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That’s really what I want out of this whole project: for us to see that it’s all saying something, whether it’s a cheesy T-shirt, or a simple country church building, or a medieval cathedral. I want us to really pay attention and ask, “What is it saying? What is true and good and beautiful in what it’s saying, and what is not?”
Modern life in the United States is atomizing, lonely, and hard on family bonds. Improving the housing stock would help alleviate these challenges.
Being pro-family must also mean being pro-housing reform. If we want more neighborhood children playing in our front yards, we should be pushing their elected officials to make it easier for developers to build, baby, build.
A book in its entirety, once given to the world, is a kind of integer, a whole from which nothing should be subtracted if it is to remain what it is.
Before modern economists claimed a monopoly on the topic of scarcity, philosophers, artists, and theologians spent centuries arguing over the nature and limits of our desires.
Prioritizing support to homemakers who care for children and the elderly is not only the right thing to do—it’s also a smart economic decision for the federal government.
Rather than sandlot games and diving contests, June is, for us, a month of contested visions about the body, about sex, gender, race, birth, and death. Perhaps the poet was wrong in declaring April the cruelest month—perhaps that title should go to June. 
People of all faiths have heard enough talk about children’s “bodily autonomy,” or their supposed ability to express informed consent. As we are witnessing, mothers and fathers remain a powerful bastion of reason in our new post-gender turn, because they display with and in and through their bodies the reality that Roe sought to hide or ignore.
Any talk about masculinity today can easily veer into predictable patterns: a left that paints with uncritically broad brushes, and a right that gets defensive and in the process dumbs down its beliefs. But Richard Reeves’s book Of Boys and Men avoids predictability, blending statistical insight and easygoing wit to craft a fruitful exploration of male malaise.
Juneteenth, coming as it does just weeks before July Fourth, provides a perfect opportunity for us—both individually and collectively—to engage in a season of contemplating and celebrating the complexities and nuances, highs and lows, of this American experiment that has at its core the achievement of freedom.
We align with people who are pro-reality, who respect core community values such as truth and honesty, and who see the human being as a whole: body and soul. There is no metaphysical “gendered soul” separate from the body. Teaching body dissociation to kids (“born in the wrong body”) has led to a tidal wave of self-hatred, body dysmorphia, depression, anxiety, and self-harm.
While the medieval world was enchanted, the modern world in which we dwell is disenchanted. A disenchanted age is not necessarily characterized by complete repudiation of the supernatural. Rather, it is characterized by a fundamental shift in the function of the supernatural. At the heart of this disenchantment for Charles Taylor is not the traditional science-versus-religion narrative. Instead, he sees the key as being a transformation in the way in which the self is understood.
Over the past several decades, our civilization has experimented with a number of alternatives to faithful marriage. Yet the evidence is abundant that from a personal as well as a public perspective, we are most likely to flourish when faithful, monogamous, natural-law marriages are plentiful and the norm.
In The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer successfully refute the still (somehow) influential interpretation of the American Founding as a secular-not-Christian project. However, they do so without successfully establishing their preferred alternative, the Christian-not-secular interpretation. There is a vast middle between these two extremes whose existence slips through the authors’ fingers again and again like a well-greased elephant.
Nature has to be understood and respected for people to be happy.
My death will most likely come from a side effect of one of the medications I’m on to keep my body from rejecting my transplanted lungs. This makes some recipients resentful or angry, as seen in a recent New York Times op-ed by Amy Silverstein. She and I received the gift of a healthier and longer life when we received our transplants. The medications that she’s decrying are the ones that have kept her—and me—alive. These years are an inexpressible gift.
If The Nursery is a tale of motherhood, it is only a half-truth. Yes, giving birth to a child will leave you sleep deprived and emotional and physically scarred. That’s only half of the story.
In The Myth of Left and Right, Hyrum and Verlan Lewis certainly succeed in proving to the reader that the pieces within each ideological bundle have shifted over time and do not inevitably go together, but they go well beyond that in concluding that each coalition’s bundle is fundamentally random. Though labels and coalitions may be quite movable, at any given time (including now) ideological identifications can tell us something intelligible about our politics.
“Wokeism” is akin to an attempt to extend the professor’s authority over students to the rest of society. But this strategy will only have limited success: students are ready to listen and be convinced by their professors, but most of society doesn’t regard itself as pupils to the woke Left. True revolutionaries do not need to borrow authority from institutions, because they have the power to take what they want from their unconsenting enemy. The woke Left, whether we want to admit it or not, and whether it is itself conscious of it or not, has no such power.
Religiosity will rear its head in one way or another. If you are religious, you’ve wagered your life on particular and exclusive claims about who God is, what kind of world we’re in, and the kind of creatures we are. These stakes are impossibly high, and sensible political communities will vigilantly safeguard the sacred from the encroachment of politics.
Leo Strauss was an extraordinarily generous writer, by which I mean that he went to great pains to present the best case he could for the arguments of a serious thinker with whom he disagreed, before offering any tentative critique of that thinker. One never finds in his writings mere polemic or straw men. He invites the reader to take seriously and try fully to understand and spell out the serious and deepest thoughts of those whose thought he is confronting, even if he disagrees.
The “equality” that uncritical feminism proposes and that women settle for is the equal opportunity to be like the worst kind of man. And everyone benefits, it seems, except women themselves.
An honest reckoning with women’s interests today calls on us to reject the cyborg vision of sexless, fungible homunculi piloting re-configurable meat suits. The cyborg era began with women, and women must reclaim the power to say “no.” In its place, we can pioneer a new but ancient moral consensus. We can lead the charge for solidarity between the sexes.
Fred Kaplan’s new biography of Thomas Jefferson, His Masterly Pen, gives us the Jefferson we deserve: Jefferson the writer, the listener, and the aesthete.