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From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, September 2023

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Prayer around family table

The Meaning of Home

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Our culture tends to conceive of the home in material terms, and the process of moving generates an endless list of practical questions. But it’s worth challenging this reductive view and reflecting more deeply on the nature and purpose of home, because home is where our life unfolds. Home is where we learn how to be ourselves and how to relate to others, prior to approaching big questions about politics and law, business and economics, or war and peace.
family, sun, children

Three Tasks After Roe

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If Roe falls, there will be difficult legal and political struggles, but three other areas will demand our thought, effort, and perseverance—engaging with those on the other side of the argument, developing pro-family policy, and protecting parental rights. In this Featured Collection from the Public Discourse archives, we revisit some excellent articles on these themes.
Photo of mom and baby

Moms and Community

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As we look forward to celebrating all the moms we know and love on Mother’s Day, it’s also worth remembering that motherhood doesn’t happen in a vacuum. While the bond between mother and child is unique, there are webs of other human relationships upon which moms depend—fathers most importantly, but also extended friends, family, employers, faith communities, and even political bodies.
Flower

Notes on Hope

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As spring settles in, with ball games and tulips and dogwoods in bloom, it pays to turn off the news, to ignore the blather and chatter and anger. We should remember that we conservatives are deeply at home in the goodness of the world. There is a season for everything, including a season of hopefulness for life and its promise.
Military Helicopters flying over war zone

Wars and Justice

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Like all human things, war ought to be ordered by law and moral norms. In these selections from the Public Discourse archives, we see neither arguments for or against war, nor policy prescriptions on options for Ukraine, but first principles are never irrelevant.
Supreme Court building

Supreme Court Nominations: A Primer to President Biden

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Public Discourse has hosted arguments about the Court since the publication’s inception. Here, from our archives, are some essays which remain timely, and which might provide some needed perspective on the role of the Court, originalism, and the role of morality and natural law in the Court.
Mom and baby sleeping

Sterilizing Hope

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We’ve thought about children quite a bit at Public Discourse, and in this Featured Collection recall previous essays on the theme. No one here pretends that having children is easy, or inexpensive, or endless bliss. Yet, we also know that marriage and having children ought not be quickly rejected.
Alasdaire MacIntyre photo

Justice, Dignity, and Alasdair MacIntyre

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It’s not enough, according to MacIntyre’s recent Notre Dame lecture, to argue for the dignity of the unborn as a property they possess if the economic and social conditions of our society make it difficult for them to maintain their dignity after they’re born. In this Featured Collection, I trust you’ll find some helpful commentary on issues which must be pondered if one wishes to understand MacIntyre’s argument.
Woman writing

Eight Years at Public Discourse: A Grateful Retrospective

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At the end of this month, Serena Sigillito will step down from her current role as editor to a new, more auxiliary role as editor-at-large. To mark the occasion, here is collection of nine essays, one from each calendar year of her tenure at PD, that were particularly formative for her.
Many small American flags

Twenty Years Later: Remembering 9/11

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9/11 was not really so long ago, and we live with its effects still. Today, we remember and grieve, but we continue to think and to act. Nothing will relieve us of that duty until the end of days.

Freedom and the Human Person

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Fireoworks

Pity, Piety, and Patriotic Love for Our Imperfect Nation

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