fbpx
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Search
Close this search box.
Search Results For:

Search Results for: snell – Page 3

Military Helicopters flying over war zone

Wars and Justice

By
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.
Two open books stacked

The Bookshelf: A Little Help from My Friends

By
Anyone who has spent his life in the academy, as I have, has reason to keep his mind open and his interests broad—namely, friends who write. My professional association over the last dozen years with the Witherspoon Institute and Princeton’s James Madison Program has introduced me to a dazzling array of brilliant and productive minds. No, I don’t want my writing friends to stop. They have given me much to ponder, and I look forward to what they will all write next.
Supreme Court building

Supreme Court Nominations: A Primer to President Biden

By
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.
William of Ockham stained glass image

Theorists of the Poison Pill

By
For the conservative theorists of the poison pill, everything becomes about ideas. According to them, Ockham, Scotus, Bacon, Descartes, Locke—they are the important bad guys who determined the decadence of our time and the problems we should be talking about. But ideas don’t work this way; reality does not proceed with perfect logic like it so conveniently does in the textbooks.
Antique books on shelf

New, Old, and Obscure: Public Discourse’s 2021 Book List

By and
Reading recommendations from The Witherspoon Institute’s staff.
Mom and baby sleeping

Sterilizing Hope

By
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.
Library of Congress

Public Discourse and the Need for Reason, Good Government, and Moral Realism

By
The texts I reflect on illuminate core themes of Public Discourse’s work: cultivating a proper understanding of reason, appreciating the indispensability of moral formation, and framing law around eternal moral truths. I was deeply honored and delighted when R. J. Snell and the current editorial team invited me to join them as a contributing editor, and I look forward to more conversations to come.
Alasdaire MacIntyre photo

Justice, Dignity, and Alasdair MacIntyre

By
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

By
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.
Dome of United States Congress

Lockdowns, Mandates, and Conservatives: Remembering the Good of Government

By
Given the overreach of government, and perhaps especially given the failure of so many elected officials to remember that they do not rule us, it’s all too easy to slip into libertarianism by default. But government is not alien or unnatural to our condition and needs. It emerges from the community’s associations, affections, bonds, and mutual sense of self-responsibility.
School hallway

Public Education and Liberal Neutrality

By
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.
International flags

Nationalism and Civility from a Medieval Perspective

By
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.
Many small American flags

Twenty Years Later: Remembering 9/11

By
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.

Natural Law and American Civil Rights Movements

By
It was on the foundation of St. Augustine’s natural law theory, then, that Martin Luther King, Jr. discovered the grounds of civil disobedience: “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of Harmony with the moral law.” Nor did he stop there. He invoked Aquinas, Martin Buber, Socrates, Tillich, and Niebuhr (among other authorities) to establish that the claim he defended was not a parochial claim merely derived from majority rule. To defend civil rights for black people meant to prove that “segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful.”

American Constitutions: Natural Law and Constitution-Making in the Founding Era

By
In order to understand the role of natural law in the American founding, it is helpful to examine the early state constitutions that preceded the US Constitution. Not only did many of them explicitly recognize natural rights as pre-political rights to which all individuals are entitled, they also proclaimed all political power to be inherent in the people, governments to be legitimate only insofar as they secure these rights and are grounded in popular authority, and, therefore, that the people have an inalienable right to reform or abolish such governments that fail or cease to serve these ends.

Natural Law and the Declaration of Independence

By
To those who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, political liberty and natural law went together: Nature summons man, individually and collectively, to self-government and guides him in the exercise of his power of choice.

Natural Law and the Colonial Roots of American Constitutionalism

By
Natural law thinking profoundly shaped the way American and British leaders approached issues involving rights, sovereignty, and constitutional government. However, the imperial authorities and their colonial opponents often appealed to different, and even conflicting, strains of the natural law tradition.

Common Law and the Law of Reason

By
Like cousins who resemble one another, common law and natural law are sometimes confused. There is in fact a deep affinity between common law and natural law, but it is better at the outset to describe their differences, and best to do this historically.

The Protestant Reformers and the Natural Law Tradition

By
However deeply entrenched the natural law’s neglect or opposition is among today’s Protestants, it cannot be attributed to the magisterial Reformers of the sixteenth century. Although it is decidedly true that they championed a particular understanding of grace and faith that took issue with their Roman Catholic counterparts, this was not to the exclusion of other vehicles of divine agency. Rather, they assumed the natural law as a part of the fabric of the created order and therein maintained continuity with those across the Reformation divide.

The Natural Law Theory of Thomas Aquinas

By
Law, of its various sorts, has a role to play in humans’ full realization of their nature by free acts. What role? To ask this question is to seek to grasp Thomas’s natural law teaching in the context of his overall metaphysical cosmology.

Freedom’s Law: A Primer on Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism

By
All this week Public Discourse will be republishing select essays from "Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism," a project of the Witherspoon Institute that was made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities as part of its "We the People" initiative. At a time when we have called our traditions and history into question, we provide a primer into the history of our people and our ways of properly understanding freedom and the liberal order.

Lost in the Chaos: The Danger of Total Politics

By
Every human lives out the drama of existence in his or her way, and with great risk: they gain or lose heaven, embrace or reject love, bring a child into being or not, form friendships and romances or sink into loneliness, become sages or fools. If we forget or forgo the primacy of the person, choosing instead the story of power and chaos, it seems likely we’ll lose the cosmos of our own souls.

Freedom and the Human Person

By
Fireoworks

Pity, Piety, and Patriotic Love for Our Imperfect Nation

By
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Public Discourse © 2024 | All Rights Reserved