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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.

Religion, the Basis of Culture 

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Public Discourse

Philosophy and a Life Well-Lived

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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

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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

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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

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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.
Public Discourse

Women and Children First

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Men and women struggling with infertility know real heartache. However, as citizens of a country founded on the struggle for rights and freedom, Americans have a civic and moral duty to confront laws that marginalize the already marginalized and threaten to create a second-class citizenry.
Public Discourse

Abortion: A Public Issue

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Contrary to the judgment of the Supreme Court, abortion is not a private issue. It snuffs out the existence of a member of the human community—a person like us with a radical capacity for reason and freedom.
Public Discourse

Is There a Moral Basis for the Free Market?

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The morality of the market, important as it is in a free society, is not the only kind of morality that matters in common life.
Public Discourse

Metaphysics and the Experience of God: The Meditations of David Bentley Hart

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The embrace of a materialist and mechanistic view of the world, taking its inspiration from the rise of modern science, results in a loss of the sense of transcendence. But God is not simply some finite object in a universe of other objects—he is reason, being, and order itself.
Public Discourse

The Mother-Free Money Tree

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If we believe that human beings should not be for sale and should not be trafficked or manufactured like products, and if we believe that women deserve better than to be treated as mere baby machines, then we must oppose third-party reproduction.
Public Discourse

It’s Time to Return to the New Critics

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Although they are often attacked as being ahistorical or obsolete, New Critical methods of interpreting literature can help students become better readers who see the value in literature, ambiguity, and the search for meaning.
Public Discourse

Emergency Contraception Can Cause Abortion

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Hidden behind misleading terminology, the facts emerge: emergency contraceptives such as Ella and hormonal IUDs can and do cause abortions
Public Discourse

Peonage for the Twenty-First Century

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The Common Core exists only because we have forgotten that parents have a right to educate their children. The state has no educational authority of its own apart from what parents delegate to it.
Public Discourse

Motherhood and Career: A Thrilling Tug of War

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The home and the office pull in opposite directions, but modern mothers can assemble a team on both ends of the rope to help them manage that tension—and they can learn to thrive in the process.
Public Discourse

“The Conservative Mind” Turns Sixty

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With optimism, precision, and intellectual elegance, Russell Kirk’s “The Conservative Mind” defined what it meant to be an American conservative for the second half of the twentieth century.
Public Discourse

Conscience and Its Reviewers: A Response to Kevin Doyle

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Kevin Doyle’s review of Robert George's new book is based on a fundamental error. Conscience, rightly understood, is not simply self-will. Rather, conscience identifies one’s duties under the moral law.
Public Discourse

America’s Moderate Liberalism: Rediscovering Montesquieu, Recovering Balance

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The French philosopher Montesquieu’s principle of moderation taught the founders to reconcile Lockean liberalism, classical republicanism, and Christianity—a balance we could use today.
Public Discourse

Authentic Feminine Excellence

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Women should not view professional success and loving motherhood as at odds with each other. Instead, women ought to cultivate an authentic and creative form of excellence that engages the whole person, with all her talents, in relation with others.
Public Discourse

Presidential Lies and Political Ownership

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When President Obama lied about the Affordable Care Act, he substituted his own self-governance and self-constitution for that of the American people.
Public Discourse

Conservatism and Freedom

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Conservatives need to refine their understanding and presentation of the moral substance of their cause, crafting a message that appeals to both reason and imagination.
Public Discourse

Nature and God in Ethics

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Just as an engineer can work out the purpose of a machine by examining its structure, reason can discover the proper end of human action by examining human nature. Yet there is also a supernatural morality that subsumes and exceeds natural moral standards.
Public Discourse

Religion and the Foundations of Morality

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We don’t need to know that God exists to know good from bad. It is enough to know human nature—what kind of being we are and what kind of actions will bring us to fullness of being.
Public Discourse

Drunk, But Not on Whiskey

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We have the worst of both worlds: a Prohibitionary State that gives license to all kinds of evil, but that regulates and restricts actions that are not evil, to manage the chaos that results from the license.
Public Discourse

Come Out and Celebrate?

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National Coming Out Day’s emphasis on “celebrating” students’ self-identification as LGBT undermines Notre Dame’s pastoral responsibility to help students develop an integrated sexual identity and a true understanding of human dignity.
Public Discourse

Faith and (Dorm) Life

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Faith-based dorms at secular universities offer a positive alternative to the indoctrination and debasement present on many campuses.

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