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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.

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Fighting the Burnout Culture: How Personalist Philosophers and Benedictine Monks Can Help Stressed-Out College Students

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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?

A Conservative Case for Utopia

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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.

How (and Why) Government Should Invest in Marriage

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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. 

Competing Visions of the University

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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.

C.S. Lewis in a Secular Core: Sex, Love, and That Hideous Strength

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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.

C.S. Lewis in a Secular Core: The Abolition of Man and a More Natural Science

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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.

Springtime for Snowflakes: An NYU Professor Takes On Academia’s “Social Justice Warriors”

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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.

Racism, the Legacy Museum, and the Costs of Self-Deception

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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.

Three Questions for the New Antiliberals

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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.

What #MeToo and Hooking Up Teach Us About The Meaning of Sex

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Reflecting on the experiences behind #MeToo teaches us that something is deeply broken at the heart of the sexual revolution.

The Strange Case of William Shakespeare and Donald Trump

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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.

Scouting Should Teach Universal Moral Values, Not Relativistic Ideology

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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.

Secular Materialism Can’t Make Sense of Reality

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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.

What It Means To Love Our Country

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Loving America well means taking her seriously—working to preserve what is lovely about her and to fix what is not.

Algorithmic Man: Yuval Noah Harari’s Timid Transhumanism

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The title of Yuval Noah Harari’s book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, is misleading. While the book uses a future-oriented rhetoric, it is actually less about the future than it is about what the author takes to be the nature of life itself: namely, that we are all just bundles of algorithms.

Self-Creation or God's Creation? Mistaken Identities and Nietzsche's Madman

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Those who believe they are living in a created cosmos inhabit a different psychological world from those living after the death of God. Those whose identity is rooted in the divine order of existence are divided from those whose identity is self-created.

Rainbow Soccer Jerseys Don’t Reduce Harassment. They Provoke It.

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The US National Soccer Team’s rainbow jerseys are provoking and inflaming the controversies of sexual politics. Soccer’s governing bodies should follow their own rules, which were designed to foster inclusivity, and ban political rainbow jerseys in international play.

What Mothers Cannot Give to Their Sons

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For the sake of boys and the families they must eventually lead, we must open our hearts and quit attempting to thrust upon them an unnatural and uninspiring commitment to sexual indifference.

The War Against Abstinence: Blockers, American Pie, and the Last Great Sexual Taboo

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The last great sexual sin of our time is not related to any specific sex act or forbidden partner. The greatest sexual sin of our time is not a sin of commission but of omission: the sin of not doing it at all.

Natural Rights, God, and Marriage in the American Founding

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By calling our attention to the Founders’ political theory of the family, Thomas West’s new book leads us to ask whether a secular theory of natural rights and natural law can sustain the moral ecology necessary for self-government. If a secular natural-rights republic cannot sustain the family, it would seem to be neither a good nor attractive political theory.

Physician-Assisted Suicide and Personal Action: Responding to the Law

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We can’t afford to live without physicians who are devoted to always healing and caring, and never harming. Requesting physician-assisted suicide, like legalizing it, erodes that devotion. A refusal to ask, even on the part of those not committed to the inviolability of human life, helps sustain that devotion.

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.

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