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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.

Calvin Coolidge’s “Hebraic Mortar” 

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Public Discourse

Science Contra Hubris

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Good scientific training is strenuous and humbling, because science is unforgiving. To spare society from the imposition of subjective pipe dreams, the prudence characteristic of valid scientific thinking needs to permeate the entire intellectual order.
Public Discourse

What Dante, Tolkien, and Harry Potter Fan Fiction Can Teach Us about the Contemporary Quest for Immortality

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From Dante to Tolkien to Harry Potter fan fiction, mankind has been tempted by the desire to transcend human limitations. This impulse is dangerous, but its dangers are not inexplicable.
Public Discourse

The End of Single-Sex Higher Ed

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As transgender people have increasingly come under the public eye, all-female colleges have caved to pressure to admit trans women—that is, persons identifiably male at birth who now identify as female. But doing so undermines these colleges' mission of educating the next generation of female leaders. Let’s celebrate our differences and our similarities. But let’s not call ourselves something we’re not.
Public Discourse

Popular Culture and the Male Body: A New Challenge

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All those concerned about sexual exploitation must pull together and fight a two-front war against female and male dehumanization.
Public Discourse

Same-Sex Marriage and Interracial Marriage: Not the Same Thing

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Proponents of same-sex marriage often liken opposition to the bigotry that defended anti-miscegenation laws, preventing interracial couples from marrying. The analogy is specious, for the two movements differ entirely in motivation. One seeks to defend an intelligible understanding of marriage; the other sought to achieve racial purity.
Public Discourse

Talking Past Each Other: “Love Wins” vs. Human Nature

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There remain two views on the question of marriage, but they keep talking past each other. One holds that “love wins”—so one shouldn’t stand in the way of love. The other respects the anthropological truth about marriage.
Public Discourse

“Defactualization” Is Causing American Schools to Become Bastions of Anti-Intellectualism

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Truth has been relegated to a secondary position in the nation’s public schools, universities, political forums, and public squares.
Public Discourse

Gender Identity

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Gender is a way of communicating truths or falsehoods about one’s sex and its corresponding social and cultural roles. An age of gender confusion and rejection calls for reflection on important issues that, in an upright age, would hardly arise. The second in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Sex Identity

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As animals that reproduce sexually, humans in the paradigm case are either male or female, with the sexes specified by reproductive roles they can potentially fulfill. According to this account, it is impossible for someone to change his or her sex, and all attempts to do so involve mutilation. The first of a two-part series.
Public Discourse
  • Art

Boyhood: A Profoundly Human Story

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Richard Linklater’s new film is powerful because it reminds us that the dull, plotless events of our fleeting lives matter in the way in which all quotidian things matter: as Joycean “epiphanies of the ordinary.”
Public Discourse

Justice Kennedy and the Lonely Promethean Man of Liberalism

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Justice Kennedy’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision is anchored in the liberty to “define and express” one’s identity. But this view of man is not as exalted as it seems. According to Kennedy, self-defined man, if he’s unmarried, remains tragically lonely, and without state recognition, might even doubt his own dignity.
Public Discourse

Riches, Religion, and the New Atheism

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It’s not that in misery and suffering human beings grasp at foolish theories that give them some hope. Rather, amidst prosperity, human beings can blind themselves to the reality of the human condition and so never ask the questions that, once asked, cannot be plausibly answered except in theistic terms.
Public Discourse

The Courage to Be on the Wrong Side of History: Lessons from Burke and Nietzsche

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Millennials who stand up for family, marriage, and the foundational institutions of civil society make possible a new cultural counter-revolution. The question is, will you join it?
Public Discourse

Is “Safe-Sex” Education the Reason Behind the Drop in Abortion?

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Honest citizens must resist the “safe-sex” propaganda and recognize this campaign for what it is: a deceptive crusade promising an easy solution to a complex problem.
Public Discourse

Sustainability’s War on Doubt

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Sustainability encompasses not only a particularly aggressive form of environmentalism, but also a strong attack on market capitalism and a progressive vision of social justice.
Public Discourse

Transgenderism: A Pathogenic Meme

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The idea that one’s sex is a feeling, not a fact, has permeated our culture and is leaving casualties in its wake. Gender dysphoria should be treated with psychotherapy, not surgery.
Public Discourse

Public School LGBT Programs Don’t Just Trample Parental Rights. They Also Put Kids at Risk.

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No matter what well-intentioned teachers and administrators believe, LGBT acceptance programs designed by GLSEN and funded by the CDC are designed to encourage kids to question their gender identity and sexual orientation.
Public Discourse

An African-American Woman Reflects on the Transgender Movement

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Supporters of transgender ideology believe that they are freeing people from restrictive understandings of gender. In reality, the more our society tries to free itself from gender stereotypes, the more it becomes enslaved to them. By saying that people can be born in a body of the wrong gender, transgender activists are saying there is a set of feelings that are only allocated to women and another set for men.
Public Discourse

Liberalism Can’t Understand Sex

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Because it reduces the human person into a mere vehicle for abstract rights, liberalism has no language to express the transcendence and sacrifice of human sexuality.
Public Discourse

Are We Ready for an Honest Conversation about Abortion?

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If we really are pro-women, and if we really want a cultural conversation on abortion, we owe it to post-abortive women to say, “You are not alone, and you deserve healing.”
Public Discourse

Science-Gilding the Marriage Debate

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Citing tenuous social science that should not (and probably does not) change anyone’s mind merely obscures what people are actually divided over—namely, the purpose of marriage as a social institution.
Public Discourse

The Legacy of John Nash and His Challenge to Homo Economicus: Why Now Is a Good Time to Study Economics

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Economics takes for granted the problematic view that everyone acts in their self-interest, and that this is the best way of understanding the world. The latest research within the discipline is, however, transforming these fundamental assumptions.
Public Discourse

Don’t Let Rhetoric Overwhelm Reason: A Response to David Bentley Hart

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If David Bentley Hart wants his arguments to be persuasive, he should offer a reasoned critique of the actual arguments of his opponents rather than continue to indulge what he admits is an “emotional” aversion to Thomism.
Public Discourse

Citizens, Unite! Part Two of Your Constitutional Primer

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“Constitutional law” is not the exclusive domain of the courts, or even of government officials. Faithful interpretation is the duty and responsibility of faithful citizens.

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