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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.

Jonathan Haidt and the Limits of Expertise 

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Valuing Full-Time Motherhood

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While most Americans respect and appreciate mothers on an individual basis, we as a society devalue their vocation.

The Right to Be Differently Excellent: Why Christian Colleges Should Be Allowed to Be Christian

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Vanderbilt is legally free to constitute itself as a non-religious university. The question is whether Gordon College will be left free to constitute itself as a Christian college. Will we have equal liberty, or only liberty for those who despise Christianity?

You Don’t Need “Meternity” Leave to Be Happy—You Just Need to Love Someone Else More Than Yourself

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Becoming parents shocks us out of our normal state of being. It compels us to love others more deeply and to act upon that love more fully.

The Bard, the Bathroom, and the Common Good: Shakespeare’s Timeless and Timely Political Thought

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Whether we discuss the nature of marriage or the rules governing bathroom use, Shakespeare calls on us to remember who we are as human beings and how our nature should be reflected in our society’s mores and laws.

Just War Theory Isn’t Obsolete

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Modern warfare may have vastly increased the scale, but the traditional criteria for just war remain sound, especially in helping leaders avoid the false extremes of cynical realism and idealistic pacifism.

Aristotle Explains the Trump Phenomenon

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Aristotle’s discussion of factional conflict in his Politics gives historical insight into Donald Trump’s meteoric rise to political popularity. Ordinary Americans are acting in defense of their perceived economic interests and against the reign of political correctness.

Is Speciesism like Racism and Sexism?

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Defending the position that human beings have a special dignity because of their rational nature does not in any way imply that non-rational animals are not also deserving of a certain respect and appropriate treatment. While racism and sexism are moral evils, so-called “speciesism” is not morally wrong and cannot be compared to them.
Female Tennis players

A Sporting Difference: On Men’s and Women’s Athletics

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Despite current efforts to level the playing field between men and women in every area, the differences between men’s and women’s professional and collegiate sports make clear that some inequalities are unavoidable. With strength and speed as the factors governing success, men’s athletics will always be more popular.
Public Discourse

Ex Machina, Artificial Intelligence, and the Ethical Dangers–or Benefits?–of New Technology

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Very soon, the classic scenarios of artificial intelligence from science fiction will become reality. Recognizing the moral and ethical concerns such achievements will raise can help us begin to address them. Whether the development of new technology will be good or bad will depend on how we use it.
Public Discourse

The Law of Benedict

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Pope Benedict XVI often ventured into venues historically hostile to the Judeo-Christian tradition. A new collection of essays discusses many of these speeches, probing the relationship of reason to religion, the West, and natural law.
Public Discourse

The Ideology of Anti-Poetry

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A recent collection of essays on the nature and function of poetry gives a clear-sighted critique of the failures of contemporary poetry.
Public Discourse

Bird Brains and Cross-Species Empathy

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Speaking about empathy between humans and animals requires a robust philosophy of nature. Such a philosophy can guide us in thinking more deeply about what it means to be human and how the human animal can better be connected to the broader animal world.
Public Discourse

No Longer Calm, But Alive: Robert Royal’s Catholic Humanism

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Robert Royal makes the case that, despite a twentieth-century period of confusion and fragmentation, Christian humanism has been renewed and revitalized, so that today it is “as alive as it has ever been.”
Public Discourse

Newman and the Idea of the University, 2.0

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Universities are fundamentally different from businesses and cannot be run in the same way, and few executives understand the contemplative and investigative purposes of a Catholic university.
Public Discourse

A Catechesis for the Tolerant

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By arguing that religion is intolerant and should not be tolerated, a new book inadvertently demonstrates that liberalism grounded in personal autonomy is the least tolerant religion of all.
Public Discourse

Shakespeare’s Critique of the American Regime: A Response to John McGinnis

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Since understanding political life is essential to understanding human nature, and revealing human nature is the mark of a masterful poet, great poetry like that of Shakespeare necessarily reflects political principles.
Public Discourse

50 Years of Sex Changes, Mental Disorders, and Too Many Suicides

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Early pioneers in gender-reassignment surgery and recent clinical studies agree that a majority of transgender people suffer from co-occurring psychological disorders, leading tragically high numbers to commit suicide. Outlawing psychotherapy for transgender people may be politically correct, but it shows a reckless disregard for human lives.
Public Discourse

What’s Wrong with the Humanities?

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The humanities are declining because too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.
Public Discourse

Science, Philosophy, and God

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An understanding of the transcendence of creation forms the essential foundation of natural science. But does that understanding require revelation?
Public Discourse

Corporate Personhood and Individual Rights: A Reply to S. Adam Seagrave

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The truth that human beings possess a natural personhood and natural rights is not incompatible with the idea of corporate personhood and rights that exist not by nature but by convention.
Public Discourse

Goodnight, Vienna: What’s Wrong with Saying That Corporations Are People

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Corporations, and civic associations in general, are necessary bulwarks between governmental power and individual citizens—but they’re not people. Now more than ever, we must recover a clear understanding of what it means to be a human person with inherent dignity and natural rights.
Public Discourse

The Family and the Force

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The destruction of the Jedi order was due, in large part, to their persistent blindness to the deep, essential, and ineradicable power of familial love. The Skywalkers can bring balance to the Force because they unite it with love learned through family.
Public Discourse

Four Score and Seven Years Later: Reflections on Martin Luther King Jr.

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Today we are called to reflect anew on the vision and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., not in mere deference to ceremonial custom or civic piety but instead as Lincoln reflected on the Founders, mindful of the crisis of the times.
Public Discourse

Transgenderism Has No Basis in Science or Law

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In a domain in which the proposed “therapies” are so drastic, it is not too much to ask for a solid, evidence-based statement of who is being treated, for what, and why, before writing a prescription or passing a law.

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