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Matthew J. Franck

Matthew J. Franck is Senior Contributing Editor of Public Discourse. He is also a visiting Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University, Senior Fellow at the Witherspoon Institute, and Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Radford University, where he chaired the department and taught courses in political philosophy, constitutional law, and American politics.

Franck has written, edited, or contributed to books published by the University Press of Kansas, Lexington Books, Oxford University Press, and Cambridge University Press, and has published articles and reviews in American Political Thought, the Review of Politics, the Journal of Church and State, the Catholic Social Science Review, National Affairs, The New Atlantis, First Things, the Weekly Standard, Touchstone, the Claremont Review of Books, National Review, and Public Discourse. On Twitter he is @MatthewJFranck.

Ideological diversity/viewpoint diversity represented by multicolored pawns

Seven Bad Arguments Against Viewpoint Diversity 

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In the end, Siraganian’s seven theses mostly collapse from their own structural inadequacy as arguments. Sneers, exaggerations, false comparisons, and non sequiturs are what her theses have going for them. In these respects, she neatly illustrates the need for the intellectual challenge viewpoint diversity promises, on her own campus and others.
antique books and quill pen

The Bookshelf: On the Necessity and Pitfalls of Anachronisms 

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I have been strongly drawn to pick up several recent books of history and historiography that tackle anachronisms and reifications, because such clarifying works can keep us from making facile conclusions about the past—and about its effect on the present.
reading for pleasure

The Bookshelf: How Do We Read? Why Do We Read? 

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Every age has its distractions, and its temptations for a shortcut. But if we are to understand ourselves and our predicament, we have the same resources our predecessors had. We have books to read. We will grow or shrink as human beings according to our willingness to read them. 
The Bookshelf

The Bookshelf: Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton! 

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Voegelin was capable of striking turns of phrase and bold arguments. It is easy to see what was attractive about his work for a Christian conservative.
Obergefell case

The Legacy of Obergefell, Ten Years Later 

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The single most durable legacy of Obergefell, it would seem, is the damage it has done to the culture of marriage and family in the United States. 
Fatherhood Bookshelf

The Bookshelf: Exemplary Fathers in Classic Literature

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In honor of Fathers’ Day, a few of our contributing editors and writers share their favorite father figures from classic literature.
bookshelf

The Bookshelf: Hayek’s Vision of Human Complexity 

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Hayek’s thoughts on thought itself ground his classic warning against the dangers of the temptation to control the freedom of others as they make their own way in that complex world of human action and interaction that surpasses our ability to understand. 
bookshelf

The Bookshelf: Betrayal and Witness

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Beyond the testimony of a man that he had once betrayed his country, and knew of others who had done so, is the testimony of a human being who has passed through a fire and lived, though scorched and scarred for life, and has come to believe that there is authentic freedom only under God, not in rebellion against his works.

President Trump and Birthright Citizenship

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The Constitution’s grant of citizenship cannot be a function of Congress’s immigration laws, let alone of a president’s executive order written on the basis of those laws. Only a constitutional amendment could unsay what the Constitution conclusively says on that question: born here, citizen here.

The Bookshelf: Language Change under Pressure

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Here at Public Discourse, many of us think that in another generation or two, Western societies will look back on the idea that people can be “nonbinary” or undergo “gender transition” with the kind of horrified wonder we now reserve for early-twentieth-century eugenics or mid-century lobotomies. In the meantime, the copy we publish will move very cautiously around or through the minefield of they and them, employing pronouns simply to tell the truth as we understand it and to be as clear as possible for our readers.

The Bookshelf: Recovering the Academic Vocation

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If the academy can produce teachers able to communicate to students the perfectly useless joy of learning, then it may continue to make its most valuable contribution to our civic life.
university

The Bookshelf: The Academy in Crisis

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How can the academy recover its vocation, its true identity as a center of humane inquiry?
reading

The Bookshelf: Unputdownable

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Just as a thrilling novel can keep us turning the pages, our interest rising all the while, so a work of history, philosophy, science, or politics can startle us with revelations of the truth that make us keep reading just as urgently.
bookshelf

The Bookshelf: Taking an Incomplete

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Readers, respect not the friends, critics, or even the judgments of posterity that insist on a book’s greatness. Enjoy what you read, and if you’re not enjoying yourself, stop, close the book, and go read something else.
voting booth

The Bookshelf: They’re Our Parties and I’ll Cry If I Want To

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And so here we are, with hyper-partisanship and extremely weak parties, largely because earlier generations of “reformers” wanted to make them more “responsible” (read “ideological”) and more “democratic” (read “responsive to a narrow base”). It’s past time to have a conversation about reforming the reforms. More creative thinking about how to make parties again represent the great middle of the country would be most welcome.
reading poetry

The Bookshelf: Waxing Poetic with A. M. Juster

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Our postmodern academy is never going to bring back traditional prosody on its own, so we should probably be thinking hard about how to use the Internet to bring the traditional tools of English poetry back to the people.
Short stories

The Bookshelf: Keep It Short

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If short stories are the wardrobe through which young people can pass into a world where they learn to appreciate novels as well, then the demise of magazine fiction is truly unfortunate. Let those teachers assign lots of classic short fiction. The taste of the young is developed in small helpings.
reading novels

The Bookshelf: Eros and Dystopia

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It seems the utopian impulse and the dystopian nightmare are never very distant from one another. If we are to love Big Brother, as Winston Smith does at the end of Orwell’s novel, all our other loves must be intruded upon, damaged, even sacrificed entirely. The case for freedom begins with the case for love.
The Bookshelf

The Bookshelf: Children of Abraham 

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The plight of the Palestinians is indeed a tragic one. Peace with their stronger neighbor will not come easily to them. Only a cessation of terrorism, of attacks on civilians, and of demonization of the Jewish people will enable them to make any substantial progress. Sad to say, the first steps may have to be taken by the Western elites who have learned to make anti-Semitism fashionable again, and have a great deal of unlearning to do. 
reading

The Bookshelf: The Brotherhood of Man, the Fatherhood of Teachers

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Is there friction between the social proclivities generated by our liberal institutions and the demands of Christian faith and teaching? It is perfectly reasonable to argue that there is—though there may be fruitful interaction as well, in which the politics of freedom and the virtues of faith foster one another.
Stack of books

The Bookshelf: What Does It Mean to Interpret?

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There are no blackout curtains, only more or less obscurity to be overcome by the work of interpretation. Much of the burden of Hirsch’s two books is to describe the methods and account for the limitations of such work. The discussion is richly informed by linguistics and epistemology, governed by rigorous logic, and elegantly written.
Donald Trump

Is Donald Trump Disqualified from the Presidency?

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The country is divided. Many people support Donald Trump, and many revile him. Whatever is decided on his eligibility, or his criminal culpability in federal and state prosecutions, large numbers of people are going to be very unhappy.
Thanksgiving table

The Bookshelf: November Is for Gratitude

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November is a month for looking back in gratitude at where we have been, where we come from, who has trod the boards of our stage before us. Gratitude is the proper spirit to lift us up during these shorter, colder days (at least in these latitudes), while the seasonal life of nature turns with the leaves and falls with them to the ground.
Children's books

The Bookshelf: Impressionable Minds

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What young readers need and deserve are models of virtue they can aspire to emulate.