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person reading a fantasy novel outside under a tree

The Falcon’s Children: Ross Douthat’s (Mostly) Fantastic Fantasy 

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Is this tale imperfect? Yes. But it’s one that’s worth hearing regardless. 
Israel

What Is Zionism? What Is Christian Zionism? 

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Basic decency provides more than enough grounds for Christians to oppose hateful and irrational attacks against Jews and Israel. We should treat these episodes as tests of our courage and discernment, because that’s exactly what they are. 
Capitol Hill

The Powers of the Senate 

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There’s no point in writing laws if the courts won’t follow them. It’s the trial judges, not the president, who are sapping Congress’s power. Perhaps it’s time that Congress does something about it.  
immigration and family separation

The Dignity of the Family and American Democracy 

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There appears to be an intractable choice between family separation, on one hand, and a nation that does not enforce its own laws or protect its own borders, on the other. How to proceed? 
Maduro

The End of a Regime? Understanding the Extraction of Maduro

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The story of Maduro’s extraction is not a tale of foreign intervention. It is a story of internal collapse, human suffering, and the eventual recognition—by Venezuelans and by the world—that a government cannot indefinitely destroy the lives of its citizens without facing consequences.
Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt and the Limits of Expertise 

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We do not need experts to tell us how to get our kids out of the machine.  
Harvard Law

The Return to Tradition in the Law 

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If feats like the medieval preservation and subsequent revival of Roman law show us anything, it is that the steady, often thankless work of patient scholarship and steady teaching can provide sound footing on dry land. 
Plato

Gorgias and Good Rhetors: A Response to Thomas Schacht 

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Taking all things together and balancing the good with the bad, you have not a moral horror, but a very good country indeed, which is why people from around the world still yearn to come here. If anyone tells you otherwise, he’s a lying rhetor. 
Historic American courthouse

The Judicial Oath and the Judgment of History

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My oath, with God as witness, to uphold the rule of law must matter more than the judgment of any peer or historian.
Roger Scruton

Rationalism in Conservative Politics 

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Ideas about the political conditions for human flourishing sometimes have unforeseen consequences. But the consequences of refusing to traffic in these ideas are foreseeably very bad indeed.
Christmas

Gaudeat Ecclesia, Now and Always 

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This Christmas, as we enjoy our cozy families and gifts, may we marvel in Christ’s appearance in Scripture and in our world, with all of its paradoxes.
Calvin Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar” 

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Henry Ford sought to mainstream anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States. In a 1925 address, Coolidge decisively broke with Ford’s movement. 
tech

People, Place, Prayer, the Past: A Review of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine 

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Kingsnorth sees the problems of technology; but he also realizes (and acknowledges) that he is embedded in the Machine. What he proposes toward the end is not a naïve and impossible utopian withdrawal but selective resistance to the Machine, resistance that can take various forms but that will always involve some level of complicity. 
Christmas reading list

The 2025 Public Discourse Book List 

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A roundup of reads from PD’s editorial team and the Witherspoon Institute staff
entrepreneurship and innovation

Entrepreneurship, Prosperity, and Living Contra Mundum: A Q&A with Robert L. Luddy

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You need people to have the tenacity, the wonder, and the willingness to say, “I can do some things better than what is currently being done in the marketplace.” And that’s the nature of entrepreneurship.
Jane Austen novels

The Genius of Jane Austen 

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Jane Austen was an extraordinary writer of fiction, but she was also a profound teacher of human nature, the arts of life, and the way to happiness. Her novels are, as it were, about her “important nothings”: about the sport of laughter, love and friendship, and the splendid challenge of being human.    
Sailing to Byzantium

Monument of Unageing Intellect

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It is plain to this grateful reader that the tradition of the university has deeply formed Professor Hankins and Professor Guelzo into the kind of people capable of bringing to fruition the Herculean labor of love and learning that is The Golden Thread. 
Supreme Court

Originalism, the Pro-Life Cause, and the Fight for the Soul of the Court 

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Conservatives are indebted to those who fought for the soul of the Court. 
ideology

Wonder Confronts Certainty, Then and Now 

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When it comes to human beings, learning must not consist in committing a pre-packaged truth to memory, but an endless process of discovery and self-critique.
person holding a smart phone

Smartphones and the New Tribalism 

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What place smartphones have in our future is uncertain, but whatever it is, all generations should be alert to the problem.
Plato statue

The Gorgias, Lawyers, and the Problem of Rhetoric 

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No matter how one answers the problem, wrestling with the Gorgias is inevitable for the lawyer concerned with justice. Either we answer Plato adequately, or we cannot be lawyers.  
Galilee

Christian Zionism Came Long Before Dispensationalism 

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It would be perverse to charge all fulfillment theology with antisemitism. Many reject Christian Zionism for the plausible (but unfounded) reasons described in Mattson’s piece, and many are clearly philo-Semitic. But it might not be a bad idea for some of them to ask what W. D. Davies and other theologians started asking in the 1970s: “How did Christian Europe come to hate Jews?” 
Amy Coney Barrett

Listening to the Law 

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Questions about how to interpret our Constitution, the reader can conclude, ought to be approached from within the broader enterprise of understanding how to inherit it. The inheritance-based understanding of American constitutionalism that Barrett transmits through this book is itself worthy of being handed on with interest and appreciation.  
healthy happy person jumping

The Virtues as the Superhabits of Human Success 

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What we need is a restoration of virtue in our land, in order to tame the strong gods and ensure that their power serves the good—so that the return to reality is marked not by domination, but by integrity, not by chaos, but by character.