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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.

A Closer Look at Transgender Pronouns within the Military

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A Closer Look at Transgender Pronouns within the Military

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So long as the military permits the use of transgender pronouns, it has two basic choices: require their use or leave that use optional. Either choice has consequences for military readiness, given aspects of American society in general and military culture in particular.

Pope Francis and Accompanying Each Other Along the Path to Truth

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Many people—young people especially—are eager for caritas in veritate, and the pope sought to teach it to them through many of the themes of the pontificate: accompanying others, recognizing the concrete circumstances that we fallen human beings can find ourselves in, and always being witnesses to God’s infinite mercy. 

Pope Francis: A Candid Assessment

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Francis was much more interested in solving pastoral problems than in theological doctrines. But his responsibility was to safeguard the Church’s doctrine and to cherish and promote its theological reasoning. It is a cause of enduring sadness that he failed to do so.

Pope Francis: A Pontificate of the Heart

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Rather than emphasizing the church as a sacramental reality imbued with the presence of God, or a conception of the church as a pilgrim people, Pope Francis voiced a preference for the church as a field hospital with a battlefield task: Heal the wounds! Start from the ground up. Encounter those on the margins. Accompany those who feel left out. 

Being There: Pope Francis’s Death and the Future of the Catholic Church

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Believing in something like the Catholic Church and her deposit of faith presupposes a non-contestable core that is insoluble to the political waters that seem to suffuse everything these days. And that, it seems, is sufficient unto the day.

Commemorating—and Choosing Again—the Freedom of Redemption

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In these next days we celebrate our deliverance; in so doing we remind ourselves of our meaning, purpose, and dignity. But more: we offer hope for the “multitude” who would return to Egypt, return to slavery, simply because of its luxury and comfort, which seems to them better than the bread of life.

The Dark Night of Disenchantment

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Many religious people lament that the contemporary world has hidden God from their sight. But what if that spiritual darkness is precisely where God is waiting for us?

Civic Education Is a Prerequisite for Liberal Education

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As Americans begin to familiarize themselves with this new front in higher education—one that can no longer be marginalized or dismissed out of hand—it is my hope that wrongheaded media criticism will eventually give way to the clear positive impact that schools of civic thought are having.

Truth, Goodness, Oak Trees, and “The Phoenix Declaration”

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The question then arises: what do we do when the two kinds of truth and goodness come into conflict, especially in education? How are we to act when someone is a good teacher—someone who is a true buddy to a child in his or her care—but who at the same time says things in the classroom that are untrue and not capital-G Good in a deep way?

Fighting Anti-Semitism Shouldn’t Harm Jewish Students: A Reflection on the Limits of Blunt Force in Academia

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Sledgehammer approaches fail Jewish students because they conflate accountability with retribution, often leaving the innocent to bear the brunt of the fallout, like blameless bystanders caught in crossfire.

Neil Postman: Amusing Democracy to Death

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To a degree Postman could never have imagined, we must choose which truths—both facts and values—to believe. A deep hermeneutic of suspicion has replaced trust in central authorities. This is in part a natural consequence of television’s metaphor: in a world where truth must be packaged as entertainment, we will grow suspicious of those who trim the truth to fit their packaging.

Andrew Tate and Conservatives’ Kierkegaard Trap

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Reflexive contrarianism is the root of much of the resurgence of anti-Semitism on the Right, as well as of many other bizarre reactionary opinions that now seem to be gaining traction in some circles. It is presumed that whatever most offends the powers that be is probably true, or at least a useful corrective to a one-sided establishment. Those who fall into this pattern tend to take contradiction and condemnation as confirmation that they are on to something—and as justification to further radicalize.

The Human and the Machine: AI Sexbots and the Boundaries of Love and Dignity in the Workplace

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What does it mean to be human in a world where machines can mimic our deepest bonds? For thoughtful readers, Jordan’s story offers a lens through which to examine the nature of identity, the limits of legal protections in the workplace, and the ethical challenges posed by artificial intelligence.

On Medical Killing and “Capitalism”

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It is misguided to rest one’s opposition to medical killing on a vague allergy to greed and to profit in general, when cost-pressures are a reality whether “profit” is relevant or not, and—in some cases at least—the profiteers are a countervailing force.

True Strength Requires Commitment

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Many people in the current sexual landscape have perverted the authentic goal of the sexual act by making its only goals pleasure and satisfaction. But the wisdom of Pope John Paul II teaches us that there is a precise meaning tied to the sexual drive.

A Physician’s Pandemic Perspective, Five Years Later: An Interview with Donald Landry

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Medicine goes back 5,000 years. Medicine is already 2,500 years old when Hippocrates articulates the Oath, and it hasn't even started the infancy of its science. So for millennia, the medical profession has been in service of those in need—regardless of risk.

Optimizing for Holiness: App Culture and Catholic Spirituality

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Exodus 90’s use of the “why” is particularly fruitful, turning a powerful but potentially self-centered aspect of psychology into a means of loving others. Apps like these can help users to build virtue and grow closer to God. But even with a transformed “why,” there is a tension between the Christian spiritual life and the user-centered framework built into the form of a lifestyle app, because the app offers a vision of happiness as gradually increasing control over one’s life.

Society Stays Christian Longer If It Respects Religious Freedom: New Evidence from Pew

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If Christians want America to be more Christian, they should recommit themselves to the deeply Christian principle of freedom of religion.

Patience, Docility, and Hope

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It’s Lent, again, and that’s good news. We are asked to acknowledge our moral agency along with our responsibility for distorting ourselves—without shifting blame to any other—and then to repent, in patient docility, sustained by a hope that distortion can become integrity and our sorrows turn to joy.

The Freedom of Lent

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Lent is not merely an occasion to give up chocolate or beer, do a few good deeds, and give a bit more to charity, although those are all acceptable ways to do penance. Lent is more: an intransigent insistence that humans are free and possess, in whatever condition they happen to find themselves, the dignity of responsibility.

The Deceitfulness of Wealth

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If wealth is as deceitful as Christ teaches in this parable of the sower, and we are the wealthiest society that has ever existed, then the occasion for temptation and deception is greater as well. And so we must cultivate habits of gratitude for what God has provided to us and practices of giving for what God wills.

Retrieving Christian Liberty in an Age of License

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Called to Liberty may prove useful for those outside the Church who seek a broad introduction to the paradoxes of freedom. Still, more is needed to recover freedom from its current drubbing by both radicals on the Left and reactionaries on the Right—a drubbing that increasingly rejects measure, moderation, and maturity. 

Wine, Medicine, and Risks to Health

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The new antagonism toward wine and other forms of alcohol seems similarly de-personal to me. It neglects the way that wine, at its best, functions in relationships: at a family meal, a wedding, a couple celebrating their anniversary, and the Eucharistic feast. And it treats what should be an individual decision—to drink or not—entirely in terms of a statistical approach to alcohol’s health risks.

Scrutinizing the Sacred

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Scruton was acutely aware that, in a society that has largely lost its religion, art can give people a sense of the timeless and transcendental. That is why he spent his life defending genuine art from those who would “do dirt on life.” However, it is also true that art can never provide the redemption that is promised by religion. The reason for this is that while art may offer us “intimations” of the sacred, only religion can reconcile us to it. 
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