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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 Bookshelf: The Frontier on Page and Screen 

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Pope Benedict waving

Ratzinger’s Cross

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The second and final volume of a biography of Benedict XVI focuses on his place in addressing the crises shaking both the post–Vatican II Catholic Church and the West more generally.
Woman holding flowers next to casket

Mourning Could Cure Us of Consumerism’s Hyperreal Delusions

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Houses of mourning allow us to see hyperreality for what it is: fake. Suffering leads us to ask questions that go beneath life’s surfaces and pushes us to become seekers, not just consumers.
Norman Rockwell painting

Rehabilitating Rockwell from the Culture of Kitsch

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Rockwell’s work may be pop culture rather than high culture, but his work is capable of real and “straightforward” sentiment. Rockwell’s work is humorous, and its humor comes from the joy in the mundaneness of things.
LGBT flags

The Autonomous Self Is a Coercive God

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Jim Breuer and Dave Chappelle are current darlings of the Right, because they refuse to bow to the orthodoxy of sexual identitarianism. Yet their own emphasis on autonomy and free speech shares in the same inadequate conception of modern humanity, which, in its never-ending quest for self-realization, inevitably descends into the very coercive behaviors it claims to eschew.
Woman studying

Should I Become an Academic? Maybe Not: A Final Response to Phillip Dolitsky

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The jealousy among fellow academics is often so strong that a good teacher or fair researcher is despised by colleagues. Many small liberal arts colleges will close. And, despite its reputation as a bastion of progressive thought, the academy usually rewards safe, uncreative thinking. If the academy still sounds good despite all this, then you should apply to graduate school.

The Impossibility of Absolute Academic Freedom: A Response to Robert T. Miller

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There will always be some limits on academic freedom, and it is better to be honest about what they are and who sets them than to try to wish them away. We need to formulate real-world standards, rather than retreating into the impossible fantasy of absolute academic freedom.
College Classroom

Courageous Scholars Shouldn’t Abandon the University: A Response to Phillip Dolitsky

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Conservatives sometimes overstate how bad things are. Too often we generalize about the dire condition of higher education based on a relatively small handful of elite schools on the coasts. Little good will come from young conservative scholars abandoning the academy out of fear. We have as much right and responsibility to shepherd these institutions as anyone else.
Student sitting in library with books

The World Needs More, Not Fewer, Scholarly Vocations: A Response to Phillip Dolitsky

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I hope students will throw themselves into these divisive conversations robustly. Call nonsense what it is when you hear it. Offend everyone around you with the truth. Do not fear to pursue the intellectual life with vigor. I am certain the world is hungry for more courageous and selfless women and men to learn, to know, and to speak truth.
Mechanic working on car

Why College Degrees Might Not Be Worth It: A Response to Phillip Dolitsky

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Why do we so closely associate having degrees with the scholarly life? Most jobs, including the highest-prestige white-collar jobs, do not involve sitting around thinking lofty thoughts and reading deeply fascinating books all day. Instead, you could go to college to learn how to read Plato and Dante and Locke, and then go off to find a job which presents genuine intellectual puzzles that interest you, regardless of whether that job requires a college degree or not.
Graveyard

The Frightening America of Edgar Lee Masters Has Come to Life

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What Edgar Lee Masters intended as a clever and eerie indictment of American society has proven more prophetic than the Midwestern poet could have anticipated.
Christian praise concert with hand raised

Reading Jesus and John Wayne While Evangelical

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A world ruled by muscle is going to be a man’s world. We don't live in that world anymore. And we don’t know terribly well what men and women are without that context. Are they just interchangeable? If there are essential differences, what are they? What should they be?
Serena Sigillito and Elayne Allen

Charting Public Discourse’s Past and Future: A Conversation between Serena Sigillito and Elayne Allen

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Our hope is that, by reading PD regularly, our readers will be formed in such a way that they have not only knowledge on particular topics, but also virtuous habits of mind. By illustrating the capacity to earnestly and carefully think through what’s good and what's bad about both conservative and liberal positions, we show that sobriety and careful, detached thinking is still possible—that we really can have knowledge about the truths that give order to our being.
Man standing alone on mountain

Unlearning Ayn Rand’s Relentless Individualism

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Rand speaks to the young, to those who have not yet realized just how frail individual life is. In doing so, she tells an incomplete story. The human person is amazing, powerful, and wise, yet equally frail, weak, and foolish. It is in those times of weakness and folly that we most need others around us.
College Student raising hand

The Contradictions of Absolute Academic Freedom

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The official moral relativism of absolute academic freedom makes universities self-negating institutions. No wonder many student activists are eager to fashion and enforce new norms and taboos: they realize, however inchoately, that a community of inquiry and instruction must also be one of practice, and that the liberal university fails to integrate these elements.

Is the Scholarly Life Still Worth Pursuing? An Open Letter to the Authors of Public Discourse

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Is the scholarly life still worth pursuing? I am at that stage in my academic career where the question keeps me up at night. I want to pursue a PhD in my field of interest. I want to teach and write scholarship. But will there be a spot for people like me in the academy?
Dome of United States Congress

Lockdowns, Mandates, and Conservatives: Remembering the Good of Government

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Given the overreach of government, and perhaps especially given the failure of so many elected officials to remember that they do not rule us, it’s all too easy to slip into libertarianism by default. But government is not alien or unnatural to our condition and needs. It emerges from the community’s associations, affections, bonds, and mutual sense of self-responsibility.
Bookshelves

The Bookshelf: Who Is in the American Canon?

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Moving books home has turned my mind toward publishers that seem to be of high value because of the enduring importance of their books. One such is Liberty Fund, which specializes in classic conservative and libertarian texts in politics and economics. Another is the Library of America, which has a broad mission to publish (in its own words) “America’s greatest writing.”
School hallway

Public Education and Liberal Neutrality

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Attempting neutrality in public education ends up creating a systemic preference for a particular ethical standpoint—a rather controversial one at that. Ironically, this creates a tension between public schools and the principle of liberal neutrality. Fortunately, this tension can be resolved without abandoning government-financed education through policies that are both popular and effective: school vouchers and education savings accounts.
Two doctors

Searching for the Why: Introducing the Hippocratic Forum

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What is lacking in modern medical training is a community of fellow trainees collectively committed to a rich, morally robust view of medicine and the physician’s place in it. This is what the Hippocratic Forum seeks to provide.
Two people looking at the Bible

How Do Christians Know When Their Understanding of Scriptural Teaching Needs to Change? Ten Questions to Consider.

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We should be very wary of changing our minds about a teaching or practice that has been taught clearly, continuously, and authoritatively on the basis of scripture throughout the history and breadth of the Church. The following ten considerations can help us think carefully when friends inside or outside the Church ask us to reconsider what the Bible teaches.
Statue of Dante

Dante’s Hell and Our Humanity

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My students and I—orthodox Jews at Yeshiva University—found something more profound than mere gore in Dante’s textual bequest to posterity. His hell provided us something that we could never find in his Purgatory or Paradise. For us, the Inferno’s true contribution was not its penal landscape of scorched sands and steaming pitch. On the contrary, what stirred us most was his evident concern for our humanity.
Students cheating by passing notes

Fostering a Culture of Academic Integrity in Our Business Schools

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Our schools of business should be places where the whole academic community, which includes administrators, faculty, and the students themselves, can work together towards educating tomorrow’s business leaders, cultivating the very best in them. We should not allow the cheating subculture’s self-righteous and narcissistic agenda to undermine the higher quest for excellence.
Boomers sitting in a park

In Defense of the Boomers

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The determination to make one’s own way in life is what marks out the difference between those who make the best of what they have and seek to improve things for themselves and others, and those who instead diminish themselves by blaming the Baby Boomers for what they don’t like about their lives.

An Afghan American Woman’s Appeal: Don’t Abandon Afghan Women Now

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Human rights, including women’s rights, are not determined by whoever is in charge. They are perpetual and fundamental. American calls for gender equality around the world ring hollow without hard security to back them up.

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