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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.

Jonathan Haidt and the Limits of Expertise 

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Public Discourse

Good Religion: In Defense of Ross Douthat

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By showing the triumph of the therapeutic over the orthodox in American Christianity, Ross Douthat’s latest book gives Americans on both sides of the political divide much to consider.
Public Discourse

Liberalism, Relativism, and the Novel: A Reply to Ramos

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How many Solzhenitsyns are occupying the pipelines of novelists in America?
Public Discourse

The Problem isn’t Liberalism, the Problem is “You”

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Even if the marriage plot has dissolved, the human drama remains. It just resurfaces in a different context.
Public Discourse

Neo vs. the Karate Kid

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The Matrix and The Karate Kid offer two competing views of the relationship between how we learn and how we understand human nature.
Public Discourse

In the Courthouse was the Word

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Though we feel that we human beings are meant for something, not individually and arbitrarily, but together and truly, we lack the language and even the political sanction to think along those lines.
Public Discourse

Liberalism Is Bad for Literature

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Jeffrey Eugenides shows what happens to the novel when courtship and marriage lose their binding character.
Public Discourse

Is the Natural Law Persuasive?

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One can neither deny nor question the natural law’s persuasiveness except by asking questions, conducting inquiries, achieving understandings, reaching judgments, and making choices—all of which are the natural law at work.
Public Discourse

The Occupy Movement’s Vacuous Critique of Inequality

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The Occupy Movement should be an occasion for the American left to rethink its own moral crusades, which turn out to be morally corrosive and hence incompatible with any serious commitment to social justice.
Public Discourse

The Sperm of Sea Urchins and the Directedness of Natural Processes

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Nature exhibits finality and purpose in its various activities, and chance is not, indeed cannot be, an explanation for this activity.
Public Discourse

Libertarianism: Not So Wrong, After All! A Reply to Nathan Schlueter

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Libertarianism offers the best defense of individual rights that government can employ.
Public Discourse

Special Education and Shirked Responsibility

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The commitment to educate special needs children was one of the most laudable education policy achievements of the twentieth century and it must be protected.
Public Discourse

The Zero Sum Games

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The totalitarians of this age are not petty thugs. They are intellectuals with a vision, and they will see their vision enacted, no matter who they have to run over, because they are certain it is good for you.
Public Discourse

James Q. Wilson: Another View

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Wilson’s scholarly achievement was great, but his moral legacy is greater.
Public Discourse

Vanderbilt’s Right to Despise Christianity

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Vanderbilt University has decided that campus student religious groups may not require that their leaders accept the core beliefs of the religious group they would lead. Ironically, Vanderbilt’s right to do so rests on the same freedom it denies to these groups—a group’s freedom to define what it stands for and the views it expresses.
Public Discourse

Intelligible Goods, Marriage, and Intellectual Conversion

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Unless we ask the “what” and “why” in ethical debate, we aren’t doing ethics. Debating ethics requires intellectual conversion and thus a commitment to intelligible reality.
Public Discourse

A Tale of Two Sex Hormones

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Artificial testosterone and estrogen use harms both individuals and society.
Public Discourse

Form and Transcendence: A Reply to Micah Mattix

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The authentic story of modernism is not one of continuity and emulation, but of violent rupture and hostility to tradition. Art should be oriented toward beauty.
Public Discourse

Reproductive Technologies and the Quest for Immortality

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The fertility industry is booming because we desire genetic and memetic immortality—the preservation and reproduction of our bodies and ways of life.
Public Discourse

Landscapes of Nothingness

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The fundamental question of why there is something rather than nothing is a metaphysical and theological question—and with respect to such a question the natural sciences necessarily have nothing to say.
Public Discourse

The Paradise of Sexual Revolution

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The sexual revolution puts forth a vision of paradise in which we rig up some nifty devices to guarantee infertility, consider neither holiness nor virtue, and believe in the blessings of no one and nowhere and nothing.
Public Discourse

Is Free Verse Immoral?

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Free verse does not simply express a “debased” yearning for freedom from tradition. Like earlier forms of metered poetry, it too expresses the trials of confining human thought to written language.
Public Discourse

Coming Apart, and Back Together?

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Charles Murray argues we’ve come apart, but can therapeutic Deism and the sexual revolution put us back together?
Public Discourse

A Muslim View on Respecting Life

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Life’s fragility should remind us of the greatness of God, and the goodness of God’s creation should inspire us to respect life. Adapted from remarks made in the Princeton University Chapel for Respect Life Sunday.
Public Discourse

Natural Causes, Divine Commands, and Human Wellbeing

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The precepts of the natural law are obligatory not because they are commanded, but because they are necessary for our well-being. God’s revelation of these precepts is better understood as a divine reminding and authoritative inviting.

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