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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.

What Can Be Done about the Universities? 

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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.
Public Discourse

A Conservative’s Odyssey: Russell Kirk and Twentieth-Century American Conservatism

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Bradley J. Birzer’s intellectual biography of the twentieth-century conservative thinker Russell Kirk highlights the complexities of the American conservative movement and its ongoing challenges.
Public Discourse

The Danish Girl: People Aren’t Born Transgender, But Playing Dress-Up Can Spark Psychological Problems

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A recent film accurately portrays the deep emotional and psychological problems that transgender people experience, but it fails to address the reality of life after sex reassignment surgery and the need to treat comorbid psychological disorders.
Public Discourse

Joyous Surrender: A Rhapsody in Red (and Green)

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Christmas isn’t tasteful, isn’t simple, isn’t clean, isn’t elegant. Give me the tacky and the exuberant and the wild, to represent the impossibly boisterous fact that God has intruded in this world.
Public Discourse

Christmas and Western Civilization

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Though Christmas is a religious holiday, secularists should appreciate its great contribution to Western Civilization: the lesson that all men are equal in their fundamental human dignity.
Public Discourse

Our Great Sexual Adventure: Where Does It End?

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Though the sexual revolution’s stock is still rising, at the end of the day, this great adventure is going to end right back where it started: in classical sexual restrictions.
Public Discourse

Infinite Wallace: Tragedy, Comedy, and Faith in the Life of David Foster Wallace

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Perhaps the greatest tragedy of Wallace’s life is that—for all his brilliance—he could never fill the dry void in his life with the waters of meaning.
Public Discourse

Collateral Damage: Same-Sex Marriage, Private Religious Schools, and Parental Rights

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Same-sex marriage endangers not only religious liberty, but also the school choice movement. We need new laws to protect schools from being forced to adopt sexual orientation nondiscrimination policies in order to be eligible for voucher, tax credit/deduction, or educational savings account programs.
Public Discourse

On Human Sexuality, Conservative Victory is Inevitable

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The emotional and physical devastation produced by the collapse of familial bonds may take decades to fully manifest itself. Once it does, the essential human need for restrictions on sexuality will again become clear.
Public Discourse

Crybullies Aren’t Just for College: On Corporations and LGBTQ Political Correctness

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Calls for “Safe Spaces” on campus don’t just threaten the future of academia. The same mindset seeks to silence dissent and respectful disagreement in business as well.
Public Discourse

The New Dignity: Gnostic, Elitist, Self-Destructive Will-to-Power

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In a world with no clear origin, no purposeful end, and no intrinsic meaning, human dignity is founded on nothing more than a self-creating will to power that is, in the last analysis, self-destructive.
Public Discourse

Rights Through Obligations: The Case of Free Speech

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Some rights are grounded in the need for agents to fulfill their perceived responsibilities, including their obligation to pursue knowledge. This obligation, along with the communal nature of inquiry, supports a right to free speech that acquires particular stringency in those communities where inquiry is most essential.

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