Refreshing, Rejuvenating, and Improving Our Public Discourse: Holiday Book Recommendations
Reading recommendations from The Witherspoon Institute staff.
Who Are You? Alt-Right “Identitarianism,” Violence, and the Intellectual Roots of Western Civilization
By making our common humanity irrelevant to the question of identity, Richard Spencer sets himself in diametric opposition to the intellectual roots of the “Western” civilization to which he would lay claim.
Six Things You Need to Know about Physician-Assisted Suicide
Is the real healthcare crisis not enough physician assisted suicide laws? Or is it the staggering and increasing number of people losing their battles with mental illness and committing suicide?
Beyond Expressive Conduct: The Heterosexual Significance of the Wedding Cake
The wedding cake is an essential element of a ritual system that expresses the public establishment of a marriage. Its form and ritual use signify the procreative sexual relationship, with its expectation of fertility in the body of the bride, which is being publicly legitimated by the wedding.
Manhood Is Not Natural
Manhood is not natural, but it is essential. No society can endure if it does not harness male sexual energy and teach men to take care of the children they father and the women who bear them.
What’s Wrong with Rod Dreher’s Straussian Narrative of the American Constitution
Because he accepts a Straussian framework that sees modernity rather than Christianity as the major turning point of Western history, Rod Dreher underestimates the influence of Christian and classical thought on the American founding.
The Truth about Men, Women, and Sex
Recent revelations about sexual harassment, assault, and abuse underscore certain blunt realities about men, women, and sex. How can we confront those realities in a way that leads to less sexual violence?
Resisting the Fortress of Solitude: What’s Wrong with First Things’ Anxious Anti-Capitalism
Young people today, especially the ones who are serious about religion and look to the editors of First Things for guidance, must resist the allure of an intellectual Fortress of Solitude where they can sit and feel superior to everyone. Griping about the state of society is a waste of time. Part two of two.
Notes from Reality About Economic Regulation: What’s Wrong with First Things’ Anxious Anti-Capitalism
R.R. Reno’s manifesto on capitalism—in which he concludes, among other things, that expanding economic freedom leads to transgenderism—is based on empirically false claims. Part one of a two-part series.
Will the Trump Administration Push Back Against Transgender Ideology in Schools?
Until policy-makers and the public realize the factual and moral bankruptcy of transgender ideology, pressure will continue to mount to normalize the tragically abnormal.
The Inalienable Right to Life: An Update on Assisted Suicide in the United States and Canada
We must act now to prevent assisted suicide from gaining a stronger foothold in the United States.
Leo Strauss and the Pursuit of Knowledge: A Reply to Paul DeHart
Leo Strauss’s statements on philosophy do not deny that knowledge is possible. Rather, they emphasize that philosophy—while motivated by awareness of one’s own ignorance—is a way of life teleologically ordered toward knowledge.
The Fourteenth Amendment and Masterpiece Cakeshop: Equal Citizenship, our Inclusive Republic, and Anglo-American Common Law
The government cannot impose creedal and exclusionary limits on occupational freedom by compelling particular citizens to provide goods and services contrary to their beliefs, unless those citizens have such a monopoly market power as to exclude other citizens from the market.
Minority Stress Is Real, but Wedding Cakes Don’t Cause It
New research points to “internalized homophobia” as the problem, not external discrimination.
Religious Exemptions Aren’t Special Privileges
Why are Christian bakers and florists less worthy of accommodation than groups who would engage in nearly identical behavior for equally expressive, but not necessarily religious, purposes?
