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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.

The Conspiracists

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the end of feminism

The End of Feminism: A Response to Rachel Lu

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Writer Rachel Lu recently penned an essay in these pages that engages my book as an example of what she calls “anti-feminist” work. Lu draws some surprising conclusions about my book that, I think, are not representative of my work. She makes four overarching points to which I would like to respond.
Stack of books

The Bookshelf: What Does It Mean to Interpret?

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There are no blackout curtains, only more or less obscurity to be overcome by the work of interpretation. Much of the burden of Hirsch’s two books is to describe the methods and account for the limitations of such work. The discussion is richly informed by linguistics and epistemology, governed by rigorous logic, and elegantly written.
John Witherspoon

The Witherspoon Way

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There is a case for cursing the darkness. But it is better to light a candle, and better still to light many.
Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift’s Feminisms

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Women need a grounded feminism that calls for a higher standard for both men and women. Before that happens, we need to be real about who women are, and part of that is acknowledging how aspects of the sexual revolution continue to harm women and relationships between the sexes. 
sparks and fire

China’s Dissident Historians

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We have become accustomed to the darkness of today’s China. But Johnson shows us flickering sparks of light, hidden on hard drives and thumbnails, that tomorrow may become blazing fires.  
Reading literature

Seeking Moral Vision in a Digital Age

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It’s possible to be an awe-filled seeker of truth and use social media with prudence; however, social media are mediated by a tech industry that aims to capture our attention and keep us scrolling, not call us into a life of virtue.
old cracked wall and cross

Losing Our Religion­ and the Fracturing of American Evangelicalism

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Moore’s writing is something of a memoir and a testimony, in good evangelical fashion, taking us back to the heartfelt and fervent faith of his youth and through what can only be described as a painful and poignant break-up with the religious tradition that nurtured and raised him.
statute depicting a person lamenting/grieving

Social Wounds, DEI Advocacy, and the Good of Lamentation

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There are reasons for hope available to us all, believers or not, but the possibility of lamentation as a form of prayer provides an especially potent way of ensuring that lament is enlivened by hope rather than rendered morbid by despair. 
Pope Pius XII

Misrepresenting the Latest Meeting on Pope Pius XII

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One of the biggest developments to emerge from the conference is that the Vatican under Pope Francis, far from slackening its support of Pius XII, has actually increased it.
Presbyterian church

The Protestant Prophet: J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism at 100

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In a time when the political, religious, and cultural challenges strikingly parallel those of Machen’s day, his arguments and actions offer us a set of timeless and timely insights. We would all do well to observe them.
Catholic church interior

Time Toward Home: Richard John Neuhaus for Our Time 

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Neuhaus’s hope is the greatest example he gives us today, especially those who feel their status as exiles more keenly than they expected. Fifteen years after his death, Christians have yet to find a more coherent proposal for how to think about political action in their pluralistic society.
papal blessing

Fiducia Supplicans and the Authority of Bishops

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This is not an easy time to be a bishop, especially as the DDF fosters confusion, but every bishop is called to lead the faithful into a deeper relationship with Christ through the Church. This requires heroic charity that embraces the sinner while being truthful to the Gospel. Jesus never blessed sin, and neither should the Church. His love for each of us is a love that calls us out of sin, which requires a recognition that some things are incompatible with the blessing of the Church.
Christmas tree in living room

Worlds of Christmas Wonder

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Perhaps our longing for Christmas past reminds us that here we have no lasting city—not even a lasting home. In this way, our celebration of Christ’s coming points us toward what it makes possible: our coming to him in heaven, when our longing will be fully satisfied, when we will truly come home.
Gerard Honthorst's Adoration of the Shephards painting

The Forgotten Tragedies of the Christmas Story

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Christ’s advent is an astonishing story of God’s power and light breaking into our darkness, doubt, and suffering.
Nativity Scene

Chesterton’s Christmas

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In “The God in the Cave,” G.K, Chesterton explains that when Christians celebrate the Nativity, they are celebrating an event that changed the course of history and permanently transformed the DNA of human society.
Advent

Awaiting the Second Advent

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Christmas hope is grounded both in the reality of Christ’s first advent and also in the reality that he will come again to fully establish the peace his princely rule has promised. This is one of the great paradoxes of the faith: Christ has come, and he is coming. The kingdom has arrived, yet we pray “Thy kingdom come.”
history

Journeys of the Mind: Peter Brown and the Excitement of History

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Many of us find it difficult to be forced to revise our assumptions and change our views, but for Brown, it seems to be one of the great joys in life.
theism

Liberalism and the Politics of Theism

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If religious believers want to protect politics from atheistic materialism, their political theory should presume at least that God made human nature good and free, and that evil comes rather from our misuse of nature. Genuine liberalism, Augusto Del Noce argues, is such a theory.
Public Discourse reading list

The 2023 Public Discourse Book List

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Our reading recommendations from a year of contemplation and enchantment. 
gratitude

Gratitude, Now More Than Ever

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As we close out this year and approach the next, we should remember that gratitude is not an incidental or secondary civilizational value. It is the backbone of a free and decent civilization. Those who embrace barbarism love destruction and revolution because they have been trained to detest everything that came before them. But just as the heroic and imperfect Americans who came before us moved history through reflection and choice, we can write the American future by recommitting our educational institutions to gratitude.
Machiavelli

The Master of Machiavelli

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Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s primary goal is to subvert and overturn Christianity. It is important to note, as Professor Mansfield does himself, that this reading of a secular, indeed anti-Christian, Machiavelli is not the only reading of the Italian philosopher.
The intellectual life

The Intellectual Life: Hope for the Rest of Us

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Welcoming human imperfection in its manifold expressions is a boon for those of us who lack the privilege of full-time scholarship. It is not in spite of, but thanks to, the inherent inefficiencies of our rich and often chaotic lives that so many of us can enjoy the pursuit of intellectual enrichment.
Public Discourse reading list

C. S. Lewis and the Populists: A Birthday Appreciation

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At a moment when the values Lewis cherished often seem endangered as much by their supposed friends as by their proclaimed enemies, we would do well to remember his prescriptions.
Collège de France

Raymond Aron: Political Philosopher 

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Aron is one of a few who never let the ideologies and catastrophic events of the twentieth century get the better of him. Ready to face those critiques and recognize their share of truth, he always refrained from taking the practical conclusions that so many cravenly or imprudently derived from them.
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