Reading recommendations from The Witherspoon Institute staff.
Author: Ryan T. Anderson (Ryan T. Anderson)
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Pope Francis, Civil Unions, and Moral Truth
More deeply understanding the truth about marriage and human sexuality will help all of us flourish. And that is what a pastor like Pope Francis desires. We can understand—indeed we share—the frustration of our fellow Catholics with the ways in which the Holy Father conducts interviews and the ways in which the media distorts them, but we must not do anything to undermine the truth that sets us free.
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Protect Good Medicine, Stop the Censorship of Good Counseling
The law must protect the freedom of parents to seek, children to receive, and doctors to practice good medicine. The law must protect the ability of doctors and families to help children feel comfortable as what they actually are—namely, male and female children—not to radically and irreversibly transform their bodies.
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Mary Eberstadt on What Plagues the West
“Post-revolutionary men and women are living in ways that are profoundly unnatural for the ineradicably social creatures that we are; and many are suffering as a result, at times without even knowing the name of what ails them. This preoccupation, and the desire to do something about it, continues to shape my work.”
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Religious Liberty Is Important, But It’s Not Enough
The religious liberty triumphs of the past several days are important, but they’re not enough. Not nearly so. We need to contend about the truth of the matter. Through legislation and litigation, we need to make it clear that it’s lawful to act on the convictions that we are created male and female and that male and female are created for each other. Privacy and safety at a shelter, equality on an athletic field, and good medicine are at stake for everyone—religious or not.
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The Supreme Court’s Mistaken and Misguided Sex Discrimination Ruling
Justice Gorsuch’s position would either require the elimination of all sex-specific programs and facilities or allow access based on an individual’s subjective identity rather than his or her objective biology. When Gorsuch claims that “transgender status [is] inextricably bound up with sex” because “transgender status” is defined precisely in opposition to sex, he presumes the very sex binary his opinion will help to further erode.
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Introducing our New Contributing Editor, Andrew T. Walker
Through being a Public Discourse reader, I’ve made friendships I would not otherwise have made. The joy of any movement is the relationships it fosters, and my life would be less fulfilled were it not for the intellectual camaraderie that is enjoyed by many within the Public Discourse readership.
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A Decade of Debates
The team at Public Discourse doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but we do think we’re asking the right questions, and getting the right thinkers to propose some of the answers. That’s one thing that we hope will always be our hallmark: thoughtful, reasoned discourse, which is rigorous yet still accessible to the educated layman.
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Refreshing, Rejuvenating, and Improving Our Public Discourse: 2019 Holiday Book Recommendations
Reading recommendations from The Witherspoon Institute staff.
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Physical Interventions on the Bodies of Children to “Affirm” their “Gender Identity” Violate Sound Medical Ethics and Should be Prohibited
Rather than teaching children to identify based on how well they fit prevailing cultural expectations on sex, we should be teaching them that the truth of their sexual identity is based on their bodies, and that sometimes cultural associations attached to the sexes are misguided or simply too narrow. There is a wonderfully rich array of ways of expressing one’s embodiment as male or female.
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Sex at the High Court: On the Redefinition of “Sex” in Civil Rights Law and Faulty Accounts of “Discrimination”
Activists are asking the Court to rewrite our nation’s civil rights laws in a way that would directly undermine one of their main purposes: protecting the equal rights of girls and women. Congress did not legislate such an outcome, and the Court should not usurp Congress’s authority by imposing such an extreme policy on the nation. Biology is not bigotry, and the Court should not conclude otherwise.
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False Dichotomies, the Common Good, and the Future of Conservatism
David French, Sohrab Ahmari, and others who are debating the future of conservatism are right to think that the challenges facing our nation are grave. Still, we need not feel forced into cheering for one side or the other, into viewing this as a matter of “teams.” We conservatives need to keep the main focus on ideas, not personalities, and engage each other both robustly and charitably. We need to think prudently about practical steps we should take—here and now, given all the givens—that will promote the common good.
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Catholic Thought and the Challenges of Our Time
The early Church saw challenges to truths about God, the Reformation-era Church saw challenges to truths about the Church herself, and today’s Church is confronted by challenges to truths about man—the being made in the image and likeness of God whom the Church is tasked with protecting. This essay is based on Ryan T. Anderson’s inaugural lecture as the St. John Paul II Teaching Fellow at The University of Dallas.
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Refreshing, Rejuvenating, and Improving Our Public Discourse: Holiday Book Recommendations
Reading recommendations from The Witherspoon Institute staff.
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The New York Times Reveals Painful Truths about Transgender Lives
Why should a doctor perform surgery when it won’t make the patient happy, it won’t accomplish its intended goal, it won’t improve the underlying condition, it might make the underlying condition worse, and it might increase the likelihood of suicide? Sound medicine isn’t about desire, it’s about healing.
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The Future of Public Discourse
For the past ten years, Public Discourse has been a different kind of website—thoughtful, calm, and civil, even while defending unpopular truths. In our next decade, we want to keep improving, reaching more people, and addressing a broader array of topics.
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Sex Change: Physically Impossible, Psychosocially Unhelpful, and Philosophically Misguided
Modern medicine can’t reassign sex physically, and attempting to do so doesn’t produce good outcomes psychosocially. Here is the evidence.
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The Philosophical Contradictions of the Transgender Worldview
The thinking of transgender activists is inherently confused and filled with internal contradictions. Activists never acknowledge those contradictions. Instead, they opportunistically rely on whichever claim is useful at any given moment.
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Refreshing, Rejuvenating, and Improving Our Public Discourse: Holiday Book Recommendations
Reading recommendations from The Witherspoon Institute staff.
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Faith and Reason, Beauty and Holiness
We have the obligation to propose with the apostle Paul the more excellent way. And this only intensifies as you graduate today and enter a world that is simultaneously hungry for and resistant to your message.
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Natural Law, Social Justice, and the Crisis of Liberty in the West
A reflection on our nature as “dependent, rational animals.”
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How to Think About Discrimination: Race, Sex, and SOGI
Sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) antidiscrimination laws are unjustified, but if other policies are adopted to address the mistreatment of people who identify as LGBT, they must leave people free to engage in legitimate actions based on the conviction that we are created male and female and that male and female are created for each other.
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Make Religious Freedom Great Again
Donald Trump should commit to protecting the free exercise of religion for all Americans of all faiths.
