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Annunciation

The “Magnificat Gift” of Advent

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Offered daily through the liturgical prayer of the Church, the Magnificat invites every Christian, through Jesus, to see the Holy Spirit in the rare expression of the woman from whose flesh our Savior took his own. The Magnificat is Mary in her own words. It inspires study and imitation of the scriptures by presenting Mary as a gift and invitation, a mother of prayer and listening for all.
Washington Monument

Gratitude in an Angry Time

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Those of us who think the stakes in our cultural conflicts are high, whichever side of those conflicts we are on, frequently find ourselves furious. But what are we angry about? Our responses to that question have to do not just with the latest news, but with deeper intuitions about the nature of the human person and its relation to the moral life of our society.
On Thanksgiving

On Thanksgiving

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Again we keep Thanksgiving Day; again we have the chance to become grateful, and not just for this single day. Again we are able to hold those we love, to feast in body and soul, and to become attuned to the freshness deep down in all things.
Jewish temple in the US

A New Alliance Between Christians and Jews

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Reviving a public Christianity in those parts of the country that are not yet entirely lost is the only plausible alternative to America’s continued decay into a brutal neo-Marxist tyranny. Jews who wish to avoid this calamity should seek an alliance with nationalist and conservative Protestants and Catholics.
Catholic church in America

American Catholics (and Others) after the Election

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Catholics can nurture their own friendships with serious adherents of other denominations and faiths. We can collaborate on projects to improve our neighborhoods and broader society. We can learn from each other in dealing with the many challenges of running a godly household today, from the sublime to the mundane. Wherever possible, and to the extent that our respective traditions permit, we can pray together to our common Father—for His blessings on our country, at least.
Protestant church in America

Protestant Futures and Friendships

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The challenges Protestants face are serious. But if we have the humility to learn from others, we will find that there are models and resources readily available to help us think through how we might respond to our cultural moment.
wokeness

Have We Never Been Woke?

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Al-Gharbi argues that the central social function of wokeness is not the pursuit of social equality, but the empowerment of the professional class and its own defense of inequality.
Utah farmland

The Online Staying Power of a “Ballerina Farm”

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Neeleman is not just any influencer; she has emerged as a sort of avatar in America’s cultural battles. The subheading of the Times profile asks whether she represents an “empowering new model for womanhood” or a “hammer blow for feminism.” The author, Megan Agnew, strongly suggests the latter.

Polygenic Embryo Screening: Following the Logic of IVF

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Even the most extensive attempt to shape “what we will get” will always fail to eliminate the contingency, particularity, and irreducibility of the person, whose concrete individuality will likewise always transcend whatever power we attempt to exercise over it.
Prison

No Porches in Prison: God, Civility, and Redemption

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Civility is an important but secondary virtue. It cannot sustain itself. We can find hope for a healthier culture in a rather surprising place. 
Trump

What Does Another Trump Presidency Mean for the Pro-Life Movement?

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Trump's reelection provides reason for pro-lifers to be cautiously relieved, though still apprehensive.
young adults

Why Do Today’s Emerging Adults Need a Playbook? A Q&A with Anna Moreland

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With respect to love, the loneliness epidemic is real. And that affects not just romantic relationships, but friendships as well. At the end of the day, life is a gift, and the center of life is who you love. That doesn’t start happening when you’re in your mid-thirties. It starts happening now
church

A Surprising Generational Rift in the Christian Reformed Church

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In their denominations and elsewhere in the church, some progressive Baby Boomers have been caught by surprise at younger people not sharing their cultural values. But should they have been surprised at this generational rift in the church? Looking at how different generations have been formed morally, socially, and culturally may help address this question.
newborn baby

Illusions of Control and the Ableism of Big Fertility

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Children are not a means to the end of adult happiness or fulfilled longings. They are human beings who deserve to be treated with dignity. Refusal to accept that we are not ultimately in control means asserting our control over others.
Europe

Pierre Manent’s Multifaceted Defense of the European Nation-State

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Pierre Manent has been a penetrating critic of the European Union, a measured but firm defender of the nation-state, and a Catholic thinker who has made signal contributions to the understanding of the Church’s role in European history, and to the understanding of many of its eminent thinkers. 
religious persecution

The Complexity of Compassion: A Review of Knox Thames’s Ending Persecution

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Thames’s recent book is a thought-provoking and enlightening read for anyone interested in international religious freedom and the failures and triumphs of America’s contribution to it.
constitution

“Oh Say Can You C?” Compromise, Consensus, Consent, and the Constitution

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Each of these books presents valuable and insightful contributions to ongoing conversations about the role of the Constitution in contemporary American political life.
Statue of liberty

Society and Spectacle

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A self-governed people are not merely those who are allowed to vote. More than that, a self-governed people direct their own judgments, attention, choice, and emotion.
American flag

With Malice toward None

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If today we are tempted to gloat or despair, curse or mock, it would be far better for ourselves and our children to quietly pray or study, rake the leaves, invite a neighbor to dinner, play a game, or work in the garage: all the things that a self-reliant, free, and sober people do.
IVF clinic

Reclaiming Personhood in the Public Debate over IVF

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As we consider the future of our debate over IVF, we must go deeper than the political questions facing us and ask ourselves fundamental questions about how we view one another.
poetry

Revisiting Auden

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Despite Professor Jacobs’s forceful defense of this book, my opinion remains unchanged. Buy Auden’s Collected Poems, regularly visit his poems from the 1930s, then patiently scour the rest of his work for more gold.
man reading fiction

The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature

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By educating our sentiments—by wedding feeling and form, appetite and intellect—good literature moves us to love and hate what we ought to love and hate.
Students and tech

Subcontracting Our Minds 

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As Rousseau put it, for the inhabitant of bourgeois society, it is necessary “to be or to seem.” AI will hand you the means to seem—at least so long as you are delivering the speech. It will deprive you of the ability to be.
tech and disembodiment

Technological Mediation in a Disembodied World: A Review of Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience 

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Technology does not merely present the real, like our bodily senses; instead, it re-presents, reproduces, copies, or simulates the real. This has concerned techno-conservatives for millennia, ever since Plato’s proposal to ban all “imitative arts” from his ideal city-state, and it is a concern naturally heightened in the era of AI deepfakes.
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