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Happy young people hanging out

Don’t Worry. Be Conservative.

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The war on spiritual poverty is worth fighting, and we need foot soldiers and generals who are willing to wage it. 
AI
  • AI

Is AI Taking Over the “Religion of the Book”? 

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An AI does not only “remember” all the words. But as any ChatGPT user can testify, it finds connections between different sources, summarizes them, generates challenging questions, and even deduces new insights. It can therefore seem as though these machines are well-versed in almost any topic.  
Oxford

Anscombe’s First Lectures at Oxford

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Despite Anscombe’s oft-repeated claim that she got everything she knew at this point from Wittgenstein, in these lectures Anscombe is not simply repeating Wittgenstein, but is in fact going beyond Wittgenstein in a number of ways.
Lord of the Rings

Magnifica Humanitas and Gandalf’s Cheerful Courage 

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It is in the martyrs, both those who have shed their blood for God but also those martyrs of “everyday life,” the martyrs of charity, that we most clearly behold the splendor and magnificence of humanity.
SC in England
  • Law

Time Immemorial  

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The stubborn persistence of time immemorial in a time when it should, by rights, long ago have ceased to be in constitutional law, tells us something crucial about what binds a community to its law. We should listen. 
college rally

The Real Campus Speech Crisis Isn’t Censorship—It’s Dogma 

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At a moment when Americans can barely speak across political lines, we are graduating a generation that never learned how. That is not a campus problem. It is a democratic emergency. 
American slavery

Who Will Fight for “Evil”?  

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old books

The Bookshelf: When Words Are Deeds 

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The nation’s semiquincentennial, which we marked on July 4, was the occasion for a number of new books about the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. I’m sure I’ll get around to reading some of those in future—if they’re good, they’re durable—but lately I’ve been revisiting some older works on the subject that still hold up. I’ll get to those in a moment, but first I want to consider what we have been celebrating this year. 
Notre Dame

The Lamp that Burns Forever 

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Let us cherish our sacred buildings cast in stone. Without them, we are cut adrift from all that we live and long for.
Adam and Eve

The Serpent in the Garden: Artificial Intelligence and the Need for Assayers 

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How can AI be used wisely, maximizing its benefits while minimizing its risks?  
conservatism

Walking Alongside History 

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What Buckley got wrong about conservatism 
China

Morality as Strategy in the West’s Approach to China   

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To help China find its true calling in the world, the West cannot rely solely on material power; it must also recommit itself to its traditional moral principles. 
Gordon Wood

An Intellectual Feast: Reflections on the Death of Gordon Wood 

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Though America’s ideals were riddled with ironies and inconsistencies, the nation still emerged as a global beacon of ordered liberty and republican democracy. No one better explained the history and significance of that American nation than Gordon Wood. 
the unvierse

Human Dignity without Metaphysics? 

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A culture that continually invokes dignity while refusing to discuss its foundations may discover that the concept gradually loses its internal coherence. If man possesses a unique and inviolable worth, then reality itself must contain some explanation for that fact. 
people talking to each other

No Less a Talking Sheep 

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If reason and speech are constitutive of who are, it would not be surprising that less talking with one another would have to do with the dumbing down of ourselves, even a diminished humanity.
child wrapped in gay pride flag

Eleven Years After Obergefell, Who Will Speak for the Children? 

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The work, eleven years in, begins with honesty; the admission that Obergefell was not a neutral expansion of rights but a substitution of one set of duties for another, and that the duties it displaced were owed chiefly to children
old texts

A Tribute to Robert L. Wilken and His Books  

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I praise God for Robert Louis Wilken, not only for the books that he authored and for the many hundreds of books that he donated to my school’s library, but for the witness of his life. May he now see the face of God he sought. 
America250

America’s Two Constitutions  

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Reflections on the nature of the American experiment in ordered liberty 
In the Land of Promise, Castle Garden

Immigration and the Declaration at 250  

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It is in accepting the poor and the wretched refuse that the greatness and promise of America are to be found.
First Amendment

Recovering the First Amendment—and a Fuller Conception of Rights and Human Nature 

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We should dedicate part of our political efforts over the next twenty-five years to restoring the original understanding of the freedom of the press in American culture and constitutional law. 
Bioethics

Bioethics at America250 

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There is no guarantee that the bioethics of our future will live up to America’s founding promises and insights. Those of us concerned that such a bioethics should exist must, as Lincoln said in honoring the dead of Gettysburg, “be dedicated to the unfinished work” of creating, sustaining, and defending that bioethics. It will be no small task, but I hope to have given some sense of what the shape of that task must be. 
declaration of independence

Are These Truths Really Self-Evident? A Q&A with Rémi Brague 

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Perhaps something in the American tradition could help us Europeans out of the lurch: the ability to change, to realize what had been wrongly done and understand that they urgently have to undo it.
womens march DC

American Apostasy at 250 

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Two hundred and fifty years since our nation’s founding, the public conscience has begun to replace its fidelity to inalienable rights and religious freedom with a state-enforced commitment to radical human autonomy.
Harvey Mansfield

Teaching and the Effectual Truth

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Professor Mansfield is a teacher whose commitments to rigor, to plucky and puckish truthfulness, to political philosophy, and to Harvard University have become suitably legendary. And his effectual truth includes generations of students whose ways of thinking and indeed ways of living he has influenced.