American Will: Going against the Grain
George Will’s latest book offers a tough, optimistic, and thoughtful summary of American public life over the past decade or so, while also serving as a powerful rebuke to pessimists on both the left and the right.
Gender Dysphoria and Adverse Childhood Experiences
The way out of rushing to surgical interventions lies in acknowledging that transgender identification has deep roots in the psyche and evaluating gender distress through the lens of adverse childhood experiences.
The Speech of the Century: Remembering Teddy Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena”
The recent anniversary of Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” speech provides an opportunity to reflect on the enduring relevance of his insights into the role of virtue and action in education, the importance of family life that is ordered towards the creation and formation of the next generation, and the need to build political community based on truth and integrity.
The One and Only Pro-Life Argument
The focus of pro-life advocacy should always be on the fact that the unborn child is a human being, with a moral status equal to a born child, and not on distractions about social policy, sexual ethics, or other rights claims that overlook this biological reality.
Unsettled Science
In a carefully researched and insightful book, Steven Koonin highlights the significant uncertainty underlying climate models and statistics, the limits of technical and political responses, and the need to reassert the core values of scientific independence and integrity that drive social progress.
The Right to a Dead Baby? Abortion, Ableism, and the Question of Autonomy
How we treat imperiled newborns—not only after a failed abortion attempt, but also in a more traditional NICU setting—is essential for fully grasping the current understanding of the right to abortion. When we examine the central role ableism plays in both sets of issues, thinking about them together provides an anti-ableist critique that has important implications for both prenatal and neonatal justice.
Sex and Gender Ideology in New Jersey’s K–12 Curriculum
New Jersey’s sample lessons for K–12 state-required sexual orientation and gender identity instruction sparked parental outrage. The sample curriculum contradicts basic biology, offers age-inappropriate lessons about sexual abuse, and imposes an LGBTQ religion on public school children. Nonetheless, New Jersey parents still have the power to influence what happens in the classroom.
The Catholic Controversy over Conscience in the 20th Century
Matthew Levering’s book offers an intellectual history of a complex question in Catholic moral theology, one that recovers a biblical and Thomistic view of conscience as a limited concept within Christian moral life as a whole.
The Christian Roots of Good Old-Fashioned American Individualism
Social conservatives used to have a much more nuanced understanding of the development of modern liberalism out of the medieval Christian world. Our insistence on individual immortality, an idea hammered home by the almost preposterous teaching of the resurrection of the body, ought to make Christians dyed-in-the-wool individualists.
A Post-Roe Legislative Agenda for Congress
In the event that Roe v. Wade is overturned this summer, pro-life legislators must act to protect human life in the womb. They should introduce legislation to recognize the personhood of the unborn, strip the ability of federal courts to hear challenges to this recognition, create a private right of action to help enforce anti-abortion policy, and use the taxing power to cripple the abortion industry.
Ukraine’s Holy Week Like No Other
As Ukraine is being crucified by the enemy, millions of its people go through the same experience of darkness and a sense of the absence of God as Jesus did on the cross. Let us not doubt that God is with the suffering and that his truth, peace, and love will prevail.
The Bookshelf: Classic Hollywood’s Religious Uplift Project
The Hollywood “religious epic” movie genre of the postwar period was all about uplift, toleration, and offending exactly no one. Though entertaining at its best and an important part of the story of America’s rising pluralism, this genre proved finally to be too anodyne and unable to do justice to Scripture or the life of the early Church.
Prophets of the Radical Right
In a highly accessible and timely new book, Matthew Rose reflects on the criticisms of liberalism of five key thinkers on the “radical right.” He argues carefully and convincingly that, while often morally objectionable and politically utopian, their insights into the failures of liberalism need to be reckoned with by those who wish to preserve the global liberal order.
Free Exercise and Conservative Judicial Overreach
During the Covid-19 pandemic, some judicial conservatives have eschewed the virtue of constraint in favor of an ahistorical and excessively libertarian notion of the free exercise of religion. To achieve the correct balance between liberty and order, and to prevent activist judges granting religious exemptions in areas outside of their expertise, conservatives should return to a more realistic view of the limited role of the courts in the regulation of religious practices.
How Digital Media Helped Shape the “Modern Self”
Are Big Tech and social media entirely to blame for the triumphs of the erotic, the therapeutic, and the transgender? Of course not. But there is no question the dominant social media companies have seriously contributed to these trends.
Black American Identity, Family, and Religion: An Interview with Glenn Loury
Racial disparity is really only a derivative result of the larger social abandonment of a set of norms which manifests itself most immediately and most severely in the African American population, but which really is a larger question for all Americans.
Equality without Freedom: When Genetic Determinism Meets Progressivism
In her recent book The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden makes flawed assumptions about the nature of moral agency and generalizes about how people value social status.
Is Democratic Debate Dead?
These days, major debates on the floor of the Senate and House of Representatives are exceedingly rare. For members of Congress to behave as proper legislators, the institution as a whole should be reformed. Members must strike a new bargain with leadership in both chambers that gives them the space to debate and legislate. We should expect more of Congress, and members of Congress should expect more of each other.
How Teacher Unions Failed Students during the Pandemic
Powerful unions such have represented teachers’ interests for decades. The COVID-19 pandemic has made clearer than ever the total dissonance between what teachers’ unions want and what’s best for students. During the pandemic, unions forced many schools to stay closed, ignored students’ needs, and severely disrupted learning.
How China Is Taking Over Hollywood
In 2020, China became the world’s number one box-office market. For years, the Chinese Communist Party has been using this economic leverage to shape the content of American movies.
