fbpx
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
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.

The Perils of Revolutionary Aristotelianism

By
Read More

Learn more about Education & Culture: get your free eBook today!

Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Public Discourse

Aristotelian-Thomism in the Modern World

By
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

By
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

By
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

By
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

By
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

By
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

By
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

By
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

By
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

By
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

By
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

By
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

By
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

By
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.
Public Discourse

Politics, Art, and Love: A Lesson from Dante

By
Valentine’s Day is usually associated with romance, but love matters in politics, too. In working to change our culture, we must remember that our opponents, like our allies, are human beings whose individual conversions can only be wrought through a combination of love, truth, and free will.
Public Discourse

Community, Contemplation, and Computers: The Role of Technology in Education

By
In order to lead students to wisdom, schools must be prepared to integrate technology in the classroom with moderation when it helps to facilitate real, authentic engagement, and they must be willing to set it aside when it pulls students away from such engagement.
Public Discourse

Edmund Burke, Radical

By
Thomas Paine’s rationalistic emphasis on freedom, equality, and rights form the basis of our political discourse. Even so, Edmund Burke has something essential to teach us: the way we order our society will always be the consequence, first and foremost, of the way we love.
Public Discourse

Why Easy Stem Cells Raise Hard Ethical Questions

By
A surprising new method for making stem cells offers scientists an easy alternative to destroying human embryos. But there is a disturbing possibility that the technique may create not stem cells but actual cloned embryos.
Public Discourse

College Athletics and the Common Good

By
If we looked at actual young men and women, and not abstractions, we might begin to think of other things besides the ratio of members of each sex participating in this or that activity. We might think about love.
Public Discourse

Why Fight For Marriage?

By
We are all called to defend marriage so that the truth can change hearts, minds, and lives. As the early pro-life activists did, we must invest the long-term political, legal, cultural, and spiritual capital to win down the line. The final installment in a three-part series.
Public Discourse

Philosophy and a Life Well-Lived

By
The next generation of true culture-makers will be shaped purely by bad philosophy if its arguments go unanswered. As individuals and communities, we will be swayed by moral thought no matter what: the only question is whether it will be well thought out. The second in a three-part series.
Public Discourse

Reason and Revelation: Why Christians Need Philosophy

By
Many Christians question the value of philosophical arguments for conjugal marriage, preferring to appeal to revelation. But our natural moral knowledge in some ways precedes revelation and helps us to understand it. The first of a three-part series.
Public Discourse

Being at Home in the World: Burke, Paine, and Modern Politics

By
The differences between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine shed light on contemporary politics, argues Yuval Levin in his new book. But they also shed light on something deeper: two fundamentally contrasting orientations toward the world.
Public Discourse

What a Progressive Used to Be

By
In the past, progressives fought to defend the family because they understood that families protect us from the atomization and amalgamation that isolate and control us.
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Public Discourse © 2025 | All Rights Reserved

Get your free eBook for The Human Person

"*" indicates required fields

Get your free eBook for Sexuality & Family

Get your free eBook for Politics & Law

Get your free eBook for Education & Culture

Get your free eBook for Business & Economics