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mother and baby

Artificial Wombs Will Compound the Harm Reproductive Tech Inflicts on Children

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What should be at the forefront of everyone’s mind is the question, “How does all this technological tinkering affect the kids?” We are only beginning to be able to answer that question.
family

From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, March 2024

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The truth lurking inside the great morass of opinions, questions, and fears about the human condition is that a confluence of factors leads to greater personal, familial, and communal flourishing.
torn American flag

Sociology in the Age of Trump: The Clash of Deep Stories on the Left and Right

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If the stories can change, it stands to reason that they can improve—or deteriorate. Responsible cultural elites of the Left and Right alike would do well to consider not only what claims they make explicitly, but what kinds of stories underlie those claims, and whether these are the right stories to tell.
newborn

The Miracle That Saves the World

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Inviting people into joy, both then and now, means also inviting others into possible pain. We must embrace the joys with the sorrows to lead full, rich lives as human beings.
college students

A Third Voice: Protecting a Regime of Robust Speech on the Campus without Falling into Relativism

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We must be clear that nothing in the search for the truth entails that we recede in any way from the surety that we have with us, now as ever, the standards for judging evil ends to be truly evil.   
ethics advice column

Ask Chris Tollefsen: An Ethics Advice Column

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The parallel to vital conflict cases is clear: do not too quickly assume that death is inevitable. Do not too quickly assume that active rather than passive harm needs to be inflicted, even as a side effect.
crosses

A Kingship Not of This World

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Few instances in the life of Christianity’s founder exemplify his rejection of the use of force, even against those who break faith, than his treatment of the greatest apostate from Christianity, Judas, whose betrayal Christians remember today
redbud tree

Ordinary Time 

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To admire the world and other people, and especially to appreciate the ordinary things that make up our ordinary existence: this is worthwhile activity.
remote work

The Conservative Case for Remote Work

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If conservative organizations want to promote an economy that centers around the family, one that rebuilds the small town and restores a healthy culture, they need to do more than promote the right family policies and tax credits.
Israel-Hamas War

The West Has Forgotten Why Collateral Damage Is Morally Justified

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Ultimately, the defeat of these terrorist groups is the primary ethical imperative. This will benefit not only Israel but also the Gazan civilians who suffer longer under their terrorist leaders and the continuous warfare that they breed. There is a moral cost to not acting decisively, and a strategic cost to forgetting the moral justification for killing in war.
chastity

How to Think about Chastity

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Chastity is a way of being more holistically directed toward our happiness regardless of the desires and attractions we experience.
pregnancy and fertility

Problematizing Fertility, Normalizing Disease

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Our bodies cause great inconvenience. Nothing about menstruation, ovulation, or having children is convenient, after all. But it’s the way we were created, and there are better ways to respond to the sexual asymmetry of men and women. What are we losing out on if we suppress it?
newborn baby

Assigned at Birth?

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To assign is to flail and thrash about as we try to exert control over the uncontrollable. But to wait in the ultrasound office or in the delivery room to find out, to then share with others in this first discovery of our child’s identity, to delight equally in male and female, is to recover our fundamental vulnerability to the gifts given to us.
Religious freedom

Religious Freedom Deserves a Right of Its Own

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Religion is a basic good for all human beings everywhere, therefore religious freedom is a universal human right. It is neither unfair nor parochial, but a requirement of justice.
Poland
  • War

Poland, the War in Ukraine, and the Problem of Moral Rearmament

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A major problem is that in these dangerous times, without strength there will be no lasting peace.
from the editor's desk

From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, February 2024

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Reflections on right reason plus a roundup of this month's essays
free speech at universities

In Defense of Free Speech and the Mission of the University 

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If we were to adopt Yoram’s call for censorship in areas where I am calling for freedom of speech, I invite him—and you, gentle reader—to consider the following question: Would the result be anything other than the further entrenchment of current campus orthodoxies, and the further weakening of protection for dissent and dissenters?
IVF

Location, Location, Location

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Location is simply one more of those many factors that make no difference where the most foundational moral principles are concerned. The human embryo is a human being, whether in utero, undergoing cell division in vitro, or temporarily (or permanently) in frozen stasis in a “nursery,” as the Alabama Supreme Court tellingly, but somewhat ironically, calls it.
busy employee

Why Do We Valorize Busyness?

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That is the trap of busyness: believing that the busyness itself is what matters, instead of placing all our work and all our rest at the feet of our maker. That is the trap that the addiction to busyness in our culture lays for us. That is the trap that we ought to resist.
Catholic church interior

Can Catholic Integralism Be Good in Theory but Bad in Practice?

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If you want to boil this essay down into one question for the soft integralist, it is this: You say you don’t want integralism now, but if not now, when? Answering that question is harder than you think.
flying birds at sunset

Impossible but True? A Review of They Flew: A History of the Impossible by Carlos Eire

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Eire’s absorbing and impeccably researched book invites us to at least ponder that alternative balancing act while reminding us of historian Ethan Shagan’s apposite observation that “every era is credulous, but they are credulous in different ways.”
illusion

A Leftism of Illusion

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The stronger the truth the Left seeks to counteract, and the more irrational the fantasy it promotes, the larger and stronger the government it requires. Whether it will achieve its ends remains to be seen.
Israel ruins

Persecution and Israeli Academia

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Many academics, perhaps recognizing the extreme nature of such boycotts, justify them by caricaturing Israeli policies as comparable to Nazism. It is only by such extreme assertions that boycotts can justify themselves.
gender confusion

What’s at Stake in Sexual Difference? A Review of Trouble with Gender: Sex Facts, Gender Fictions by Alex Byrne

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Until everyone, including Byrne, sees that the point of gender ideology is to change our understanding of human being, our arguments and clarifications will ultimately be impotent.
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