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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.

What Can Be Done about the Universities? 

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Montrose Graduation 2021

To Find Your Life’s Mission, Follow Your Questions

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What are the small and humble questions that should animate all human lives, that work to reveal to us little by little our unique mission? Questions like these: “Who or what am I responsible for today? How can I use my time well? What ought I do in this situation? How do I treat this person with the love and dignity she deserves?” We find our life’s mission not by seeking after some “castle in the air,” but by fulfilling the very concrete duty of each moment, one moment at a time.
Classroom

Coming out of Our Burrows: Anti-Fundamentalism, Free Speech, and the Academy

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A new book pushing back against fundamentalism and advocating open conversation should make readers rethink their positions. What is the proper relationship between abstract reason and personal knowledge in the academic arena? Perhaps it is a sign of admirable intellectual resilience rather than feebleness to have traits of both the hedgehog and the fox.
Microscope

Are Christianity and Science at War?

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In his new book, Kenneth Kemp shows that the relationship between science and theology is not one of warfare. Here and in his other writings, Kemp is at the forefront of contemporary interpreters of evolution and Christian faith.
Reginald Arthur: Joseph Interprets Pharaoh’s Dream

Biden, Abortion, and the Temptations of Status: Biblical Lessons from Another “Ordinary Joe”

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Joseph’s service to Pharaoh provides important lessons to Jews and Christians considering roles in government in an increasingly pagan America. Today, we neither reign from the throne in Jerusalem nor cower in the catacombs of Rome. Is there a place for us in the palace of Egypt?
Roth

When Good Books Are Written by Bad People

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To believe that we cannot both enjoy the work of a disreputable artist and condemn the artist is to underestimate our own capacity for ethical discernment and to deprive ourselves needlessly of sources of wisdom.
lightning strike

Storm-Born: What God Revealed at Sinai

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Lightning strikes only a single time from the dawn of life until the last line of the Five Books of Moses. Perhaps it does so to teach us all that God’s gift is not an escape from crises but the means to overcome them.
Oxford

Intellectual Diversity Is Not All Academia Needs

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The contemporary academy betrays its vocation precisely insofar as it seeks to usurp the wonder of the world and to transpose that wonder onto its own ingenuity. “Look,” says the contemporary scholar, “let me show you how this-or-that is really just an exercise of power. I alone have had the vision to see it.”
Cloister

Sohrab Ahmari’s Case for Tradition

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Sohrab Ahmari’s new book enlightens in many respects, while falling short before the tribunal of moral and political prudence. Still, it succeeds admirably in making the case for “the wisdom of tradition” as the one thing most needful today.
Friends talking over books

Learning in Love: Authentic Friendships and Liberal Learning

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I’m not only trying to show younger people the futility of a life based on achievement, but to show that there are ways of thinking about achievement that are better for your soul. One of them is to see your desire to achieve as being inspired by a vision of the good. Ultimately, in the highest things, you end up not thinking about yourself. Once you become excellent at something, whether that’s teaching or writing or being a tax attorney or being a doctor, you’re actually looking for the good of other people. It’s about how you make the lives of others better and encourage them in their pursuits.
William and Mary

Freshman Orientation: An Introduction to Monolithic Higher Education

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My snapshot of freshman orientation highlights some of the failures of higher education. Too many universities today no longer teach students how to think but what to think. Instead of a marketplace of ideas, campus has become an echo chamber of ideas. But outspoken students (and faculty) can save the university by thoughtfully and deliberately making their voices heard.
Corporate office

Managerial Oligarchy: Why Conservatives Should Oppose Big Business

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Free market dogmas are inapplicable to the managerial oligarchy. A politically coordinated cabal of opaquely owned companies is not private property in the way a local coffeeshop is. To do nothing while a managerial mob uses the wealth we have entrusted to them to seize power over us is a betrayal of ourselves, our nation, and our posterity.
A Reading from Homer painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

The Princess and the Stranger

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Stories of encounters between strangers and princesses were common in ancient cultures. The two most famous, about Moses and Odysseus, seem to present a choice between passivity and activity, peace and violence. But the question becomes both more complicated and more interesting when we turn to the princess-and-stranger narrative to end all others.
Yuval Levin

Our Post-Pandemic Institutions: A Conversation with Yuval Levin

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"If you look at today’s Republican senators, there are differences among them about the role of government that are very profound, and that are deeper than anything we’ve seen in two generations on the Right. But they take those differences as reasons to be publicly disappointed with each other, rather than as reasons to actually mobilize some bloc of voters (and politicians, and activists, and intellectuals) and try to negotiate about what the party should offer the country."
Friends eating outside

The Bookshelf: The Pleasures of the Table

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One of the vital experiences of which the current pandemic robbed us for too long is the dinner party with friends. Reading about food, too, can be a pleasure in its own right, whether one tries out daring new recipes or not. My small kitchen library has a few notable classics that are as interesting for their authors’ voices as for their instruction in preparing dishes.
Oath of the Horatii

Reflections from a Dean of Students: Virtue versus the Agreeable

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Civilize your children long before you allow them to inhabit the decivilizing island of social media. Make sure that they can govern their own souls. But remember that virtue isn’t only about restraining impulses. It is also, and especially, about loving the good. Don’t just take things away. Give your children something better.
Plain white church

Ramona’s World: The Quiet Christianity of Beverly Cleary’s Beloved Books

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Beverly Cleary did not make Ramona a specimen of moral improvement, or a Christian evangelist. She made her a Christian child. Unlike Christian families today, however, Ramona’s family lives a world in which traditional morality is the cultural default. Going to church makes you normal, and practicing Christianity garners social rewards. Christian life simply means living.
Video Call

On the Primacy of Embodiment, Against the Online Instructors

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The inadequacy of online education reminds us of our embodied nature as human beings. We yearn to experience reality as the integrated persons we are.

What Easter and Passover Can Teach Us About Confronting Cancel Culture

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Christianity and Judaism have survived, and now thrive, not by erasing the problematic aspects of their past, but by openly acknowledging them—by building them into their rituals and incorporating them into the very fabric of their faith.
Farmers' Market

American Farming Communities Have Collapsed. It’s Time to Revive Them.

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Since our founding, the idea of agricultural autonomy has encouraged reductive thinking that breaks down the farm’s purpose to fit solely profit-focused ends—and has served as a threat to healthy, whole farm communities. Farmers need more than private free enterprise; they need a collaborative supportive system.
Man with three screens

The 50/50 Problem: How the Internet Is Distorting Our Reality

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More than 50 percent of Americans spend more than 50 percent of their waking hours living in virtual, artificial worlds rather than the given, created one in which their bodies exist. The 50 percent threshold represents a tipping point that renders dialogue, deliberation, civic friendship, and compromise extraordinarily difficult in any society.
two open books, one on top of the other, with a television remote control on the top

The Bookshelf: Good Books into Better Movies

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Many of the books behind our favorite films are very much worth reading. But the medium of cinema does not necessarily translate great literature effectively.
Ora et Labora written over door

Would St. Benedict Zoom? The Rule of St. Benedict as an Antidote to Technopoly

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Even though few of us are called to monastic life, Benedict’s Rule provides us with a guide for a more fulfilling, contented life that mitigates the acedia of an anxious age in the thrall of technology.
Statue of St. Francis

Enduring Longings: Reflections on DuBois’s Reflections on Francis of Assisi

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The conception of the good life that W.E.B. DuBois discerns in the pattern of St. Francis of Assisi’s life straddles the secular and sacred. It can provide a starting point for a recovery and re-articulation of enduring longings in a secularized culture. The cultivation of those longings, in turn, is at the core of truly liberal education.

Guiding Youth to the Good Life

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So many young adults today are desperate for guidance but surrounded by adults unwilling or incapable of providing it. Richard Morley Myers's Thinking About Happiness reminds us that while the ignorance and fashionable errors of our generation may pass, the wisdom of the classics will endure.

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