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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.

Walking Alongside History 

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Christian conventions

Christians Need Stronger Conventions, Not State Power, to Influence Culture

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Deep, broad cultural change often results not primarily from government imposition or propagation of ideas, but from committed social entrepreneurs who pilot alternative conventions. Public pronouncement of Christian values, absent change in underlying social conventions, is a poor substitute for deeply rooted change internal to the church.
The Vatican

Pius XII and the Politics of the Mystical Body

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Pope Pius XII exhorts the faithful to participate in daily Mass, frequent confession, personal prayer, mortification, and works of mercy. These practices are not minor, weak, or irrelevant responses to a world crisis; on the contrary, the pope believes they are powerfully efficacious and necessary, strengthening the bonds uniting the mystical body of Christ and sowing the seeds of peace. His counsel is spiritual in nature, but socio-political in its effects.
desert

The Hidden Riches of the Desert

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In her new book A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life, Zena Hitz situates her philosophical ponderings within the context of her own life, here spotlighting a crisis precipitated by her conversion to the Catholic faith. Like Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac at the Lord’s behest, Hitz realizes that unconditional love of God, “wholehearted commitment without compromise,” might demand the renunciation even of what she has held most dear.
Literature

How to Justify the Study of Literature

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John Guillory’s Professing Criticism is a thorough and complex work of scholarship. It’s also a bracing call for literary scholars to significantly reform how they think about their profession, and its relationship to their students and reading public in general. At its core is a challenge that is simultaneously reasonable and radical: professors of literary study must be more modest in their aims and promises to suit the realities of their field in the twenty-first century.
Woman in headphones listening music in nature and at the mountain (intentional pale color style)

The Bookshelf: Audiobooks and the Recovery of Leisure Reading

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Audiobooks’ greatest potential is to encourage a sense of receptivity and leisure throughout the rest of life, not just one’s reading life. Listening to a novel, accepting its rhythms and flow of detail on the book’s own terms, is a gentle reminder that life’s most glorious things demand quiet, silent admiration, and loving acceptance.
Clear circular glasses on the table with blurry background

Is Bias Actually Bad?

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If we take seriously Thomas Kelly’s ideas about bias blind spots, then we should seek public universities composed of a high degree of biased parts. Such universities would intentionally hire faculty members and administrators who harbor contrary views on divisive cultural issues. This would probably create campuses that can boast of having teaching and scholarship that have much less pejorative bias than their peer institutions.
Image of Barbie

Barbie’s Quiet Rebuke of Transhumanism

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The movie’s most profound insight is its distillation of pop feminism: a praise of women so unceasing that we no longer feel comfortable being normal human beings with blemishes, weakness, and fertility.
Karyatides statues, Erehtheio, on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece

The Past As Enemy Country: Why Teachers of Great Books Should Be Teaching History, Too

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We need to study history as a subject in its own right, acquiring a deep appreciation for the story of Western civilization, with all its abysses of failure and all its deservedly celebrated achievements. We need to help our students understand old texts at a deeper level, in less anachronistic ways. Above all, we need to arm them against the hostility to their own tradition that has become such a destructive force in our culture.
Garden

Third Places Aren’t Enough

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Activities like gardening—what Josef Pieper has called “active leisure”—offer even more than third places can. They too are a meeting ground for people of any background, but active leisure is more deeply rooted in a true vision of our condition: creatures responsible for stewarding what’s been given to us alongside others.
The golden apse of the Basilica of Saint Paul outside the walls in Rome, Italy.

The History behind the Formation of Christendom

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In Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, Peter Heather wishes to dismantle some of the conventions that have governed how the story of Christian history is told.
Light shining on open bible

Exploring the Evangelical Imagination with Karen Swallow Prior

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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?”
old books row background

The Bookshelf: Editions and Subtractions

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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.
Glory of the Florentine saints, fresco by Vincenzo Meucci in the Basilica di San Lorenzo in Florence, Italy

Why Religion and the Humanities Are in Decline

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What is useful is inherently teleological: calling something “useful” invokes the question “useful for what?” But modernity resists this question by multiplying means without any clear ends. We live an infinite regress of usefulness with little sense of the point of our labors. In a world that only understands useful things, interest in humanities and religious faith (both of which consider human purpose) will inevitably decline.
Painting of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russian Wonder and Certainty

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Like the Bible, Russian literature came to be perceived “not as a series of separate books but as a single ongoing work composed over many generations.” It is a conversation with both the present and the past simultaneously.
President George Washington home at Mount Vernon in Virginia, USA

Reclaiming Museums’ Civic Duty

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Museums assume, both for the country and the individual, a special trust of preservation and civic encouragement. That encouragement need not involve glossing over the failings of our past. We distort our history both when we whitewash it and when we overemphasize our shortcomings.
a woman with wrapping cd and book in her hands

The Bookshelf: Gifts of Friendship

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It is not always easy to buy books for friends—or even for family. The nature of the relationship one has with another, and the knowledge of the other’s interests and capacities, will affect one’s choices. Of books in the pleasure reading category, we have as many choices as our knowledge of our friends’ and loved ones’ tastes and reading history allows. But it is in the third category of books, the ones Francis Bacon said must be “chewed and digested . . . with diligence and attention,” that a real challenge arises.
Photo of Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy and the Possibility of Faith

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Cormac McCarthy, who passed away today, gives readers reason to suspect that he did not shut the door on God before his life ended. His last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, offer more than just an artistic representation of reality’s inescapable brutality. They forcefully struggle with the greatest questions of human existence. Like any good work of art, these books don’t allow any reader—religious, atheist, materialist, Christian—to walk away feeling perfectly comfortable in their understanding of the world.
Dramatic landscape of lake michigan dunes and beach in New Buffalo Michigan. Sandy foot path leading to the beach before it rains.

Fidelity to Place

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Fidelity to place, to the community of one’s birth, is not merely one virtue among others, but a foundational and formative source of our character. We first learn to be faithful husbands and wives from the unchosen example we witness of our own parents. We first learn to be faithful citizens as we explore the small postage stamp of terrain that we did not choose to go to, but simply awakened to with our first dawn of consciousness.
Praying hands is in the dark with light on the hands.

Fidelity to God: Our Highest Good

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As we begin this inaugural Fidelity Month, we recommit and rededicate ourselves to God. You were made to know God. He is your ultimate happiness. Knowing God is not a rejection of creaturely good. It is vantage point that allows us to enjoy creaturely good as intended “from the beginning.”

Thomas Aquinas: Revolutionary and Saint

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Seven hundred years ago the Catholic Church canonized Thomas Aquinas. Today he is often considered a consummate authority for Catholic philosophy and theology. We should remember, however, how revolutionary his views were.
Teenage Depression CDC 2023

The Moral Paralysis behind Teenage Depression

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It’s not just that many have been taught that the wrong things make them happy, and that their deliberation leads to choices that make them miserable—though that does happen in many cases. Far too often, they have not been given enough tools for moral thinking and acting at all.
Group of surgeons in hospital operating theater. Medical team performing surgery in operation room.

The Gift of Transplants

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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.

A Catholic Cardinal’s Appreciation of Pastor Tim Keller

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Pastor Keller preached the Gospel as true. He would blush when I told him he was a genuine apologist. But he deserved this cherished title as one who, in a compelling, credible, and colorful way, could present and defend the basic truths of God’s revelation. No watering down, no wavering, just the truth—which, he would repeat, has a name: Jesus.
Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton and the Love of Home

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In denying students access to their history; in dumbing down art, music, literature, and even the sacred liturgy; and in celebrating obscenity over beauty, you detach people from their past, their home, and the transcendental dimension of the human experience. You make them strangers to themselves, to the soul, and the soil.

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