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Hopkins

The McHugh Factor: The Ideology of Transgenderism Will Brook No Dissent

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The point of recent attacks on Dr. Paul McHugh is not to take him down. Rather, it is to signal to every other mental health and medical professional in the country—from psychiatrists to endocrinologists to surgeons to therapists and counselors—that the ideology of transgenderism will brook no dissent.
Scales

Reclaiming Social Justice

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The term “social justice” is typically associated with an aggressively progressive political agenda led by a muscular Uncle Sam. But there is an alternative understanding of social justice—one that is especially well-suited to helping the nation address many of today’s most troubling challenges. It’s time for conservatives to explain this approach and articulate an agenda for the future based on it.
Masks

Alone Together, or Just Alone? Social Conservatives Are Right

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Social conservatives are not just moralizing when they reject so much of what passes for liberation in our time. It’s not that we’re against self-determination, but rather that we are for the flourishing and well-being of persons, and thus we insist on fostering the institutions that are essential to this task.
Gate

Social, Political Animals: Embodied Learning and the Limits of Online Education

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Technology may permit us to supplement, but it should not lead us to discard, the personal Socratic education that does full justice to human nature and has contributed so much to the development of our civilization.

Isolation Cinema: The Films of John Ford

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John Ford’s America is a good deal like Ford himself—loud, brawling, and hard-charging. Ford’s Americans are also honorable, self-sacrificing, and faithful to their promises. That’s not the whole truth about America, not by a long shot. But it’s true enough that in John Ford’s films, we will forever see something of ourselves.
Aeneas

Virgil, Pope Francis, and the Wisdom of Memory

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In responding to the current crisis, the great pandemic, we can follow the example of Aeneas: we can reject despair in the face of horrible suffering and find strength in "the roots of our traditions."
Masks

How Social Capital Helps Communities Weather the COVID-19 Storm

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Social capital mediates the severity and spread of COVID-19. In order to be effective, public-health interventions in response need to be connected to the social forces that are already at play in communities.
Civil Rights

Christopher Caldwell Is Not Here to Give You Hope

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In The Age of Entitlement, Christopher Caldwell chronicles our increased willingness to eat our seed corn and inability to propagate the future. But the questions he raises require a treatment other than borrowing the frameworks of progressive theorists and drawing different conclusions that suggest an inescapable logic of racial resentment.
Common Good

Bullish on the Common Good?

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The common good is the final cause of political association, not least because practical decisions are always decisions about achieving what is good and avoiding what is bad. But invoking the common good under the influence of De Koninck, Maritain, or even Aquinas doesn’t on its own advance the political conversation that characterizes a healthy polity.
Gates

The End of Campus Education? Virtually Impossible

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Our current national experiment reveals how unpopular online education is. Its proponents on the political right should admit its limitations and end their infatuation with its novelty and presumed efficiency.
Integralism

Integralism, Political Philosophy, and the State

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Integralism delivers a more realistic view of how states actually function—including states that are secular—than do models currently dominant in political and legal philosophy.
Books

Isolation Bookshelf: Escaping into Historical Fiction

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There is a great deal to be learned about the virtues and vices by following the long and eventful lives of D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. And isn’t this finally what good novels of any kind do for us—present the fullness of human characters for our consideration, so that we may reflect on our own characters?
Conservatives

Can Social Conservatives and Libertarians Still Be Friends?

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American Compass and younger conservatives need to do more than complain about doctrinaire libertarians. There is a large need for careful thinking about the societal and cultural implications of economic policies, but blanket declarations of war against “libertarian fundamentalists” or “market fundamentalism” are no substitute for thoughtful analysis.
Cap

Carrying Jesus into the Public Square: A Reflection on Faith and Partisanship for Young Catholics as They Graduate from College

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To be Catholic is to be completely comfortable in neither party. I know. I live this every day. If you really want to change the world, you must choose to be Catholic, and carry Jesus into the public square. Adapted from a May 2019 commencement address Representative Lipinski delivered at Ave Maria University.
Homeschool

Pandemic Lessons: Homecoming, Homeschooling, and the Home Economy

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A powerful antidote to such atomistic existence, loneliness, and alienation, is found in the family: productive, resilient, and together. A family-centered life with the home as the engine of education and economics orders one’s vocations and roles in ways that build lasting familial bonds and provide stability amid a changing world. COVID-19 quarantining provides an opportunity for this reality to sink in.
Benjamin

The Great Price of America’s Great Lockdown

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We must be clear-eyed about the long-term economic effects of expanding state intervention and temporarily freezing the economy as America battles COVID-19.
Chinese Communist

The Chinese Communist Party Is a Bigger Threat to Humanity Than Coronavirus, and America Must Confront It

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The Chinese Communist Party suppressed the truth about this virus and allowed it to spread around the world, creating a catastrophe. When the pandemic is finally under control, the rest of the world must come together to confront the CCP. In a globalized world, when dictators are in power, it’s not only the people they directly rule who are in harm’s way. It’s all of humanity. If free nations do not eradicate communist authoritarianism, they will become its victims.
Books

Isolation Bookshelf: Science Fiction Classics

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What can human beings endure? How can they adapt to radical changes in their environment and in themselves? How will their choices reshape their society? Science fiction at its best invites us to consider such questions at the extremes of human experience.
COVID

The COVID-19 Crisis Is Strengthening the Venezuelan Regime

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As much as I would like to believe that the COVID-19 crisis will produce a future where evidence-based policies triumph over other forms of governance, the sad reality is that the COVID-19 crisis will leave us in a much more authoritarian Venezuela.
Church

Is It Ethically Defensible for the Church to Suspend Public Masses?

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One can certainly debate the scientific warrant of a quarantine, its effectiveness in a given region or country, its proportionate value in the face of its economic consequences, and its psychological effects on citizens. Still, in principle, the state may legitimately request Catholic Christians to undertake such a quarantine, in accord with the natural law. There is nothing illegitimate about such a request, if it falls within certain parameters of temporary and just use, nor is it historically unprecedented.
Mask

Information Can Do What Lockdowns Can’t

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In the effort to combat COVID-19, making the public aware about the truth of the pandemic has been more effective than government lockdowns. China’s suppression of information, the WHO’s dilly-dallying with declaring a pandemic, and President Trump’s refusal to take COVID seriously enough from an early date all cost lives. Once Americans understood the gravity of the problem, they began social distancing on their own, before government-mandated lockdowns began. That has been the most effective measure in controlling the virus’s spread.
Sad

The Impossibility of Informed Consent for Transgender Interventions: The Risks

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Dr. Stephen Levine highlights biological, social, and psychological (mental health) risks in medically “transitioning.” Without explaining these risks and determining that the patient fully understands them, a medical practitioner has failed to obtain informed consent—if such consent is even possible. The second of two essays.
Doctor

The Impossibility of Informed Consent for Transgender Interventions: The Paradigm

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Assisting a gender dysphoric patient in “transitioning” without laying out the full panoply of medical, psychological, and social consequences violates the physician’s ethical obligation to obtain truly informed consent. The first of two essays.
Books

Isolation Bookshelf: Great Cases in Constitutional Law

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Chief Justice John Roberts complained five years ago, in the Obergefell marriage case, of some of his colleagues’ “extravagant conception of judicial supremacy.” To understand how such a conception has come to grip the judicial mind, studies of some of the Supreme Court’s most notable cases make for instructive reading.