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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.

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As an essential part of our character and a reason for our nation’s exceptionalism, ambition in America has been portrayed both as a sentiment to be contained and a virtue to be cultivated. The first of a two-part series.
Children’s relationship to the political community is fundamentally different from that of adults, because it is mediated through their belonging to a family and living under the authority of their parents.
People are at the heart of what we are doing in Afghanistan. Novels can help us understand them and their cultures in all their subtlety and complexity.
It remains unclear whether sexual orientation is genetically determined. Even if it is, that doesn’t justify advocacy for same-sex marriage.
Until higher education throws out the text books and replaces them with primary sources, and professors begin talking with their students instead of to their students, our graduates will remain content to gain no other knowledge than what is required for their major.
When we define our terms based on the results we want, rather than on the reality of the thing being defined, all hell breaks loose.
Lust perverts language itself, calling sex “safe” or “protected,” and cohabitation “honest,” and relationships “mutual,” which are nothing but forays into a jungle, where the strongest and most cunning survive.
We cannot embrace same-sex marriage and live in continuity with our past as a civilization. To embrace it is to deny that tradition, revelation, reason, and nature have any authority over us.
Is religious belief wrong, and are religious believers morally culpable for their false beliefs?
No one wants to return to the 1950s as Betty Friedan characterized them, where women felt blocked from pursuing interests outside the home. At the same time, to insist that stay-at-home moms are trapped, desperate, and unhappy is naïve, insulting, and even damaging to the roots of society.
The Founders’ vision of the “common good” was not the pre-modern natural law conception of an objective human good, but a conception of “mutual advantage” shaped by the social contract framework. This logic of liberalism has driven our country to its current political and cultural problems.
While we should reject misguided claims that our founders adopted political voluntarism, we should follow suggestions for strengthening civic life—and thereby sustain American liberalism—through local government, families, churches, and other civic associations.
To reject the presence of natural law in documents of the Founding era is to embrace both cynicism and romanticism.
Since redefining marriage requires us to deny sexual differences, even school children now have to conform to that principle at the risk of punishment.
Hollywood’s new musical masterpiece illustrates a classical legal philosophy, long lost to our liberal establishment, that serves as a golden mean between tyrannical legalism and libertine antinomianism.
Calvin Coolidge is an exemplar for conservative leaders because he was the very opposite of an ideological dreamer; he saw his vocation as a duty to provide the country that elected him with honest and frugal government that respected limits.
The invention of Rex, a bionic man with artificially created organs, helps us see why it is impossible for any machine to be a human being.
True doctors and abortionists are different kinds of persons because they perform different acts as they carry out different proposals: the one, a proposal to remove a non-viable child to save the mother; the other, to kill that child for the mother’s benefit.
To persuade people effectively that a sexual morality does indeed exist, we need to help them arrive at that conclusion on their own by asking thought-provoking questions and treating them with dignity, love, and respect, not by force-feeding them arguments and statistics.
With money as the biggest incentive for sperm donation, donors are set up to be absent fathers. Politicians, charitable organizations, academics, and donors themselves should counter the ills of sperm donation through law, journalism, and funding for anti-sperm donation advocacy. The second of a two-part series.
Commercialized sperm “donation” degrades and objectifies men, promotes a culture of irresponsible parenting, and hurts children conceived through donation. The first of a two-part series.
Our government has failed to admit that its own selfishness is the root of many societal problems it has tried to address.
Rather than cave to self-interested protests against school choice from teachers unions, we should do what we can to make Catholic schools a viable school option for low-income children.
Religion isn’t outdated simply because some people claim that we can only know what the natural sciences tell us. Philosophy and theology are the next steps in our search for truth about nature, human nature, and God.

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