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Founding Fathers

Competing Visions of America

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Charles Kesler’s new book, Crisis of the Two Constitutions, offers a straightforward approach to the Constitution, a pointed (though always measured) characterization of progressivism, and an honest assessment of American conservatism.

Statement from Pro-Life Catholic Scholars on the Moral Acceptability of Receiving COVID-19 Vaccines

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The Ethics and Public Policy Center has organized the following statement from leading pro-life Catholic scholars, including EPPC President Ryan T. Anderson, EPPC board member and Princeton professor Robert P. George, and EPPC Fellow and Notre Dame professor O. Carter Snead, along with two professors at pontifical universities in Rome and other U.S.-based scholars, to explain why it is morally acceptable for pro-life citizens to receive any of the COVID-19 vaccines currently available.
united nations

American Conservatives Should Take the United Nations Seriously

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The question was never whether or not conservatives should engage the multilateral system. It was always what kind of multilateralism conservatives want: one that is accountable to self-governing sovereign states and advances U.S. interests, or one that is wholly untethered from political oversight and unaccountable to the American people.
Legal scales

Rights, Natural and Legal: A Response to Nigel Biggar’s What’s Wrong with Rights?

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Natural and legal rights are not like individuals of the same species, but analogous ways of identifying what justice demands. Natural rights provide a standard by which legal rights are to be understood and corrected; but legal rights are the means by which natural rights are to be secured and realized in a polity.
BLM Protest

Reforming Our Successor Civil Religion

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Wokeness meets a religious need by mimicking a Protestantism that our society has largely left behind. Although it highlights important truths, Wokeness needs to retrieve the orthodox teaching on the universality of original sin, the Christian understanding of salvation through the divine Scapegoat, and the centrality of the Church in its social imagination.
Crusaders

Dulce et Decorum Est: In Defense of Healthy Patriotism

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The things we’re willing to die for are tied to what we hold as sacred. In fact, the willingness to die for something also consecrates it as sacred. We need to entertain the possibility that love for our country might lead us to sacrifice greatly, even radically, in order to preserve the best that remains in it.

Guiding Youth to the Good Life

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So many young adults today are desperate for guidance but surrounded by adults unwilling or incapable of providing it. Richard Morley Myers's Thinking About Happiness reminds us that while the ignorance and fashionable errors of our generation may pass, the wisdom of the classics will endure.

Amidst Disputes in Bioethics, Hope for Human Flourishing

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A new book by Christopher Kaczor is an accessible resource for those who want to understand current debates in the field of medical ethics.
Image of Christ

Was Jesus a Socialist?

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Lawrence Reed’s Was Jesus a Socialist? is both a great introduction to why socialism fails and an engaging challenge to Christians to let go of utopian myths.
George Washington Statue

Virtue at the Origin: The Classical Foundations of the American Republic

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Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas Ricks has produced a thoroughly researched and engaging book on the intellectual world of the American founders. We who live in a highly partisan age can hope, as Ricks does with mild optimism, that we can return to virtue to cope with the problems of modern-day factionalism.
Pope Benedict XVI

A Healthy Secularity Is Possible: A Response to Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley

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Catholic citizens can hope for a society where the faith is more broadly shared, but we cannot escape the responsibility of political deliberation about our society as it is—riddled with its pluralism and confusion—not as we would have it be. A healthily secular society can acknowledge the freedom of the Church and a positive role for the Church in society, understanding that the state is rightly focused on natural norms and goods, not supernatural ones.
Saint Chapel, Paris

Building a Catholic “Civilization of Love”: A Response to Nathaniel Peters

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Why must a “serious Catholic politics” tolerate a regime that worships the profit motive and carnal pleasure but recoil from one that worships the Blessed Trinity? Why is it sophisticated to ask the state to recognize truth of supply and demand but simplistic to ask that the state recognize the truth of the sacraments?
in god we trust

It Is Right and Just Offers Inspiration, Not Serious Catholic Politics

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In their new book, Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley provide a rousing exhortation for Catholics to unapologetically live out their faith. Unfortunately, the book contains too many generalizations, overstatements, and imprecisions to be a thoughtful guide to Catholic politics. Any serious Catholic politics must recognize that the problem of pluralism cannot be solved by dominating non-Catholics and imposing our view of the good on them.

The Unsoundness and Imprudence of “Common-Good Originalism”

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After decades of struggle, the conservative judicial project has finally produced a possible working majority of five originalists on the Supreme Court. There are plenty of reasons to wonder how consistently they will coalesce in practice and how willing they will be to revisit wrong precedent. But trashing Antonin Scalia’s originalism and replacing it with Josh Hammer’s idiosyncratic, results-oriented version isn’t likely to help matters.
Seedling in ground

Against Conservative Rationalism

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Humans are frail creatures, depending on much beyond our control. Those who do not recognize this have never seen their father watch the clouds, or had livestock die, or waited as the ultrasound searches for a heartbeat that will never be heard. God is good, and he loves what he has created, but we are dust, and he allows the winds to blow.
Stack of books with laptop on wooden table

The Bookshelf: In Praise of University Presses—and of One in Particular

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What libraries do on the demand side—acquiring the books and other materials that their faculty and students need to do their research—the university presses do on the supply side, bringing important research into print. Unfortunately, one of the best university presses in the country now faces the threat of closure.
Three babies

Child Allowances Reduce Abortion

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One feature of Mitt Romney’s Child Allowance proposal has been critically under-billed: the extremely high likelihood that it would reduce the abortion rate. Conservatives arguing that a rise in single parenthood is an unacceptable cost of a child allowance are necessarily arguing, as a corollary, that some of those children instead being aborted is an acceptable cost of the current policy regime. But if abortion is murder, then keeping single parenthood down by murdering the infants is surely not an optimal anti-poverty policy.
Big group of kids

Why Not Have a Bunch of Kids?

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Humans are, hands down, the single most fascinating set of creatures on the planet. If you want to understand how humans work, just make a few, sit back, and watch them do their thing.
Pastor preaching

Forming Evangelical Pastors: Theological Education from the Margins

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Evangelicals do not need more pastor-politicians. As the social pressures against historic Christianity increase, pastors and ministers will need a deeper doctrinal foundation, one that enables them to effectively catechize and instruct congregations embedded in a neo-pagan West.
Church congregation

Is the Catholic Parish in Crisis?

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The future of the parish depends on taking Catholic belief and practice more seriously, rebuilding neighborhoods of solidarity within the parish, and proposing Catholicism as integral to human flourishing.
Aeneas

We Must Found Institutions, Not Just Preserve Them: A Conservatism of Creation

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Conservatives are generally good at conserving, and we are particularly aware of the continuities across the human condition. But given today’s conditions, when so much has changed so recently and so many social problems bedevil us, we need to get great at creating new institutions.
Cambridge

A Time to Build Schools

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Our nation’s morally formative institutions are weak and weakening further, thanks in no small part to the enormously destructive effects of social media. The single type of institution best suited to resist these and other pressures of our times is the mission-driven, tech-skeptical K–12 school. The successes of our best countercultural colleges and universities, viewed in the light of Yuval Levin’s invaluable work on the nature of institutions, show us how the incentive structures of an excellent K–12 school make it the formative institution our time needs most.
Supreme Court

Toward a New Jurisprudential Consensus: Common Good Originalism

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Common good originalism is the best constitutional complement to a politics of a conservative restoration. It is ordered toward a profoundly and distinctly conservative politics that elevates the concerns of nation, community, and family over the one-way push toward ever-greater economic, sexual, and cultural liberationism.
"1984 is now" sign

Orwell, Atheism, and Totalitarianism

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Many have argued that without God there can be no fixed moral principles. George Orwell’s 1984 goes further, raising the possibility that without God there cannot even be “facts” in any meaningful, reliable sense.