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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.

On Dignity and Desecration 

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Public Discourse

In the Cave: How Automation Changes the Way We Interact with Our World

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Good work connects us more deeply to the world around us. By contrast, automation can often alienate us from the physical world, changing the way we think and act.
Public Discourse

Complementarity: Lessons from the Adams Family

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As the history of the Adams family attests, the proper education of the young American requires both father and mother, grandfathers and grandmothers.
Public Discourse

Amy Kass: Teacher, Truth-Teller, Defender of Dignity

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The loss of Amy Kass is incalculable. But what cannot be taken from us are the lessons she taught, not only by precept, but by the splendid example of the life she led.
Public Discourse

Conservatives, Check Your Privilege

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The idea that some groups are objectively disadvantaged in our society should not be dismissed by conservatives. After all, we believe that we are all embedded in a tapestry of traditions that inform our personal and communal identities.
Public Discourse

“Shut Up, Bigot!”: The Intolerance of Tolerance

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Conservatives are called bigots because those who embrace the new sexual mores are beholden to the new tolerance as a plausibility structure. Postmodern liberals cannot comprehend the idea that one could simultaneously reject a belief and accept the person who holds it.
Public Discourse

Doing Injustice to the Just Price

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An article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology on the just price of cancer drugs in the United States contains an odd reference to a nonexistent book by Aristotle. Unraveling the origins of this error reveals an almost farcical series of misinterpretations.
Public Discourse

On the Dangers of Thanking God for the Atom Bomb

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There are often great temptations to violate the absolute norms against intentional killing and against lying. On the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs over Japan, we should remember what is at stake in such decisions and how agents constitute themselves in their choosing.
Public Discourse

For Baby, #AnotherBoy, and Millions More: Why I’m Speaking Out about Miscarriage and Abortion

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Having carried life in my womb, I cannot look away. I cannot cloak reality in another name: early pregnancy loss is death, and willful termination is killing.
Public Discourse

Planned Inhumanities: From Roe to Obergefell

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Consider the intellectual consequences of the foundational belief that humanity can be “planned.” Such a belief means that humans can be edited and arranged; it makes children into objects rather than subjects.
Public Discourse

The Dark Side of Third-Party Reproduction

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Third-party reproduction is pitched as a victory for all, a vehicle for creating beautiful families. But the process requires enticing marginalized women to undergo harmful procedures. Moreover, children are created, with no regard for the rights that other children enjoy, to satisfy the desires of wealthy adults.
Public Discourse

Conservatives and Transgenderism: A Response to Jennifer Gruenke

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Adopting a gender persona is not given. It is something that is developed in response to one’s given sexual identity, which provides a sort of vocation—not a fully determinate life plan, but a structure nonetheless.
Public Discourse

Rethinking the Conservative Approach to Transgenderism

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Conservatives do not take the introspective reports of transgendered people seriously, but there are good scientific reasons for supposing that subjective experience of gender is legitimate, even when it contradicts apparent biological sex.
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.

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