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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 Lamp that Burns Forever 

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Washington

Isolation Bookshelf: Independence Day Edition

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Americans love America because it is their own and because it is good. Our ability to detach ourselves from America and decry its injustices only increases our attachment to it as a continuing project that is truly our own.
Iso Cinema

Isolation Cinema, Father’s Day Edition

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The best depictions of fathers in classic films.
Pillars

Life Lessons: Four Pillars, Three Little Pigs

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We have limited time. So how should we use it? What will our lives mean when we finally look back on them? Like it or not, we inevitably choose a path, either by our love or refusal to love; by our actions or our refusals to act.
Books

Isolation Bookshelf: Classic Texts on the Problem of Justice

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Accommodation and half measures—the stuff of everyday political life—will not do when we encounter the politics of mastery and subjugation. Aristotle’s “partnership of free persons” demands more.
Windows

Would America Be Better Off without Religion?

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A great irony of the Jewish and Christian faith traditions: One must be willing to accept suffering and sacrifice for a greater purpose that transcends one’s particular material and sensual needs and desires. Counter-intuitively, it is these transcendent qualities of faith that eschew utilitarian aims for a greater purpose that create the circumstances for greater material well-being.
Books

Isolation Bookshelf: Words Matter

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Each of the books I mention here can help us to be conscious—to be “in the know,” which is what Austen meant by the word—thus using the gift of speech in ways that accord with our nature as “the reflexive animal,” as Lewis calls us, governed by “the inner lawgiver” (Lewis again) of our conscience. And these conjoined obligations—to our nature and to our speech—are why even pronouns are a field of battle that truth-tellers should not surrender.
Prayer

COVID-19 Relief and Saving Catholic Schools

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Catholic schools, along with other faith-based schools, are a vital gift to the families they serve and to our country. America’s COVID-19 relief efforts should support the educational choices of all families and work to save Catholic schools.
Matt's Bookshelf

Isolation Bookshelf: Laugh Out Loud with P.G. Wodehouse

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Wodehouse’s work, from virtually any period of his long career, is amazingly consistent. One learns after a while that when one begins a Wodehouse story, satisfaction is guaranteed. Like a fresh whisky and soda, his work promises an easing of the tensions of daily life, an invitation to merriment, and a quiet contentment that in the end all will be well.
Prayer

Reviving the Freedom of Association

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A competent First Amendment jurisprudence must adequately account for the rich web of associations that enable human flourishing. To live in communities according to shared values is essential to our humanity.
Gate

Social, Political Animals: Embodied Learning and the Limits of Online Education

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Technology may permit us to supplement, but it should not lead us to discard, the personal Socratic education that does full justice to human nature and has contributed so much to the development of our civilization.

Isolation Cinema: The Films of John Ford

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John Ford’s America is a good deal like Ford himself—loud, brawling, and hard-charging. Ford’s Americans are also honorable, self-sacrificing, and faithful to their promises. That’s not the whole truth about America, not by a long shot. But it’s true enough that in John Ford’s films, we will forever see something of ourselves.
Aeneas

Virgil, Pope Francis, and the Wisdom of Memory

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In responding to the current crisis, the great pandemic, we can follow the example of Aeneas: we can reject despair in the face of horrible suffering and find strength in "the roots of our traditions."
Gates

The End of Campus Education? Virtually Impossible

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Our current national experiment reveals how unpopular online education is. Its proponents on the political right should admit its limitations and end their infatuation with its novelty and presumed efficiency.
Books

Isolation Bookshelf: Escaping into Historical Fiction

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There is a great deal to be learned about the virtues and vices by following the long and eventful lives of D’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. And isn’t this finally what good novels of any kind do for us—present the fullness of human characters for our consideration, so that we may reflect on our own characters?
Books

Isolation Bookshelf: Science Fiction Classics

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What can human beings endure? How can they adapt to radical changes in their environment and in themselves? How will their choices reshape their society? Science fiction at its best invites us to consider such questions at the extremes of human experience.
Neighborhood

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood despite COVID-19

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As we accept the new normal—for however long this might last—maybe we can look to our past and reclaim our first communities, our neighborhoods, by reaching out to those nearest our quarantine bases. Hopefully we will find that, when we can finally resume life as we knew it, we will have more community, not less, richer connection, not poorer.

Isolation Cinema, 1939 Edition

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While you’re stuck at home, why not elevate your viewing with some classic films from the golden age of American filmmaking?
Times

Scapegoating “Christian Nationalists” for the Coronavirus Pandemic

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Shutting down the questions of Christian nationalists comes from a faith tradition of its own, a faith in collective humanity, international travel, and free exchange. Time will tell whether such a faith can remain vibrant.
Prayer

Pray, Trust, Act, and Hope: An Easter Letter

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My prayer for all of you—for all of us—is that God would not only intervene dramatically to kill this virus, but also that, in the course of doing so, God might strengthen us in our faith and trust, and in our understanding of our ultimate dependence on Him for all of life.
Books

Isolation Bookshelf

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Reading good history books takes us out of ourselves and places us, for a time, elsewhere and elsewhen. In our isolation, with our minds so preoccupied with the pandemic and its economic and social effects, such an escape can be just what the doctor ordered.
Video

Learning the Right Lessons from COVID-19 Can Benefit Mothers after the Pandemic

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So much of feminist thought is concerned with the idea that women need affordable, high-quality childcare options so that they can pursue professional success. But there is so little written on the ways we could use technology so that women could be with their children the vast majority of the time while still advancing in their careers.
Pandemic

Pandemics and the Agency of Citizens

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While medical experts’ job is to save lives from the coronavirus, it is the responsibility of citizens to ask and decide what makes a worthwhile life. There is more to life than mere living; our own self-respect as responsible agents, who govern ourselves under the law (human and moral), ought not be so easily jettisoned.
The Good Place

The End of The Good Place and the End of Man

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The Good Place finale was hilarious, thought provoking, and profoundly moving. However, in failing to find our highest good and identifying the means to achieve it, the show could do little more than put a happy face on our current cultural despair. This article contains spoilers.
Family

How to Flourish During the Coronavirus Pandemic: Research from the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard

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Our confrontation with suffering and death provides an important opportunity for reflection. What is it that we value most? What relationships need forgiveness or reconciliation? How should we understand our lives and our own mortality? Both empirical data and religious traditions show that, by engaging in such interior reflection, it can be possible to grow and flourish even amidst great suffering.

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