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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 Uncreated Art 

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An Open Letter to Mr. George Clooney on Hate and the Southern Poverty Law Center

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Please use your influence as a major donor to persuade the Southern Policy Law Center to amend its embittering and unproductive campaigns to label any political or social issue opponent as a hate group. Although controversial, organizations that fight to protect the unborn and strengthen families are not motivated by hate. Vilifying them only worsens our toxic and polarized political climate.

On Christian Liberty and Lockean Liberty: A Grateful Response to Micah Watson, Samuel Gregg, and Anthony Esolen

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If we want a different politics, ultimately we must offer a different moral imagination for ourselves, our children, and theirs.

Patrick Deneen and the Problem with Liberalism

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Patrick Deneen poses good questions but begs others. The second installment in the Public Discourse symposium on Why Liberalism Failed.

Prisoners in the American Cave

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Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed is a provocative attempt to explain what’s wrong with our culture, how this came to be, and what might be done about it. Although his historical account of liberalism is unpersuasive, he offers a prescient analysis of the current moment and insightful prescriptions for constructive action.

What’s Scariest: Facebook, Google . . . or Us?

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Facebook or Google taking over the world is a distant, speculative fear. Being harassed, humiliated, shunned and unemployed are immediate fears. We increasingly live in a digital panopticon ruled as much by mobs as by the overseers.

The Merit Badge of Surrender: How the Boy Scouts of America are Succumbing to the Gender Revolution

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With the recent decision to drop “Boy” from their fabled name, the Boy Scouts undermine the very foundation for their existence and exacerbate our society’s confusion about sexual difference and gender distinction.

The Catholic Church, the State, and Liberalism

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According to previous papal teaching, a Catholic confessional state is the ideal, even if in most modern situations it’s not a practical possibility, and prudence would steer us away from it. That teaching continues to be normative for Catholics.

Conforming to Good or Evil: More Moral Lessons in the Shadow of the Holocaust

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Clear moral norms are crucial. But to be effective, those norms need to be embodied in moral communities and social practices, habituated in the virtues, and animated by a conviction that they are an essential part of human flourishing. We must create social structures and communities in which intellectual training and moral formation in the virtues can happen.

Moral Education in the Shadow of the Holocaust

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Why do some ordinary men and women commit horrible atrocities, while others resist, even if it costs their lives? Studies of the Holocaust offer a potent critique of our customary approaches to moral education.

The Dual Legitimation Crisis: Elitism, Populism, and Political Power

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Because liberal Western democracies are ostensibly rooted in the theory of popular sovereignty, elite disdain for the people creates another legitimation crisis—one that many fail to recognize. It is not simply that the people have lost confidence in the elites and their governance, or that the elites struggle to speak for (and even to) the people. Disdain for the people also unmoors elite authority.

Conservatives Should Care about Institutional Racism

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Contemporary America faces continued racial discord that throws into question our mutual seriousness about the natural rights tradition and our commitment to the demands of republican citizenship. In an effort at self-scrutiny, conservatives should ask ourselves what our first response is in the face of evidence of institutional racism, and then ask ourselves what it should be.

Rob Rieman, Joseph Pieper, and the Existential Poverty of the West

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Joseph Pieper knows what Rob Riemen has forgotten: the existential poverty of the West cannot be evaded or solved through humanism, for no ersatz god gives meaning to our poetry, song, dance, and drama. Absent God, it is all vapor, lacking the goodness to which we respond in wonder, delight, joy, and feasting.

Women’s Hidden Influence: Mothers, Race, and the American Republic

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Women are deeply effective in the transmission of mores, as are the churches, schools, and civic organizations that they serve and lead. If these institutions were touched by white supremacy even into the 1970s, how can those educated by such institutions escape the influence of these opinions in their own interpretations of contemporary racial politics?

Can Sex Be Casual? Searching for Connection on Campus

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A new book on the hookup culture describes its harms in great detail. But the author fails to understand the implications of her own data, ignoring the fact that we’re in the middle of a cultural sexual crisis that exists because we’ve told ourselves that sex can be casual.

Jordan Peterson on Adam and Eve

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In his biblical interpretation, Jordan Peterson re-presents in powerful and fresh ways the stories that have animated Western culture. Christians have much to learn from him, even as his own engagement with the Bible could be enriched by the Christian tradition.

Domestic Challenges to Religious Liberty—From Left and Right

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Religious freedom in America is caught between opponents on the left and the right. The second in a two-part series.

Who Do You Think You Are? Identity in the Twenty-First Century

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We are more than our driver’s licenses, Social Security numbers, and credit cards.

The Deficits of the iPhone Generation

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Members of iGen suffer from serious intellectual and moral deficits: they are ill-informed, uninterested in pursuing relevant information, passionate without being active, afraid of debate with those who disagree, and uninterested in learning or exploration.

Madeline L’Engle, C.S. Lewis, and Christianity: Moving Beyond Collectivism and Individualism

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The Christian quest for the common good is not reducible either to the simple aggregate of individual goods or to the promotion of the needs of the collective at the expense of the one.

A Tragic Abandonment of Identity: The Secularization of America’s Religious Colleges and Universities

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Today’s religious colleges and universities face a choice between two opposing worldviews: the traditional, spiritually embedded worldview upon which they were founded, or the secular, hedonistic, materialistic worldview that dominates them today.

A Stone Wall in a Concrete World: D.C. Schindler’s Freedom from Reality and Our Modern Crisis of Meaning

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Freedom from Reality belongs in the upper echelon of contemporary philosophical works. Schindler’s reflection on the contemporary crisis of meaning transcends dry rhetoric to embody the truths it describes.

Neither Straussian nor MacIntyrean: The Politics of Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option”

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Ironically, for all his fierce criticisms of it, Dreher operates very much within the school of American conservatism. He follows in the footsteps of the same pessimists who emerged in conservative political thought a few decades ago.

Neuhaus and Liberalism

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A liberal polity is a conversational polity: it comprises human beings bound together in argument, aspiring to order their common life through the exercise of persuasion, not the application of power. A liberal society is therefore a special kind of intentional community.

How Europe’s Way of Denial Became a Way of Death

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Europe’s immigration woes underscore how much of the continent is living in untruth—in lies that gradually kill.

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