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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.

John Witherspoon and the Spirit of 1776 

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Saint Chapel, Paris

Building a Catholic “Civilization of Love”: A Response to Nathaniel Peters

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Why must a “serious Catholic politics” tolerate a regime that worships the profit motive and carnal pleasure but recoil from one that worships the Blessed Trinity? Why is it sophisticated to ask the state to recognize truth of supply and demand but simplistic to ask that the state recognize the truth of the sacraments?
in god we trust

It Is Right and Just Offers Inspiration, Not Serious Catholic Politics

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In their new book, Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley provide a rousing exhortation for Catholics to unapologetically live out their faith. Unfortunately, the book contains too many generalizations, overstatements, and imprecisions to be a thoughtful guide to Catholic politics. Any serious Catholic politics must recognize that the problem of pluralism cannot be solved by dominating non-Catholics and imposing our view of the good on them.
Seedling in ground

Against Conservative Rationalism

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Humans are frail creatures, depending on much beyond our control. Those who do not recognize this have never seen their father watch the clouds, or had livestock die, or waited as the ultrasound searches for a heartbeat that will never be heard. God is good, and he loves what he has created, but we are dust, and he allows the winds to blow.
Stack of books with laptop on wooden table

The Bookshelf: In Praise of University Presses—and of One in Particular

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What libraries do on the demand side—acquiring the books and other materials that their faculty and students need to do their research—the university presses do on the supply side, bringing important research into print. Unfortunately, one of the best university presses in the country now faces the threat of closure.
Pastor preaching

Forming Evangelical Pastors: Theological Education from the Margins

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Evangelicals do not need more pastor-politicians. As the social pressures against historic Christianity increase, pastors and ministers will need a deeper doctrinal foundation, one that enables them to effectively catechize and instruct congregations embedded in a neo-pagan West.
Church congregation

Is the Catholic Parish in Crisis?

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The future of the parish depends on taking Catholic belief and practice more seriously, rebuilding neighborhoods of solidarity within the parish, and proposing Catholicism as integral to human flourishing.
Aeneas

We Must Found Institutions, Not Just Preserve Them: A Conservatism of Creation

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Conservatives are generally good at conserving, and we are particularly aware of the continuities across the human condition. But given today’s conditions, when so much has changed so recently and so many social problems bedevil us, we need to get great at creating new institutions.
Cambridge

A Time to Build Schools

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Our nation’s morally formative institutions are weak and weakening further, thanks in no small part to the enormously destructive effects of social media. The single type of institution best suited to resist these and other pressures of our times is the mission-driven, tech-skeptical K–12 school. The successes of our best countercultural colleges and universities, viewed in the light of Yuval Levin’s invaluable work on the nature of institutions, show us how the incentive structures of an excellent K–12 school make it the formative institution our time needs most.
Mont saint michel

Benedictine Education and the Importance of Poetic Thinking

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The poetic stance is receptive, submissive even, and begins with an appreciation of the mysterious and the inscrutable. A humble appreciation of the mysterious beauty of reality must be the context for all fruitful problem-solving.

Catholic Schools and Transgender Students

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The lastingness of each person’s reality as male or female is so integral to the faith’s architecture, that to deny it—even to equivocate about it—is to undermine Catholic faith itself. No Catholic institution should risk that effect.

Engaging with the Culture: Virtue? Or Practical Reasons?

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Practical reasons are where the action is if one is to engage agents, the culture at large, and even popes, in moral discussion, debate, and deliberation. There is really no alternative in an ethics of virtue, acquired or infused.
Man looking at painting

Beauty Can Teach Us the Art of Living Well

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Human beings have a natural appreciation for beauty, but we strain to justify its existence in utilitarian or pragmatic terms. By offering an attractive vision, beauty makes the truths to which it relates appealing. It helps convince us that the good may not just be good for human life in the same way a healthy diet and exercise are, but also a source of joy.
Austrian Village

Revelations from a Hidden Life

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The hidden life of Franz Jägerstätter offers us an example of how to love our fellow citizens in a time of partisan antagonism and division.
Praying hands

Avoiding the Delimiting of Hope

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Against the failed hopes of the Enlightenment, scientism, and modernism, Josef Pieper calls us to embrace a hope that transcends the physical and political world.

Ratzinger’s Way

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The first of a projected two-volume biography of the theologian-pope underscores his thought’s consistency and how it was shaped by Germany’s twentieth-century traumas.
Lincoln Douglas

The Bookshelf: Partisan Moments

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Partisanship is strong drink, and moderate consumption of the intoxicant has always been difficult. Herewith some recommendations for reading on partisan moments in American history.

A Communion of Anxiety: Hookup Culture and the Impossible Horizon of the Future

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What if religious and conservative higher education ceased speaking about marriage and family life as an accomplishment and began to treat marriage and children as that which enable human flourishing and a meaningful future?
People in Library

Learning, Justice, and Gift

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If people are more than wage-earners, then they must see that all of life is not about the practical activity of getting ahead. If they are more than political actors, then we must have education that is not expressly political. In other words, if we want to “do justice” to the total human condition, we must explore all the things that comprise the liberal arts: religion, philosophy, art, music, and literature.
Veiled Woman with French Flag

La France Périphérique and the Wounds of Globalization

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Nicholas Mathieu’s novel And Their Children After Them shows the effects of globalization and progressive idealism on a de-industrialized French town. Comparisons between Mathieu’s story and JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy offer insight into rural poverty and populism in France and America.
Student working at laptop

What I Wish I’d Known When I Started Graduate School: Tips for Writing and for Combating Impostor Syndrome

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Whatever your raw intelligence, whatever your background, what you have control over, and therefore what you should focus on, is your actions. The cure for impostor syndrome is to do what intellectuals do, and you’ll become an intellectual.
Netflix mug in front of laptop

The Netflix Effect: Corrosive Storytelling and the Human Person

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The Netflix adaptation of The Queen’s Gambit and the original version are based on two radically different visions of the human person. They bring the reader or viewer to one of two endpoints: either we recognize the importance of making the best choices and inherit a position of moral responsibility, or we face the despair of living in a world without moral agency.
Woman praying in church

Unlock Our Churches: Bringing Back Private Prayer

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Given the Church’s unequivocal endorsement of prayer before the Eucharist, and given that Masses are underway again in most dioceses, churches should be reopened for the private prayer of the faithful.

The Bookshelf: Reading and Watching Shakespeare in 2021

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Dipping into Shakespeare’s plays from time to time was unsatisfying; I grew ambitious to read all of his works. Yet how to proceed through it all? Some eight years ago, I resolved to make my own daily reading plan for moving through all of Shakespeare’s works in a year. Here, I present the 2021 version.
Christmas Tree closeup

The True Meaning of Christmas: Accept No Substitutes

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The Christmas message is one of joy, even “great joy,” but not superficial joy. Christmas confronts us with the sobering claim that humankind is in a state of sin—a state from which we cannot save ourselves. Hence the need for a savior, and hence the joyful Christian claim that God himself offers the salvation by coming to live among us.

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