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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.

Newman’s Conscientious Maximalism 

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Bust of John Henry Newman, doctor of the Church

Newman’s Conscientious Maximalism 

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Our obligations are not limited to what human beings in positions of authority spell out for us. 
girls' basketball team

The Lady Griffins and Aiming Students Higher 

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The Academy of Classical Christian Studies’ Lady Griffins basketball team captured the attention of millions with their decision to forfeit their championship. This decision didn’t happen in a vacuum; it grew out of an education that seeks to aim students toward higher things.  
Pope Leo XIV Inauguration

Two Leos on Church and State

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The contemporary Leonine texts suggest that the Pope’s primary concern is about the downstream political consequences of religious liberty.
person reading a fantasy novel outside under a tree

The Falcon’s Children: Ross Douthat’s (Mostly) Fantastic Fantasy 

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Is this tale imperfect? Yes. But it’s one that’s worth hearing regardless. 
Israel

What Is Zionism? What Is Christian Zionism? 

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Basic decency provides more than enough grounds for Christians to oppose hateful and irrational attacks against Jews and Israel. We should treat these episodes as tests of our courage and discernment, because that’s exactly what they are. 
Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt and the Limits of Expertise 

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We do not need experts to tell us how to get our kids out of the machine.  
Christmas

Gaudeat Ecclesia, Now and Always 

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This Christmas, as we enjoy our cozy families and gifts, may we marvel in Christ’s appearance in Scripture and in our world, with all of its paradoxes.
Calvin Coolidge

Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar” 

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Henry Ford sought to mainstream anti-Jewish sentiment in the United States. In a 1925 address, Coolidge decisively broke with Ford’s movement. 
tech

People, Place, Prayer, the Past: A Review of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine 

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Kingsnorth sees the problems of technology; but he also realizes (and acknowledges) that he is embedded in the Machine. What he proposes toward the end is not a naïve and impossible utopian withdrawal but selective resistance to the Machine, resistance that can take various forms but that will always involve some level of complicity. 
Christmas reading list

The 2025 Public Discourse Book List 

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A roundup of reads from PD’s editorial team and the Witherspoon Institute staff
Jane Austen novels

The Genius of Jane Austen 

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Jane Austen was an extraordinary writer of fiction, but she was also a profound teacher of human nature, the arts of life, and the way to happiness. Her novels are, as it were, about her “important nothings”: about the sport of laughter, love and friendship, and the splendid challenge of being human.    
Sailing to Byzantium

Monument of Unageing Intellect

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It is plain to this grateful reader that the tradition of the university has deeply formed Professor Hankins and Professor Guelzo into the kind of people capable of bringing to fruition the Herculean labor of love and learning that is The Golden Thread. 
ideology

Wonder Confronts Certainty, Then and Now 

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When it comes to human beings, learning must not consist in committing a pre-packaged truth to memory, but an endless process of discovery and self-critique.
person holding a smart phone

Smartphones and the New Tribalism 

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What place smartphones have in our future is uncertain, but whatever it is, all generations should be alert to the problem.
Galilee

Christian Zionism Came Long Before Dispensationalism 

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It would be perverse to charge all fulfillment theology with antisemitism. Many reject Christian Zionism for the plausible (but unfounded) reasons described in Mattson’s piece, and many are clearly philo-Semitic. But it might not be a bad idea for some of them to ask what W. D. Davies and other theologians started asking in the 1970s: “How did Christian Europe come to hate Jews?” 
healthy happy person jumping

The Virtues as the Superhabits of Human Success 

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What we need is a restoration of virtue in our land, in order to tame the strong gods and ensure that their power serves the good—so that the return to reality is marked not by domination, but by integrity, not by chaos, but by character. 
the thinker statue

A Philosopher for All Seasons 

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West shows us in Maritain what a Christian philosopher in our time should look like. 
Cardinal Newman

The Magisterial Minimism of John Henry Newman 

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Inconsistencies in official religious teachings are frequently only apparent. 
The Great Gatsby

The Great Gatsby at 100 

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All forms of art are acts of creation and, on a small scale, the artist is participating in an act of creation that is ultimately an act of God, the Creator of all things.  
mystery novels

The Bookshelf: Vive la Différence! Vive le Mystère! 

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The taste for mysteries has more than one cause, but a keenness to see justice done, and the balance of the world set right, takes pride of place.
local community gathering

Rethinking Localism 

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Our ability to trust and the ability of others to keep promises uncorrupted make navigating social life possible.
Local library

Institutions and Influence 

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If we can’t trust our own institutions, even locally, to respond to individual and shared needs, at least some of those institutions may require rethinking. 
the human body

TikTok Between the Body and Christ 

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Before we indulge in more time online, it is worth considering whether the images flashing on that screen are ultimately pointing us toward the humanity and healing power of Christ or a disfigured version of the kind of body a technocratic culture wishes us to have.
St. Thomas Aquinas

Celebrating Aquinas in China  

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Thomas Aquinas can be celebrated by the peoples of both oceans.

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