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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: The 2026 Public Discourse Summer Reading List 

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Of Pigs and Pupils: Fast Food, Modern Education, and the Growth of Classical (Christian) Schools

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The classical school approach offers a fundamentally different vision of education that families fed up with a factory approach to learning find compelling.

Power, Preference, and Morality: On Alasdair MacIntyre’s Latest

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Despite the frustrating sense that much of its argument is asserted rather than demonstrated, there can be no doubt that those involved in the cultural disputes of our day ought to know Alasdair MacIntyre’s new book.

Law, Liberalism, and Luther: Beyond the Myths

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Contrary to the popular, tidy narrative repeated by Robert Reilly and others, neither Luther nor his colleagues and heirs “abandoned” natural law. Nor did they recast it in a voluntarist mold. They embraced and defended it along entirely traditional lines.

Pressing Pause on the “Transgender Moment”: Ryan T. Anderson’s When Harry Became Sally

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Ryan T. Anderson has written the definitive book on the transgender phenomenon—ranging across medicine, psychology, culture, sociology, law, and public policy. In doing so, he may have saved the minds and bodies—indeed, the very lives—of people he will never know.

We Must Reclaim Parental Rights as Building Blocks to a Healthy Society

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In both the United Kingdom and the United States, the fundamental rights of parents have dangerously eroded, undermining the ability of parents to protect the welfare of their children, instill moral values, and pass on religious beliefs and practices.

Is Medieval Christianity the Solution to the Crisis of American Protestantism?

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A new book seeks to diagnose the ills of contemporary Protestantism and, with help from C.S. Lewis, prescribes a course of treatment drawn from the rich history of Christianity.

Could A Preemptive Strike on North Korea or Iran Be Morally Justified?

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If mutually assured destruction no longer seems effective in dealing with the threat of nuclear attack by North Korea and Iran, what military options remain and what moral principles can guide their employment?

Notre Dame Swallows the Pill

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The University has announced it is to be the sole funder, unaccompanied proprietor, and director of distribution of what it has solemnly declared for years to be an immoral service. But the Holy Spirit is not a consequentialist. God does not want us to weigh up pros and cons of adhering to the moral truth. And the greatest respect we can show others is to bear faithful witness to the truth.

Germain Grisez, Christian Philosopher

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The whole of Grisez’s account of this sense of Christian philosophy repays study, not least as an exploration of the shape that philosophic wonder first takes in a Catholic educated by a warmly believing household; and then of the place of audacious questioning in a Christian faith firmly held for love of God and in hope for God’s Kingdom.

The Criminal Mind and the Moral Imagination: What Psychopaths Can Teach Us About Conscience

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Just as evil may be understood as the absence of good, darkness as the absence of light, cold as the absence of heat, the absence of conscience presents itself as profoundly dehumanizing and destructive.

Why Senior Faculty Should Teach First-Year Students

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Why aren’t we insisting that students be introduced to the discipline by those who know it best? Pawning these courses off on overworked junior faculty who are so busy grading they have no time to eat lunch, let alone publish or—worse yet—on adjunct faculty who are paid slave wages and have no benefits is unconscionable.

Casualties of a Social, Psychological, and Medical Fad: The Dangers of Transgender Ideology in Medicine

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Dr. Paul McHugh is optimistic that the ascendency of transgender ideology is a passing fad. Yet the damage that transgender ideology can wreak in even just ten or fifteen years—the hormones, the surgery, the irreversible decisions, the mutilated bodies—is considerable.

Can We Stop Fighting Over Schools?

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Most other nations with advanced levels of universal schooling provide public support to faith-based schools with no evident harm to their social fabric and with considerably less conflict over schooling. The time has come for the United States to adopt principled pluralism as the fundamental and equitable structure of our education system.

The Libertarian Case for Drug Prohibition

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Freedom isn’t just the bare ability to do something; it is the ability to act under the influence of properly functioning cognitive faculties. If you value freedom, then you should oppose the legalization of recreational drugs.

Civic Chaos and the Myth of Autonomy

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A regime that rejects the primacy of truth and attempts to upend our social nature will inevitably create conditions for civic unrest.

LOL: No Laughing Matter for Catholic Universities

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In order to be considered a university at all by those who fancy themselves the arbiters of what counts as knowledge, the Catholic university must abandon its fundamental truth claims and its proper relationship with those entrusted with the proclamation of that truth.

It Stinketh: On the End (and The End?) of the Modern University

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The modern university project, as articulated by the American Association of University Professors, is a project of planned obsolescence. Those who continue to proclaim that the principles of free and open inquiry and the marketplace of ideas are alive and well are fooling only themselves.

What’s Wrong with the New NIH Study on Transgender Kids?

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A new study being launched by the NIH is intended to produce evidence supporting a particular conclusion: that transgender affirmation therapy is safe and effective for gender-dysphoric youngsters. And once the federal government speaks, states and other institutions will fall in line.

The Last Jedi and the Ancien Régime: A Spoiler-Heavy Defense

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The arrogance of the Jedi and the Sith needs to be replaced with a deep sense of failure and humility, out of which fruitful service and sacrifice can grow. In this way, The Last Jedi is the Star Wars film we need right now, even if it isn’t the one we want or deserve.

Harvey Weinstein Isn’t Unusual: Sexual Abuse and Trafficking in the United States

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The latest Harvey Weinstein allegation reminds us that, around the world and here in the United States, sex trafficking is closer than it appears.
philosophy, natural law

Practical Reason, Basic Goods, and Natural Law

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Reason operating without error judges that no human being should ever intend the death of another human being for any reason whatsoever. No achievable good can justify such a choice. And that is the foundation for the case against the death penalty.

The Philosophical Case against the Philosophical Case against Capital Punishment

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It’s three times more likely that you’ll die of lightning than that Aquinas will turn out to be wrong about something. The same cannot be said of New Natural Law philosophy.

Jefferson’s “Master Epicurus” and the Nature of the American Regime

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While the American regime is often criticized as Hobbesian, the letters of Thomas Jefferson provide evidence that it may be more accurately described as Epicurean.

Who Are You? Alt-Right “Identitarianism,” Violence, and the Intellectual Roots of Western Civilization

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By making our common humanity irrelevant to the question of identity, Richard Spencer sets himself in diametric opposition to the intellectual roots of the “Western” civilization to which he would lay claim.

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