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Suicidal Sweet Sixteen: A Reflection on Trans Youth Medicine

Teenage girl on bridge

Today, white-coated professionals tell parents of children with gender dysphoria: affirm your child’s trans identity right away or prepare for suicide. Are those really the only two options? For a movement that decries the binary, its commitment to this false dichotomy is relentless.

Wrong Then, Wrong Now: The Fake Abortion History of Roe v. Wade

Supreme Court

The history put forward in abortion litigation by advocates of abortion has never been about history. By their own admission, they “fudge it as necessary,” keeping up “the guise of impartial scholarship while advancing the proper ideological goals.”

Public Education and Liberal Neutrality

School hallway

Attempting neutrality in public education ends up creating a systemic preference for a particular ethical standpoint—a rather controversial one at that. Ironically, this creates a tension between public schools and the principle of liberal neutrality. Fortunately, this tension can be resolved without abandoning government-financed education through policies that are both popular and effective: school vouchers and education savings accounts.

After Zoom Church: Restoring the Real in Christian Worship

Empty Church

Church is not just a place to sing, listen, think, or emote. It is where God delivers Christ and his forgiveness through Word and Sacrament into the whole human person. Privatized, digital worship services subtly spurn physicality and community, unintentionally endorsing a mind–body dualism that runs counter to Christianity’s holistic view of the human person.

Public Monuments and Public Memory

Robert E. Lee statue

Monuments answer questions about which parts of our history we choose to make into a public heritage—which strands of the past we choose to bring into the present in order to shape and form the future. Taking down monuments is not a choice to forget the past. It is a choice not to honor certain elements of our past in public.

The Smith Case, Religious Freedom, and Originalism

Supreme Court chambers

One might wish that the Free Exercise Clause, as originally understood, had provided a basis for more judicial protection of religious rights than it does. But wishing doesn’t make it so. Judges don’t have the authority to interpret the Constitution to get better policy results, even if those are really, really important results.

What Confucius’s Li Can Teach the West about Law

Gavel on top of books

One cannot simply coerce social change by commanding substantive ends in positive law. Rather, human law can facilitate social change by rewarding or punishing certain actions and thereby also communicating the value of that action. Law does not so much dictate values as habituate them by encouraging their practice.

Nationalism and Civility from a Medieval Perspective

International flags

The virtue of civility finds expression in the readiness to accept differences in those cases in which no common ground may be found. I can valorize my national particularity without the need either to demolish yours or to agree with your reasons for valorizing yours.

Are Women Still Human?

The issue of abortion cannot be reduced to the narrow question of the status of the child in the womb. The answers rest upon broader assumptions about what it means to be human. If we are to believe those who defend a right to abortion, it is nothing less than the power to end the life of her unborn child that guarantees a woman her humanity—that is, the autonomy befitting her status as man’s equal. That is a denial of what really makes us human: our natural dependence upon, and obligations towards, one another.

Searching for the Why: Introducing the Hippocratic Forum

Two doctors

What is lacking in modern medical training is a community of fellow trainees collectively committed to a rich, morally robust view of medicine and the physician’s place in it. This is what the Hippocratic Forum seeks to provide.

Losing Our Fertility

Woman crying

The great paradox of late-stage feminism is that it attempts to establish women on equal footing with men by robbing them of their life-giving nature. It’s time to reject this damaging and dangerous lie. Fertility is not a limitation. It is a gift.

Dante’s Hell and Our Humanity

Statue of Dante

My students and I—orthodox Jews at Yeshiva University—found something more profound than mere gore in Dante’s textual bequest to posterity. His hell provided us something that we could never find in his Purgatory or Paradise. For us, the Inferno’s true contribution was not its penal landscape of scorched sands and steaming pitch. On the contrary, what stirred us most was his evident concern for our humanity.

The Limitations of Economic Analysis in the Church

Cross on dollar bill reading "In God we trust"

The economics of the kingdom of God is gift. This is the difficulty with applying contemporary economics to the Church. None of us are consumers. We have received that which we did not deserve. We are not purchasing a darned thing. Salvation is bestowed in the Church as grace, as a gift, that is offered to all men and women.

The Danger of “Manifest Truth” Politics

Protest sign saying "I am Pro-Truth"

If we understand that truth is inherently tentative and provisional and acknowledge that we must cultivate intellectual humility, we could mitigate many of the worst repercussions of social media on politics.

In Defense of Motherhood: What’s Wrong with “Birthing People”

Mother and child

That motherhood and childhood begin in pregnancy is highly embarrassing to liberal anthropology. The physical and genealogical dependence of children on their parents attacks the thesis that we are isolated individuals rather than members of families that precede and survive us.

Fostering a Culture of Academic Integrity in Our Business Schools

Students cheating by passing notes

Our schools of business should be places where the whole academic community, which includes administrators, faculty, and the students themselves, can work together towards educating tomorrow’s business leaders, cultivating the very best in them. We should not allow the cheating subculture’s self-righteous and narcissistic agenda to undermine the higher quest for excellence.

The Supreme Court Should Look At International Abortion Law and Overrule Roe v. Wade

After almost fifty years of abortion jurisprudence, the US Supreme Court has an opportunity to overrule the arbitrary viability standard, to expand states’ ability to regulate pre-viability abortions, and to narrow down Doe’s unconscionable definition of health. International and foreign law on abortion can provide legal support for such a ruling.

The Bookshelf: Literature and Identity—Especially Sexual Identity

Man and woman at book shop

There may indeed be a case for distinguishing the “female voice” and the “male voice” in literature. But don’t let anyone sell you on the false essentialism of a necessary “identity” of a writer with his or her principal subject, whether it be an identity of sex, or race, or culture.

Should Christians Claim Religious Exemption from Mask Mandates?

Mask on a bible

Religious freedom is not a get-out-of-jail-free card that lets us evade whatever laws we dislike. Nowhere does the Bible hint that we have the individual authority to examine all laws, determine which are good and which are not, and select, à la carte, which are binding and which are not.

In Defense of the Boomers

Boomers sitting in a park

The determination to make one’s own way in life is what marks out the difference between those who make the best of what they have and seek to improve things for themselves and others, and those who instead diminish themselves by blaming the Baby Boomers for what they don’t like about their lives.