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If we want to rebuild our country, we must rebuild our local communities. To rebuild communities, we must rebuild a culture of reasoned discourse.
Bernie Sanders has done a favor for conservatives. He has highlighted the harm that a bloated and unaccountable federal government can cause. In doing so, he has provided an opportunity for conservatives to build a strong alliance with millennials.
The Supreme Court has long channeled the views of a very particular sort of religious and elite class interest in its Establishment Clause jurisprudence concerning religious displays. Cases like American Legion v. American Humanist Association suggest that it is—gradually and haltingly, but nevertheless steadily—withdrawing from this field of cultural combat.
If fertility declines because child mortality is falling, then almost any moral system would encourage most people to accept the trade-off. But if fertility is falling because Western countries promote a set of cultural narratives telling women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that children are antithetical to a happy life, that the lifeways of their national communities are outdated and backwards, and that cultural legitimacy comes from emulating the family patterns of white Westerners, then there may be strong reasons to reject this model.
Terry Eagleton attempts to offer us a gentle revolution, a soft “transition” from Catholicism to Marxism. This is as theoretically and theologically impossible as it is historically unprecedented. Any “radical sacrifice” on anything other than God’s terms will lead to mass bloodshed and human suffering, as it has whenever and wherever such a project has been tried before.
Without a Christian framework, but with a strong sense of sin, seemingly minor wrongs and slights are seen as representative expressions of the injustices of society as a whole. But there is no one to grant absolution to the repentant, or to redeem the world from its fallen state. Each wrong is indelible, and so there is only sin and punishment. Forgiveness becomes impossible when every discrete wrong is bundled into a secularized version of original sin.
If the status quo is the end game for conservatives, then there can never be hope for a long-term political victory, only momentary setbacks to the progressive agenda. The victories of social progressivism have less to do with the ideology of the founding than the moral failure of men and women in every generation to stop evil from progressing.
If we are to correct the wayward course of contemporary democratic societies, we must preserve what is true and good and mitigate what is false and harmful in both liberalism and nationalism. We would do well to embrace core principles of the Anglo-American constitutional tradition—principles grounded in and sustained by the virtue of prudence.
When something as natural and ordered as erotic love is no longer being pursued, there is something deeply wrong with our society. Kate Julian’s Atlantic article “Why are Young People Having So Little Sex?” presents incontrovertible evidence that the experiment of “free love” without consequences, based solely on pleasure, has failed.
If by “objectivity” we mean approaching social research with no pre-commitments and no need for interpretive work, then true objectivity is impossible. Still, sociology should not be merely a vehicle for enacting a particular moral and political vision. It should be the systematic, disciplined pursuit of the truth about human social life.
Given our splintered, irresolute wills, Alan Jacobs’s concept of thinking that “we can do better,” even if “we ought to,” is not enough. It’s going to take more than hope and a checklist.
American Muslims must seek to preserve the American constitutional settlement against encroachments by totalitarian secularism because doing so means preserving what remains of a civilizational order that proceeds from belief in God.
If there is one thing that the prophets of egalitarian ideology cannot abide, it is the true and sincere believer in normativity—the person who judges that we are, each and every one of us, beholden to exercise our freedom in keeping with a higher law.
Keith Whittington’s new book, Speak Freely, is both a warning and a call to action. When it comes to offering a cogent, nuanced defense of the academic value of free speech, now is not the time to be quiet.
A full vision of the social structures of human flourishing must include three elements: the economic, political, and moral-cultural.
Because liberal Western democracies are ostensibly rooted in the theory of popular sovereignty, elite disdain for the people creates another legitimation crisis—one that many fail to recognize. It is not simply that the people have lost confidence in the elites and their governance, or that the elites struggle to speak for (and even to) the people. Disdain for the people also unmoors elite authority.
Canada takes pride in being a progressive nation, but our government is relying on the same tired excuses for religious discrimination that the United States Supreme Court dismissed more than fifty years ago.
Reading recommendations from The Witherspoon Institute staff. 
What Harvey Weinstein is accused of is wrong not only because the victims did not consent but also and more importantly because of what he chose. Sex expresses self-gift, which is why it is such a violation when something that should only be a free gift is stolen by force.
More than ever, religiously informed conservatives should underscore the importance of market economies for ordered liberty.
Defenders of capitalism need a more humane anthropology, sensitive to man’s social and communal nature, lest they forget to ask the crucial question of what economics is for.
If conservatives want to seriously help address issues related to Islam, the Muslim world, and encounters with the West, they need to escape their narrow information networks.
Commercial surrogacy is the ultimate manifestation of the American neoliberal project of capitalist commodification of human life to create profit and fulfill the narcissistic desires of an entitled elite.
For Christians who wish to restore our society, the writings of Leo XIII and Abraham Kuyper can provide a set of guiding principles.