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.

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Those who value freedom of conscience and faith need to realize that the Orwellian Chinese system is not cartoonish hype: it’s a real system coming soon to a country near you.
Choose an institution that has adopted the Chicago Principles, and then learn how to shed light on the dark corners of inquiry, and of your own mind.
Christian Miller’s scientific approach to understanding moral character is impressive, and it allows him to reach a public that is inclined only to trust the empirical. Yet this method severely restricts the conclusions Miller feels justified to make.
Brown University researcher Lisa Littman has been attacked for publishing results that call into question the politically correct narrative about transgender youth.
Justice is something we must establish every day—in the way we live with others, in the way we speak humbly and attend to all the facts patiently, in deference to reality and the truth of things.
Jonah Goldberg makes a fundamental mistake by tossing out God in the opening sentence of his latest book, Suicide of the West.
The authors of two new books on reading agree: reading good literature well is not only enjoyable, it is also a veritable school of virtue. The pleasure to be gained by reading well is a skill that, like virtue itself, is achieved through practice.
Intellectual diversity, academic freedom, and freedom of speech are means to an end, the end of truth-seeking. If a university does not retain its traditional mission of seeking the truth through reasoned discourse, it will not remain committed to freedom of inquiry or freedom of speech.
September 11 should serve as a day of remembrance, but also as a day of reflection. We should reflect on the day, what it means to be an American, and how we can take up President Reagan’s charge to develop an “informed patriotism.”
The Truman Show, once thought of as a science-fiction film, has suddenly become reality. We are all balancing our roles as Christof and Truman, creator and created, limited by circumstances and nature but bent on inventing ourselves and managing how we are perceived.
What are the ends of education? How do various conceptions of the human person influence our understanding of education? What does a liberal arts education look like in an educational system dominated by specialized fields of study and focused on credentials and skills? How do friendship and community relate to education?
The remedy for utopianism is not the suppression of the utopian imagination but its education. Genuine poetic education assists in the development of right reason, and it is the only effective remedy to the cheap sentimental allures of propaganda.
New research suggests that educational programs can strengthen or even save marriages. Government can and should play an important role in supporting marriage through such programs. 
The promise of a career or the ability to write correctly formatted technical reports does not justify years of debt. But the formation of the self and the entrance into an intellectual inheritance—these are the treasures that collegiate education promises.
For C.S. Lewis, the body and the erotic procreative relationship between men and women are not mere nature, to be manipulated and embellished. They are not mere matter, to be shaped in any way that we please. They are, rather, an indicator of a larger order, something that offers us a clue to that larger order and that has to be understood in the light of it.
The problem with modernity’s conquest of nature is that it works toward obliterating the distinction between creature and creator, a distinction that is essential for maintaining a humane and non-totalitarian politics.
Michael Rectenwald’s new book offers up passionate intellectual debate in a climate where the discursive righteousness, sexuality, sex, skin color, and feelings of the speaker too often matter more than the thoughts espoused. It is a portrait of the contemporary scene of academic freedom, which is anything but free, and even less academic.
When we lie to ourselves about the moral status of other human beings, we not only unjustly injure other people, we also injure ourselves and our culture. We transform ourselves into a people who believe the lie. The costs of self-deception are internal and reflexive as well as external and consequential.
The new antiliberals are not wrong to worry about the dire state of American politics and culture. But they persistently fail to adequately ask, much less clearly answer, three pressing questions that must be part of any adequate treatment of the problem, and they virtually ignore the thoughtful conservative alternatives to antiliberalism that do address these questions.
Reflecting on the experiences behind #MeToo teaches us that something is deeply broken at the heart of the sexual revolution.
Stephen Greenblatt’s new book is broad-ranging, accessibly written, and nominally dedicated to an interesting topic: tyranny in the work of William Shakespeare. Unfortunately, too much of the author’s energy is dedicated to expressing disdain for a particular contemporary politician in a way that detracts from his declared purpose.
The progressive left is working to overcome what it perceives as the out-of-date premises of the Judeo-Christian ethic previously reflected in scouting.
Rumors of God’s death may have been greatly exaggerated, but the prevalence of a materialistic philosophy that cannot give an adequate account of human freedom and moral responsibility has put in jeopardy many of the core ideas at the base of our civilization. Without metaphysics we are left simply with physics, and physics is about power, leverage, and force.
Loving America well means taking her seriously—working to preserve what is lovely about her and to fix what is not.

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