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Search Results for: social justice – Page 4

John Haldane has reminded social conservatives in America of important political and moral truths, but he overlooks the necessity of engaging in partisan politics with eyes wide open to political realities.
What does the future hold for social conservatives in America? A British professor of philosophy writes to offer the advice of a friendly outsider: Don’t delude yourself into thinking the 2008 election was not a repudiation of the Bush administration, and keep in mind that aligning social conservatism too closely with either political party may prove fatal.
For the nineteenth-century Italian Jesuit Luigi Taparelli, social justice is not about redistributive justice by government fiat. Nor is it linked to some idea of absolute social or economic equality, as in progressive parlance. Instead, social justice according to Taparelli must be grounded in the principle of subsidiarity and linked to a theological understanding of economics.
My generation feels obligated to constrain our footprint in the name of social justice. I reject this. I cannot promise my children perfect comfort or safety in the world. But I can make their world—our home, our lives, our family—a mooring when everything else is guaranteed to be perpetually confused.
Since our founding, Public Discourse has sought to promote an approach to economics that focused on the common good. From early essays from our Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Ryan T. Anderson, on a natural law vision of social justice (the subject of his dissertation), to more recent essays from Senator Marco Rubio on the dignity of work and from our Editor, Serena Sigilito, on economic policy and childcare, Public Discourse has been a venue for conservative thinkers to explore how to best understand the relationship of the market and human flourishing. Here is a small sample of some of those early essays and more recent ones from the past year.
The fortieth anniversary of the Jonestown massacre should remind us to beware of utopian causes with totalitarian methods, on either political extreme. Though they promise social justice, they only deliver deadly power.
It’s time for Christians to partner with conservative Muslims and others who share traditional views on key social issues. And American Muslims should leave behind their lockstep alliance with the social justice left.
Sustainability encompasses not only a particularly aggressive form of environmentalism, but also a strong attack on market capitalism and a progressive vision of social justice.
The Occupy Movement should be an occasion for the American left to rethink its own moral crusades, which turn out to be morally corrosive and hence incompatible with any serious commitment to social justice.
Rawlsian “public reason” approaches to human capabilities are insufficient bases for social justice.
Al-Gharbi argues that the central social function of wokeness is not the pursuit of social equality, but the empowerment of the professional class and its own defense of inequality.
In their denominations and elsewhere in the church, some progressive Baby Boomers have been caught by surprise at younger people not sharing their cultural values. But should they have been surprised at this generational rift in the church? Looking at how different generations have been formed morally, socially, and culturally may help address this question.
If the purpose is to change the world, not merely to describe it, as Marx’s famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach claims, then here we see something of what that means: the critique of religion is not simply for the purpose of demystifying or disenchanting the world. Rather, it is part of changing the world, of tearing down the illusions by which men and women shield themselves from having to face reality.
Smith's book is an excellent reminder that conservatives should never prioritize an idealized individual or nation. Rather, we must work to preserve those institutions that point us to better lives.
Like all secular revolutionary movements of the modern age, wokeism is a religion in denial. We will only put an end to the cycle of violent political revolution if we return to the Christian religion that gave birth to our civilization.
Regoli’s book reminds us that the Holy Spirit is constantly at work—that the Church has overcome numerous crises, including in the recent past.
As we unwittingly imitate the worst of Soviet culture, we need deliberately to imitate the best as well.
Conservatives, who sometimes can be seen as wanting to turn the clock much farther back than the last decade, will need to identify ways of applying core principles in ways that avoid falling into sheer revanchism. Old-fashioned liberals who wish to recover a circa 2013 version of the Democratic Party will have to lay out what, exactly, they would change to prevent the same cultural trends from playing out all over again.
While we continue to seek ways to extend robust legal protection to prenatal children and to persuade our pro-choice brothers and sisters that such laws are necessary to forge a truly just society, we should all be able to come together to stop unwanted abortion. 
Lamenting the violations of our past and celebrating the achievements of the present, the ancillary role of DEI would serve to exalt personhood and the communion of culturally rich community without qualification as the life of any institution.
Francis of Assisi teaches us that those who want to embrace the joys of this life must also embrace suffering. Our forgetfulness of this truth could explain the current crisis of our civilization.
We do not need more self-conscious crusaders for the nation or even for Western Civilization, but instead more priests, teachers, businessmen, artists, writers, and parents who perform their own activities faithfully, serving—to borrow a phrase from Russell Kirk—as “leaven for the whole lump.”
John Guillory’s Professing Criticism is a thorough and complex work of scholarship. It’s also a bracing call for literary scholars to significantly reform how they think about their profession, and its relationship to their students and reading public in general. At its core is a challenge that is simultaneously reasonable and radical: professors of literary study must be more modest in their aims and promises to suit the realities of their field in the twenty-first century.
If we take seriously Thomas Kelly’s ideas about bias blind spots, then we should seek public universities composed of a high degree of biased parts. Such universities would intentionally hire faculty members and administrators who harbor contrary views on divisive cultural issues. This would probably create campuses that can boast of having teaching and scholarship that have much less pejorative bias than their peer institutions.