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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.

Chesterton’s Christmas

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Public Discourse

Crowdfunding, Selfies, and Mommy Blogs: Finding Community in the Internet Age

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It’s common to worry that the internet is isolating us. But could it also be helping to create new forms of community?
Public Discourse

American Hope: Don’t Conflate Political Culture and Christianity

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If we have to make proof of Christian faith dependent on a willful attitude about politics in order to wage the culture wars, are they really worth fighting?
Public Discourse

How Good Intentions Make Bad Art: Christian Reviewers and Aronofksy’s “Noah”

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Good art helps us see reality how it is. Thus, the artist must attend to what is, looking at the world as carefully and deeply as possible—even the parts that make him uncomfortable.
Public Discourse

Where Is the Virtue?

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Our culture has become soft. We suppose that sex is too trivial to require virtue, yet we also believe it is so significant that to suggest any restraint upon its consensual exercise is an affront to the most important fount of human dignity.
Public Discourse

In Defense of the Innocent

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Although Nigel Biggar’s new book on just war has many strengths, the author gets himself into a moral muddle over the question whether the deaths of innocent non-combatants can be deliberately chosen in war.
Public Discourse

Just Money

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If a society regards governmental manipulation of money as the antidote to economic challenges, a type of poison will work its way through the body politic, undermining justice and the common good.
Public Discourse

Lady Edith and Pregnancy Dilemmas

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For many men and women, the multi-faceted realities of pregnancy pose complex questions about moral responsibility that defy rigid characterizations.
Public Discourse

An Anxious Author: Hope and the Spirit of Joseph Bottum

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Why bother with American culture? Bottum recommends despair.
Public Discourse

Timeless Beauty: Conservatism’s Modernist Problem

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Conservatives who reject modern architecture have reasons to do so. Traditional architecture is predicated on the ideal of beauty as an objective reality, while modernism exalts subjective preferences.
Public Discourse

What Can a Modern Philosopher Teach Us About Natural Law?

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As a philosopher, Locke was both historically great and uniquely ambivalent. This combination provides extraordinarily fertile ground for uniting modern and pre-modern insights that seem opposed.
Public Discourse

Aristotelian-Thomism in the Modern World

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Our modern intellectual context is profoundly at odds with genuine Aristotelian-Thomism. If we want to infuse the public discourse with sound philosophy, we must soberly recognize the obstacles before us and confront them in the spirit of devotion to truth. The first of a two part series.
Public Discourse

“Is This the Upshot of Your Experiment?” Hawthorne and Bioethics

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By revealing the agonizing human cost of scientific obsession, Hawthorne reminds his reader that potential good must never override basic consideration of one’s fellow man.
Public Discourse

Covetous Envy: The Forgotten Deadly Sin

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Modern rhetoric of income inequality is driven by covetous envy that betrays America’s tradition of applauding those who succeed. Caritas, humility, gratitude, and goodwill toward others are a healthy society’s answer to the ancient curses of envy and pride.
Public Discourse

Stanford, Marriage and Abortion Controversies, and the Mission of a University

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Trying to silence others because one fears what they might say is no way to learn. And it is no way for a university to be a university.
Public Discourse

Lady Edith and Abortion Rights

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For many women, the social, practical, and personal reasons for having an abortion simply trump the life of their child.
Public Discourse

The Culture of Dishonesty: Abortion, Divorce, and Obamacare

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Americans’ acceptance of President Obama’s lies reveals how dangerously comfortable we have become with dishonesty. It will take a profound renovation of our culture to restore truthfulness to its proper place and establish political freedom on a more secure foundation.
Public Discourse

A Rational Defense of the Humanities

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If all literature is essentially bound by its historical period, then studying the “great books” of Western civilization has little value. But if there are certain eternal questions that are essential to human existence, such a study is invaluable.
Public Discourse

Confusions About Totipotency: Stem Cells Are Not Embryos

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The ability to both produce all cell types and to organize them into a coherent body plan is the defining feature of a human organism. All stem cells lack essential elements supplied by the egg cell and cannot develop into a fetus.
Public Discourse

The Evidence for Virtue: Social Science, Natural Law, and Human Flourishing

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Christians have nothing to fear and everything to gain from good social science. It provides a way to talk normatively about human flourishing in terms that are intelligible, legitimate, and persuasive to those outside the community of faith.
Public Discourse

The Limits of Life: Biology and the Philosophy of Nature

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Biology continues to offer us new and exciting insights into the world. These insights need to be integrated into a philosophical perspective that is richer than the reductive materialism that is often linked with the empirical sciences. In this endeavor, biology needs the philosophy of nature.
Public Discourse

Piety, Justice, and Animals: A Response to Charles Camosy

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Both natural law thought and the Catechism agree: animals are not part of the same justice community as human beings, because they do not possess the dignity that comes from existing as a rational being.
Public Discourse

What We Owe Animals: A Response to Christopher Tollefsen

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Animals are not simply “a gift for human beings.” The needless cruelty inflicted on animals by factory farming not only violates a duty to provide them just treatment, but far outweighs the goods that humans gain by eating such meat.
Public Discourse

Nameless Beauty: Conservatism’s Architecture Problem

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The enduring values in which conservatives believe—beauty among them—are more multifaceted and surprising than we sometimes give them credit for. Beauty does not always follow rules, and it is often found in unexpected places and patterns.
Public Discourse

The Rights of Children: Biology Matters

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Every child has a right to be loved by his or her biological parents. Third-party reproduction violates this right by intentionally conceiving a child in a way that will alienate that child from at least one of her biological parents.
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