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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.

God and Man at Yale at 75 

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Yale

God and Man at Yale at 75 

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In a postmodern and increasingly siloed society that now lacks any universal moral codes or even reference points, it isn’t clear that the value of humanity itself can be successfully defended—at Yale or anywhere else.  
abandoned soviet building

Postliberalism’s Rebellion Against Reality 

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It is good to oppose communism. It is not good to oppose communism out of support for clerical fascism. 
smartphone

The Bookshelf: A Post-Literate Age? 

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The New Dark Ages, which I hope will be widely read, is a brief, brisk, and persuasive book about the damage our screen life is doing to our social and political life. He puts the matter starkly in his introduction: “As reading fades I believe that we may find ourselves facing a post-literate future that resembles the pre-literate past: mystical, tribal, and autocratic.”
Robots and job interview

The Virtue of Letting Skills Die 

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AI will make many cognitive techniques obsolete, and preserving them for their own sake would mistake difficulty for formation. Schools and workplaces should instead preserve or rebuild the learning functions that cultivate judgment, prudence, and human agency. 
Sartre

Theory’s Rise and Fall  

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Theory, though it blazed brightly for a time, was doomed to burn out. It simply could not give a deep account of the human condition and of those things that are most important to being human—e.g., love, altruism, friendship, gratitude—that fully reflect the human experience. 
Talmud

America Saved the Jews. Can the Jews Save America? 

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Americans are fighting over who decides what’s true. Jews once argued for truth itself. Can Jews teach America how to argue yet remain united? 
Odyssey

Homer Against the Attention Economy  

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What modern culture discards as redundant, the ancient poets understood as the foundation of memory, identity, and human connection. 
person teleworking on a laptop

AI, Automation, and the Meaning of Work 

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Abuse is no argument against proper use. But AI’s challenges and opportunities are bound up with identifying the scale and scope of proper use as well as the consequences of abuse, and how to distinguish one from another.
E pluribus unum

E Pluribus Unum, Yesterday and Today

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If America’s unity frays, the problem is probably not its diversity, but that America needs its many cultural groups—and perhaps new ones—to contribute more of their special strengths to public life. 
Middle-aged professor

Beware the Old Man on Campus 

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There are certain universal and timeless truths about what works in a classroom that no technological advancement (even a humanoid robot) will ever change. And this knowledge is where being the old man on campus can have power and resonance. 
SCOTUS

The Bookshelf: Packing the Supreme Court 

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Of all our major institutions, the Supreme Court is still performing better, more reliably, with more integrity, than the presidency or the Congress. I am often disappointed by its rulings; so is everyone I know, though we may be disappointed by different ones. But it is not pervasively corrupt, incompetent, or tyrannical. Expand it for partisan reasons, and where is the stopping point?
Petrarch

A Giant on the Shoulders of Giants 

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If, in a hundred years, Petrarch has returned to his rightful place on the bookshelves, tongues, and souls of readers the world over, it will be thanks to the prodigious labors of A. M. Juster. 
Oxford University

Liberalism in the U.S. and the UK: A Q&A with Lord Nigel Biggar 

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The typical liberal virtues of respect and tolerance are far too thin. They need a wider array of supporting virtues: humility, docility, temperance, courage, etc. And that such traits are virtues is not obvious to every worldview.
The Odyssey

Nolan’s Odyssey: A Shaky Middle Ground 

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Nolan’s Odyssey is a post-Christian story par excellence. One question, however, remains: will this moral middle ground hold, or will we eventually return to a truly Homeric past?  
Vaccines

Attorney General as State Theologian: Florida’s Vaccine Mandate and the Freedom of the Church 

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If the Florida bishops determine that immunizing their students is required for the common good, then their policy of mandatory vaccinations is, contra the Florida AG, supported by Catholic teaching.
conservatism

The Augustinian State of Social Conservatism 

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An Augustinian reading of the present moment would help social conservatives resist both triumphalism and despair. The renewal and invigoration now visible among many social conservatives may be a genuine mercy: a sign that the moral imagination—worn down though it is by the exhaustion of ambient progressivism—has not been entirely extinguished, and that many still perceive the disorder produced when freedom is detached from truth, embodiment, family, duty, and the created order.  
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness

C. S. Lewis and Questioning the “Right” to Happiness

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For Lewis in 1963, the Declaration and its “inalienable” right to the “pursuit of happiness” for all men was at least as countercultural then as when it was first written. Lewis urges his readers to again feel the incredible weight of it, not to be disillusioned or to complain that the American dream is dead, or is only now for some, or that the pursuit of happiness means nothing.
Happy young people hanging out

Don’t Worry. Be Conservative.

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The war on spiritual poverty is worth fighting, and we need foot soldiers and generals who are willing to wage it. 
AI
  • AI

Is AI Taking Over the “Religion of the Book”? 

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An AI does not only “remember” all the words. But as any ChatGPT user can testify, it finds connections between different sources, summarizes them, generates challenging questions, and even deduces new insights. It can therefore seem as though these machines are well-versed in almost any topic.  
Oxford

Anscombe’s First Lectures at Oxford

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Despite Anscombe’s oft-repeated claim that she got everything she knew at this point from Wittgenstein, in these lectures Anscombe is not simply repeating Wittgenstein, but is in fact going beyond Wittgenstein in a number of ways.
SC in England
  • Law

Time Immemorial  

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The stubborn persistence of time immemorial in a time when it should, by rights, long ago have ceased to be in constitutional law, tells us something crucial about what binds a community to its law. We should listen. 
college rally

The Real Campus Speech Crisis Isn’t Censorship—It’s Dogma 

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At a moment when Americans can barely speak across political lines, we are graduating a generation that never learned how. That is not a campus problem. It is a democratic emergency. 
American slavery

Who Will Fight for “Evil”?  

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old books

The Bookshelf: When Words Are Deeds 

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The nation’s semiquincentennial, which we marked on July 4, was the occasion for a number of new books about the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution. I’m sure I’ll get around to reading some of those in future—if they’re good, they’re durable—but lately I’ve been revisiting some older works on the subject that still hold up. I’ll get to those in a moment, but first I want to consider what we have been celebrating this year. 

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