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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: When Words Are Deeds 

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Family Watching Movie

Isolation Cinema: Family-Friendly Classics

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Although kid-friendly movies continue to be made—usually animated ones rather than live action—the movie theater is no longer the safe space it generally was before 1960. Fortunately, the best family films of yesteryear are still available to us.
Food on Table

On the Sacredness of Food

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If life is sacred, food must be sacred too, since it makes life possible. And the higher the order of life which is given up to be food, the more sacred the food. That’s why vegetables are harvested, while animals are sacrificed. That’s why the Catholic Church considers the sacrifice of the Mass, when God offers his body as food for our corporal and spiritual nourishment, the source and summit of the Christian life.
Hammer & Sickle

Affirming Reality by Rejecting the Lie

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All “dissidents” and men of good will need to give serious thought to the ways they might resist the regnant ideological lies all around us. In this task, Rod Dreher’s Live Not By Lies will remain indispensable for what might be a long time to come.
Books

Beauty and Charismatic Humanities

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In order to win the undergraduates once more, the humanities have a clear course to follow. They must abandon identity politics, which only produce a tense and humorless classroom. More deeply, they must insist upon the old appeals to genius, greatness, masterpieces, beauty, and sublimity.
Classroom

Isolation Bookshelf: Teachers and Influences on the American Project

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Clearing

Ingratitude, Mob Violence, and Providence

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Our culture’s deep ingratitude is the long, nihilistic outworking of the logic of modern thought itself. When human experience is reduced to only will and power struggle, there no room for gratefulness. Those of us who have not renounced cosmic order and the providence that brings that order to fulfillment, by contrast, know that all things willed or permitted by God work for good. Thus we should be grateful—profoundly grateful—for everything.
Peacock Feathers

Flannery O’Connor, Sanctity, and the Psychology of Racism

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Flannery O’Connor drew on her understanding of the evil within her in composing her brilliant fiction. Far from being the simple racist that recent attacks have made her out to be, she authored some of the most probing accounts of the psychology of racism in American literature.

Why Religious Pluralism and Religious Literacy Matter for the Future of Religious Freedom in America

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To have any chance of seriously mitigating common misperceptions of religious freedom, Evangelicals must publicly demonstrate a sincere commitment to religious pluralism and its necessary counterpart, religious literacy.

Education and the Restoration of Moral Agency

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Many students today lack a real formation in moral order and agency. Few adults have taught them what a worthwhile life looks like and what they could do to achieve it. University educators must give students access to authoritative moral claims, even as they allow them to judge and decide for themselves.
Martin Luther

A Protestant Defense of the Common Good

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An integral part of the Christian calling is to pursue goods greater than ourselves.

Isolation Cinema: Crazy Love

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What is it that makes screwball comedies so much fun? With their manic scripts and their depiction of characters of both sexes who will say anything and do anything for love, they bring together men and women—whose senses of humor often differ sharply—to laugh at the same crazy antics, and to see what mad joy love can be. In the summer of COVID, as we stay home with our loved ones, the screwball may be just what the doctor ordered.
City

A World of Strange Relations: Christian Wiman’s Survival Is a Style

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Christian Wiman’s new collection of poetry creates a world in which the human being is never one thing or the other—believer or unbeliever—but both at once. As the speaker in the book’s first poem, “Prologue,” puts it, “I need a space for unbelief to breathe.” Survival Is a Style creates that space.
Public Discourse

Reconsidering the Statesmanship of Abraham Lincoln

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In many ways, Abraham Lincoln has almost loomed entirely too largely in our national consciousness, since it has now become difficult to get around the acknowledgment of his greatness to discover just what it was that made him great. Jon Schaff’s new book is an attempt to do just that.
Strange Rites

Angels, Demons, and Unbundled Religion

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True encounters with demonic activity ought to make today’s neopagans reconsider whether they should do more than cultivate eclectic spiritual identities.
philosophy, natural law

The Epistemics of First Principles

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All knowledge comes from sensory experience, including knowledge of the first principles of morality on which the natural law and moral reasoning build.
Martin Luther

Should Protestants Reject Natural Law? Responding to Common Objections

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Even according to Protestant traditions with the gravest views of sin, fallen human beings do not get everything wrong when thinking about morality. Since Scripture itself affirms that the created order reveals God’s moral law, Christians should not turn their backs on natural law for the sake of promoting biblical teaching.
Books

Isolation Bookshelf: History Outside the Academy

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For reasons that pass all understanding, modern academic disciplines are where English prose goes to die. Fortunately, profound and compelling historical writing has a history of its own that predates the modern research university by two and a half millennia, stretching back to Herodotus in the fifth century BC. Such a tradition is resistant to the chloroform of the modern academy, so long as gifted storytellers find publishers and readers.
Homer

Homer at the Beach

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On Calypso’s island, we encounter both the allure and the dangers of the beach. There, Homer brings us right up against a mysterious fact: the fantasy of an undying beach body—even that of a love goddess whose collagen never loses its tensile strength—will not really make us happy. The best kind of lover will have skin in the game: skin that can age, that has aged, that is actively aging before our eyes. To escape the history that is written into our bodies is to escape the meaning, the meaningful struggle, of our lives.
News

The News Makes You Dumb

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We should stay away from the news lest we fall prey to its mania, foolishness, and stupidity. We should read books—difficult books—and be challenged to improve ourselves rather than settle for easy answers.
Reading

Thought, “the World,” and Education

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Inwardness, intellectual or otherwise, is the source and the safeguard of individual human flourishing, without which no community is judged to do well. Individuals must experience their learning as a mode of freedom and spontaneity, not a complex navigation of yet another structure of authority and achievement.
Capitol

Two Cheers for Politics

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The intellectual life and political life are distinct elements of the human good, but they mutually support one another.
Bookshelves

The Beautiful Uselessness of Learning

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The humanities matter because human life matters. Rightly lived, the intellectual life is an ascetic one that calls for renunciation and sacrifice. Most of all, seriousness demands that we continue to pursue the truths of human existence and align our lives with them.
Campus

Isolation Bookshelf: College Daze

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Like the spirit of liberty itself, the spirit of liberal education is “not too sure that it is right.” As colleges and universities are beset by the twin challenges of the pandemic and of ideological activism, will we able to keep that spirit of inquiry alive?
Praying

Responding to a Fundamental Crisis Within Islam Itself

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If we are to abolish the primordial cycle of hatred, tyranny, and violence that plagues humanity, and avert civilizational disaster, people of all faiths must work together to prevent the political weaponization of fundamentalist Islam. We should learn from the unique heritage of Muslims on the Indonesian island of Java, who defeated Muslim extremists in the sixteenth century and restored freedom of religion for all citizens, two centuries before the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom and the Bill of Rights led to the separation of state and religion in the United States.

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