fbpx
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Search
Close this search box.
The study of theology

In Defense of the Liberal Arts and the “Queen of the Sciences”

By
The problem with the way that discussions surrounding university education are often framed is that they seem to accept as inevitable a pernicious anthropology that presumes students are autonomous subjects, consuming in order to be consumed. But we are more than what we achieve, more than we produce, more than our billable hours.
Watching the news

Subsidiarity and the Ethics of Attention

By
If our immediate surroundings and concrete responsibilities constitute the arena in which we are most uniquely competent, then reserving our attention for those objects is not quietism, but the pinnacle of activism.
Christian conventions

Christians Need Stronger Conventions, Not State Power, to Influence Culture

By
Deep, broad cultural change often results not primarily from government imposition or propagation of ideas, but from committed social entrepreneurs who pilot alternative conventions. Public pronouncement of Christian values, absent change in underlying social conventions, is a poor substitute for deeply rooted change internal to the church.
AI

Tech Evangelists: The AI-Made Pseudo-Religions of Tomorrow Sound Uncannily Like Those of Yesterday

By
Treating data centers, just like fleshly human bodies, as irrelevant or inconvenient, and claiming the world wide web, not the material world, as sovereign over our “true” selves, makes this kind of thinking into a form of techno-theology.
Conservative wisdom

Conservative Wisdom or New-Right Dreams?

By
We do not need more self-conscious crusaders for the nation or even for Western Civilization, but instead more priests, teachers, businessmen, artists, writers, and parents who perform their own activities faithfully, serving—to borrow a phrase from Russell Kirk—as “leaven for the whole lump.”
Person holding two pennies

In a Fallen World, Scarcity Is a Gift

By
In our fallen condition in which we are detached from relationship with God, our mortality is a gift. Scarcity grants meaning to our decisions, provides a merciful conduit for us to know the love of God and one another, and pushes us toward relationships broken by the Fall.
The Vatican

Pius XII and the Politics of the Mystical Body

By
Pope Pius XII exhorts the faithful to participate in daily Mass, frequent confession, personal prayer, mortification, and works of mercy. These practices are not minor, weak, or irrelevant responses to a world crisis; on the contrary, the pope believes they are powerfully efficacious and necessary, strengthening the bonds uniting the mystical body of Christ and sowing the seeds of peace. His counsel is spiritual in nature, but socio-political in its effects.
desert

The Hidden Riches of the Desert

By
In her new book A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, Zena Hitz situates her philosophical ponderings within the context of her own life, here spotlighting a crisis precipitated by her conversion to the Catholic faith. Like Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac at the Lord’s behest, Hitz realizes that unconditional love of God, “wholehearted commitment without compromise,” might demand the renunciation even of what she has held most dear.
Ivf embryo transfer

Procreating Alone

By
If sexual attraction is one powerful force that God built into the world to counteract the individual’s inclination to self-absorption, then the combination of technological and cultural assaults on this urge doesn’t threaten only the formation of families, the basic unit of society. It also threatens something even more foundational: the nature of the person as a social being.
Voting day

For the 2024 Election, We Must Relearn to Be Citizens

By
As 2024 approaches, there will be tremendous temptations to go still further in taking the gloves off in an attempt to prevail by any means necessary. There will be power at stake, but also tremendous profit as the purveyors of opinion seek to build audiences and sell advertisements. But we are not helpless. We can be more fair to each other and thus create the conditions for a more fruitful discourse.
Literature

How to Justify the Study of Literature

By
John Guillory’s Professing Criticism is a thorough and complex work of scholarship. It’s also a bracing call for literary scholars to significantly reform how they think about their profession, and its relationship to their students and reading public in general. At its core is a challenge that is simultaneously reasonable and radical: professors of literary study must be more modest in their aims and promises to suit the realities of their field in the twenty-first century.
Devorah Goldman and Dr. Miriam Grossman

How Gender Activists Defaced Pediatric Medicine: An Interview with Miriam Grossman, MD

By and
“My book is based on a series of dangerous ideas that have led us to where we are now. Beginning with the insidious theories of John Money, these ideas progressed through the fields of psychology and psychiatry and eventually infiltrated our educational and legal systems—corrupting many of the country’s most powerful institutions.”
US Constitution

How to Lose Sight of the Constitution

By
Such a substantial proportion of this book is devoted to textualism, originalism, and traditionalism that it is hard to escape the sense that Sunstein protests too much by repeatedly claiming that his moral-philosophizing “reflective equilibrium” is “the only game in town.” And in truth, he leaves his own preferred approach woefully underdeveloped.
Ronald Regan

Ronald Reagan: An Imperfect, Indispensable Leader

By
In his new book, William Inboden clearly regards Reagan as indispensable to something coming close to a miraculous chain of events surrounding the peaceful end of the Cold War. He rejects the popular notions of Reagan as clueless, all form and no substance, gullible, or hopelessly and sentimentally patriotic. This is a sympathetic biography, but one that is copiously researched and laden with fresh and insightful nuances that treat Reagan as a complex figure, a man with limitations, paradoxes, and weaknesses.
Summer camp

Summer Camp: An Ailing American Institution

By
The original rationale for summer camp is more valid than ever. Young people are struggling with mental health, addiction to technology, disconnection from the body, isolation, and many other painful realities. Summer camps cannot fix these problems. But for many adolescents, the experience of traditional summer camps might help them see that life is about more than accomplishment, and that is a start.
IVF

Elon Musk and the Reproductive Revolution

By
What the sexual revolution began by upsetting gender roles and obscuring the necessary link between marriage and procreation, the reproductive revolution continues, shattering our conceptions of motherhood and fatherhood and severing the bond between parents and children.
Woman in headphones listening music in nature and at the mountain (intentional pale color style)

The Bookshelf: Audiobooks and the Recovery of Leisure Reading

By
Audiobooks’ greatest potential is to encourage a sense of receptivity and leisure throughout the rest of life, not just one’s reading life. Listening to a novel, accepting its rhythms and flow of detail on the book’s own terms, is a gentle reminder that life’s most glorious things demand quiet, silent admiration, and loving acceptance.
Technology

The Psychology of Digital Dehumanization

By
A Web of Our Own Making overflows with disquieting observations about the ways digital technology is reshaping human nature. Antón Barba-Kay puts into haunting words the anxiety, exhaustion, and emptiness that most of us feel but cannot put into words because we are too busy scrolling and ogling.
Christianity in America

If You Like America, Thank Christianity

By
Mark David Hall’s Proclaim Liberty Throughout All the Land represents a landmark contribution to the debate over the impact of Christian faith on American law and culture. It is high time for Christians to reframe this debate, asking not “How much do we have to apologize for?” but “How much can we take credit for?”
Clear circular glasses on the table with blurry background

Is Bias Actually Bad?

By
If we take seriously Thomas Kelly’s ideas about bias blind spots, then we should seek public universities composed of a high degree of biased parts. Such universities would intentionally hire faculty members and administrators who harbor contrary views on divisive cultural issues. This would probably create campuses that can boast of having teaching and scholarship that have much less pejorative bias than their peer institutions.
Image of Barbie

Barbie’s Quiet Rebuke of Transhumanism

By
The movie’s most profound insight is its distillation of pop feminism: a praise of women so unceasing that we no longer feel comfortable being normal human beings with blemishes, weakness, and fertility.
Karyatides statues, Erehtheio, on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece

The Past As Enemy Country: Why Teachers of Great Books Should Be Teaching History, Too

By
We need to study history as a subject in its own right, acquiring a deep appreciation for the story of Western civilization, with all its abysses of failure and all its deservedly celebrated achievements. We need to help our students understand old texts at a deeper level, in less anachronistic ways. Above all, we need to arm them against the hostility to their own tradition that has become such a destructive force in our culture.
Surgeons

The Transgender Movement’s House of Cards Is Falling

By
A growing number of doctors, patients, and whistleblowers are beginning to question the medical establishment’s recommendations for children with gender dysphoria.
Hand of a person casting a vote into the ballot box during elections

There’s No Easy Fix to Our Broken Presidential Nominating System

By
For the foreseeable future, there will be no institutional barrier to demagoguery, viciousness, or incompetence to be found within the nominating processes. The only barrier will be the voters themselves.
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Public Discourse © 2024 | All Rights Reserved