to the contrary on the part of physicians probably stem from rampant misinformation about abortion laws.
religious freedom in the US

Religion, State Law, and the Common Good

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How can government and religion properly work together to promote the common good?
family

What Is the Economic Impact of Low Birth Rates? A Q&A with Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

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Everyone can have their own beliefs about the ethical principles of human fertility. From a pure accounting perspective, however, the problem is people are not getting married. So, making IVF cheaper, for example, is not solving that issue.

The Civics Playbook

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A lot of people will no doubt want to know about the political direction of the new civics centers, and there is no hiding that they are inspired by conservative intellectual sensibilities. But to think that there is any sort of partisan agenda set from above misses the point of these schools entirely.
Supreme Court

Saving Religion from Incoherence

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It is past time to restore some semblance of order to the law of religion.
Venus de Medici

Written in Water: A Look inside the Currents of Art History 

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What makes the popularity of a work of art wax and wane is one of the most intriguing questions in the history of aesthetic preferences.
3d ultrasound

What President Trump Is Doing (And Should Do) about Abortion

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Using only his executive authority as president, what actions could Trump take to respect the lives of unborn children?
university

The Bookshelf: The Academy in Crisis

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How can the academy recover its vocation, its true identity as a center of humane inquiry?
Orthodox church

The “Finest in Disorganized Religion?” Orthodox Christianity Endures

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While Orthodoxy’s “multipolar” context arguably can foster temporary frictions, across centuries it has also lent itself to an oddly flexible resilience, not always easily legible to Western perspectives.
Cross ontop of a keyboard

Emerging Tech and Religious Freedom

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As lawmakers across the country increase their scrutiny of emerging technologies, tech-savvy religious organizations will have to navigate an increasingly contested boundary line between the requirements of law and the demands of faith.
angels

On Angels, Demons, and Artificial Intelligence

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In order to understand and evaluate claims about artificial intelligence, we need a satisfying theory of mind that can account both for the intelligent capacities of human beings and those of actual and possible beings that are significantly unlike us. 
Cross on a hill

Tracing the Work of Redemption throughout History

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McDermott’s central claim is surely right. In everything and in every place, God is providentially at work to effect redemption. If engaging with his work can foster this awareness in us as readers, then that is precisely a “dimensional difference” that will be all to the good, raising to greater consciousness the wonder and beauty of God’s work.
Cardinal Newman

John Henry Newman, Ida Görres, and the Power of Hagiography: An Interview with Jennifer Bryson

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The book’s importance goes beyond the perennial value of Newman; Görres penetrates deeply into the heart of Newman’s character and life. In doing so, she reveals what made him holy, and holiness is of perennial value.
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