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Pillar

Education & Culture

The fourth pillar, education and culture, is built upon the recognition of two essential realities. First, the Western intellectual tradition requires a dedication to and desire for truth. Second, education takes place not only within colleges and universities but within our broader culture, whose institutions and practices form us as whole persons.

What Conservatives, Catholics, and All Americans Can Learn from Israel 

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Israel flag

What Conservatives, Catholics, and All Americans Can Learn from Israel 

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As the experience of many nations around the world shows, constitutions are easily dissolved, and constitutional order lost, when citizens allow their leaders to violate their charter to achieve partisan goals. When that happens, the delicate system of checks and balances usually gives way to an oppressive one-party rule. 
bookshelf

The Bookshelf: Taking an Incomplete

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Readers, respect not the friends, critics, or even the judgments of posterity that insist on a book’s greatness. Enjoy what you read, and if you’re not enjoying yourself, stop, close the book, and go read something else.
the Aeneid

A Spiritual Aeneid

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Readers will find in this book an insightful and witty commentary, suitable both for the serious student of the poem and for the layman reading it in translation. If it encourages anyone to read Virgil with fresh eyes or for the first time, it will have served its purpose.  
Church

Christian Institutions in a New World

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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.
Dawson

Religion and Revolution: Christopher Dawson and the “Great Awokening”

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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.
The Vatican

Across the Divide: M. Ciftci and Nathaniel Peters on Vatican II, Church–State Relations, and Political Participation 

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Christians should always make the best of any pragmatic agreements they can find with non-Christians on any issue. But the evangelical reasons why we support, for instance, constitutional government should be made clear, not veiled in embarrassment by translating them into the idiom of natural law or human dignity out of a misguided concern to avoid blurring the boundaries between political and religious affairs.
anxious kid

Taking The Anxious Generation Further

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Haidt’s work points us toward reclaiming childhood. Let’s go further and reclaim our humanity.
college dropoff

Empty Nests, Then and Now

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If anyone older than Homer used the bird’s nest motif in a figurative sense, I have been unable to find it. His evocative imagery may seem familiar to modern readers, but this is deceptive insofar as it makes us think of the changes on the horizon for the parents whose primary child-rearing responsibilities are complete.
Evangelicalism

Megan Basham’s Civil War

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My interest is not in striking a blow either for or against Basham and the like-minded folks who feel empowered and justified by her claims. Rather, I want to talk about why I think the book is important and how a more expansive framework might help us understand the strife and atmosphere of suspicion more accurately. 
back to school

Back to School: A Roundup of Our Top Essays on Education and Culture

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Here are our editors' favorite essays on education, liberal arts, the university, and flourishing in college and in life.
Robert E Lee

Propriety without Principle: The Cautionary Tale of Robert E. Lee

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Robert E. Lee perhaps tried to be a gentleman, but his moral principles were weak. Therefore, when the flood of war came, he compromised with evil, then piled sin upon sin, as the rebellion’s corrupting logic swept away more and more of his moral foundations.
intellectual life

The Dream World of Modern Intellectuals

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Our age appears to be in full rebellion against God and His Creation. And since we are creatures, even against our own nature. Ingratitude is thus the cardinal sin of our time.  
Red Square in Moscow

Waiting for Sharansky

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As we unwittingly imitate the worst of Soviet culture, we need deliberately to imitate the best as well.
reading poetry

The Bookshelf: Waxing Poetic with A. M. Juster

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Our postmodern academy is never going to bring back traditional prosody on its own, so we should probably be thinking hard about how to use the Internet to bring the traditional tools of English poetry back to the people.
Israel

Anti-Semitic Students and Jewish Isolationism

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From the river to the sea, human flourishing will only be advanced through a nuanced and empathetic attitude to both sides. Radical stances that dehumanize one side, turning its babies into colonizers and marking them as legitimate targets for attack, do not advance freedom or justice. Quite the opposite.
Fairmont, WV

Putting Public Colleges on a Path to Privatization

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Postsecondary education in the United States needs the discipline of the market. Putting all public colleges and universities on a path to privatization—and, eventually, removing all forms of public subsidy—is how to get there.
Mary Poppins

Mary Poppins Feminism

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As I revisited the familiar lyrics from my childhood, I noticed new themes and deeper meanings. To my surprise, I soon reached the unlikely conclusion that this classic family film has much to teach us about women, work, and feminism.
poetry

An Unhappy Marriage of Poetry and Philosophy

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Cosmic Connections has intermittent charms. Those blessings were not sufficient, however, to justify the time and effort necessary to read the book.
ideology

What Is Ideology? A Conversation with Mark Shiffman and James Matthew Wilson

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Ideology replaces respect for the dignity of the human person with celebration of a new humanity required for its perfected social and political order.
Summer camp

Summer Camp: An Ailing American Institution

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The original rationale for summer camp is more valid than ever. Young people are struggling with mental health, addiction to technology, disconnection from the body, isolation, and many other painful realities. Summer camps cannot fix these problems. But for many adolescents, the experience of traditional summer camps might help them see that life is about more than accomplishment, and that is a start.
bookshelf

The Bookshelf: Old Voices and New Alliances

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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.
romanticism

Romanticism Light and Dark: A Response to Margarita Mooney Clayton

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Whatever our centuries of godless materialism and scientism have alleged, the cosmos still is enchanted, inasmuch as it was and is being created, even now, by a loving and surpassingly mysterious God. To tell the truth is to admit that this cosmos bears his fingerprints, opening out into blinding wonder and moments of ineffable transcendence.
summer reading list

The Public Discourse Summer Reading List: 2024

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Here's what our editors are reading this summer.
English major

Don’t Major in English: And Other Bad Advice from the World

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Education should rehumanize us. In higher education, with the guidance of professors and mentors and elders, we should move through Homer, Newton, Wordsworth, Du Bois, O’Connor, and be transformed by our love for the good, true, and beautiful, into the person we are meant to be.
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