Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
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 Bookshelf: The Frontier on Page and Screen 

By
Read More

Learn more about Education & Culture: get your free eBook today!

Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
school choice

School Choice Is About Religious Liberty, Not Just Better Test Scores 

By
America’s constitutional tradition recognizes parents as primary educators. To honor this, policymakers must safeguard private school autonomy and ensure funding follows students to their families’ chosen learning environment.
Pascal

Pierre Manent’s Challenge to Modern Atheism  

By
Pascal’s theology is sublime, beautiful, and all-consuming. But it reflects the life of a celibate mystic rather than that of the statesman who must transmit Christian culture. Statesmen after all must wager. 
Bookshelf

The Bookshelf: Nostalgia Has Consequences 

By
Richard Weaver’s bestselling work is his worst book. But an author with his contempt for mass democracy would probably appreciate that irony. 
Hamnet film purchased via Alamy

Hamnet and the Myth of Radical Autonomy 

By
That a story that demands we define ourselves by our duties of care to each other—not by individual success—should resonate with so many is perhaps a sign that the cultural tide is quietly turning. It’s time to remember that, if our interdependence makes us vulnerable, it’s also what gives us a sense of purpose. 
inspiration for Rivendell in LOTR

Political Philology: J. R. R. Tolkien Against the Leftists 

By
If I may be permitted to so step beyond my bounds and attempt to speak for what Tolkien’s advice might be, I believe his recommendation would be this: teach, read, and write poetry, for that is the first step toward viewing language as not merely a tool for communication, but a science, an art, a heritage, and a way in which man resembles God. 
Declaration of Independence

Without Virtue, Freedom Fails 

By
We cannot expect to preserve a liberal democracy until each generation learns to embrace its civic responsibilities.
Classroom

Zero Trust in the Classroom 

By
Doubt, suspicion, and anxiety must not outweigh love in the classroom. Zero trust has no place, but authentic relationships do.
early suffragettes

Steelman or Strawman? Carrie Gress’s Something Wicked

By
Regrettably, Gress's latest book is an exercise in dispatching straw men of its own making.
antique library with old bookshelves

The Bookshelf: Movements and Clerks 

By
We do well to remind ourselves, as the late Christopher Lasch did, that what we now call the “laptop class” can make itself too independent, too insulated from the buffeting winds that others must struggle against.
Bust of John Henry Newman, doctor of the Church

Newman’s Conscientious Maximalism 

By
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 

By
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

By
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 

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

What Is Zionism? What Is Christian Zionism? 

By
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 

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

Gaudeat Ecclesia, Now and Always 

By
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” 

By
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 

By
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 

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

The Genius of Jane Austen 

By
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

By
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 

By
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 

By
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 

By
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?” 

Get your free eBook for The Human Person

"*" indicates required fields

Get your free eBook for Sexuality & Family

Get your free eBook for Politics & Law

Get your free eBook for Education & Culture

Get your free eBook for Business & Economics