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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.

In the Courts of Three Popes: An Insider’s Insight

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Close-up of hands texting on cell phones

Contempt, Inquiry, and Rational Disagreement: Learning from Aquinas in the Internet Age

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Present-day Americans are a people consumed by anger—an anger that rests on deep pools of sadness, isolation, loss, and fear. In spite of his reputation for dry, unemotional logic, Thomas Aquinas has a great deal to say about the way in which disordered passions can undermine our capacity for getting at the truth. His work can teach us how to resist the vices encouraged by social media, pursue truth in concert with others, and achieve rational disagreement.
Uniform buildings on a college campus

An American Tragedy: On the Suicide of Liberal Education

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Life’s biggest questions are almost never resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, and if we don’t study the differences between the Epicureans and the Stoics, between Locke and Rousseau, and between legal originalists and non-originalists, we are missing out on our own music: sometimes a battle of the bands, sometimes cacophony, always fascinating.
Florenz, Galileo Galilei

Eppur si muove: The Legend of Galileo

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From beginning to end, the Inquisition’s actions were disciplinary, not dogmatic, although they were based on the erroneous notion that it was heretical to claim that the Earth moves. But opinions of theologians are not the same as Christian doctrine. The error the Church made in dealing with Galileo was an error in judgment. The Inquisition was wrong to discipline Galileo, but discipline is not dogma.
The relationship between argument and democracy, however, did not begin with the American founding but with the ancient Greeks: there is an unmistakable tie between the agora (the birthplace of Greek democracy), and the development of rhetoric as a field of study.

To Be Human Is to Argue

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The modern story of “argument” might seem troubling to many. Debate too often seems emotion-driven, and laden with fallacies and quarrelsome noise. By exploring the significance of argument for both individuals and society, Lee Siegel’s Why Argument Matters reminds us why to be human is to argue—and why that is something to celebrate.
Woman reading book at evening at home close up

The (Female) Intellectual Life

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With All Her Mind, in compiling the hard-won wisdom of women from many different states in and ways of life, encourages its reader to cultivate compassion toward women whose balances of work, family, children, and study look different from her own. The intellectual life need not be a source of competition among women, but instead ought to find a place in each of our lives.
woman in warm sweater reading book at home

The Scandal of Virtuous Reading

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In The Scandal of Holiness, Jessica Hooten Wilson suggests that we shift from passive, uncritical acceptance of cultural mores and entertainment to active formation in virtue, leading toward a life of sainthood. To do this, we need stories of sanctity that do not elide the messiness of everyday reality. These stories are neither saccharine accounts of cheap piety nor dry philosophical and moral theories.
Benjamin Franklin

The Bookshelf: Writing in the Mirror

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Whether it is an account of one’s whole life, or a memoir focused on a certain period or aspect of one’s life, or a published journal or diary, the author of an autobiography is too deeply interested (in both senses of that word) to achieve a really critical distance. Can the autobiographer, the memoirist, or the diarist be trusted?
football or soccer fans at a game in a stadium

Why the Super Bowl Is Good for America

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Don the jersey, embrace the pageantry, and invite friends over for seven-layer dip.
School boy memorizing the lesson in classroom

There Is No Thinking without Memorizing

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We deploy faddish educational notions such as “critical thinking” to the detriment of our students. What is often derided as “rote-learning” is actually essential to sophisticated analysis. Memorization creates a base of knowledge. We draw upon this foundational knowledge as we engage in more conceptual thinking.
Multiple storeys old library

Remembering Paul Johnson, the Historian of Human Dignity

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Underlying Paul Johnson’s historical writing was the sense that people possess an innate dignity. To Johnson, history was the story of people—flawed, creative, reasoning, exceptional—with the capacity for incredible achievement. People, he thought, were made with a purpose, and that meant history has a purpose.
Photo of Cardinal Pell in wine cellar

Seven Days with Cardinal Pell

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I consider myself lucky to have gotten to know George Cardinal Pell a bit—and that after his 80th year.
Hands crossed in prayer

Confronting Faith’s Postmodern Problem

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In the postmodern world, orthodox religion suffers less for being thought demonstrably false than from claiming the authority of truth at all. This absence of consensus about truth is reflected in the variety of perspectives contained in a collection of essays by seventeen thoughtful Orthodox Jews. Since their reflections on the causes and conditions of belief apply to all religions, all believers are likely to find something instructive in this book.
Bnei Brak , Israel - October 18 . 2018: The interior of the synagogue Brahat ha-levana in Bnei Brak . Israel . Designated congregation and the altar.

The Legacy of Living Jews

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Instead of focusing on what the world has done to the Jews, it is far more worthwhile to investigate the way Jews have not only survived, but thrived.
Photo of GK Chesterton

The Bookshelf: Enter 2023 Laughing

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There is a lot of mileage to be gained out of mockery, and nowhere more than in satire and parody. But successful parody depends on close study, intimate familiarity with the target, and that can often produce a certain gentleness and sympathy in the result.
Pope Benedict

Pope Benedict XVI: An Appreciation

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Jews and Christians both must rally around Benedict’s call to defend and celebrate the legacy of the West: the rule of law, the respect for the dignity of man, the institutions of marriage and family, the love of our neighbor, the one most like us, which becomes the basis for the love of the truly other, even—and especially—the one most unlike us. These are the gifts of the West.
Catholics in Pew at Mass

Census Fidei? Methodological Missteps Are Undermining the Catholic Church’s Synod on Synodality

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As a social scientist, I have grave concerns about the methodological mess that has characterized this synod’s massive, unwieldy data-collection-and-analysis venture.
Photo of Pope Benedict

Benedict XVI: Apostle of Hope

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Benedict lived in a faithless time when people lost themselves and their hope. He reminded them of who they were, and who they could be—children and heirs of God. What good fortune we had to have lived at a time when a man such as this taught us.
Particles

What Is Matter (and Why Does It Matter)?

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What is most original in Koons’s book Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? is his argument that quantum mechanics is best interpreted as vindicating the Aristotelian hylomorphist’s view of nature. Koons is the first prominent philosopher to make the case at book-length, in a way that combines expertise in the relevant philosophical ideas and literature with serious and detailed engagement with the scientific concepts.

Joyous Surrender: A Rhapsody in Red (and Green)

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Christmas isn’t tasteful, isn’t simple, isn’t clean, isn’t elegant. Give me the tacky and the exuberant and the wild, to represent the impossibly boisterous fact that God has intruded in this world.
Book cover of the Betrothed

A Masterpiece Novel That Should Be an Instant Classic

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In Alessandro Manzoni’s recently translated novel, The Betrothed, the world is regularly pitted against the sanctity of a few. The novel often asks the reader, an implicit echo, how do you live as a faithful Christian when so much evil persists in the world? But more than anything, it shows us the reality of forgiveness and the possibility of fulfilling Jesus’s most challenging commandment: love your enemies.
Open book and reading glasses on the table, illuminated by sunlight. Stack of vintage books in the background. Selective focus.

Classic, Contemporary, and Controversy: The 2022 Public Discourse Book List

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Reading recommendations from Public Discourse and the Witherspoon Institute.
Sunrise over the St. Peters Basilica in Vatican City. Morning at the most famous landmark, empty of people street, cloudy sky.

The Unfolding and Unsettling of Vatican II

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George Weigel’s book on the meaning and legacy of Vatican II is persuasive as a history of ideas, but in focusing on context and content it seems to miss the sense in which the Council is an unfolding event that calls Catholics to encounter Christ and walk away changed and challenged.
Photo of Pope John Paul II

Catholic Teaching on Jews and Judaism

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Faithful Catholics will affirm, with the Second Vatican Council and with the papal magisterium, that the Jewish people are indeed “the good olive tree onto which the wild shoot of the Gentiles has been grafted,” that God’s original Covenant with his chosen people is unbroken and unbreakable, that our bond with the Jewish people is a spiritual bond, rooted in a common spiritual patrimony, and that our Jewish neighbors are indeed our brothers and sisters in faith.
John William Waterhouse Narcissus painting

The Advice Column of Expressive Individualism

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The expressive individualists promised a world in which moral conventions could be cast off in favor of something more beautiful, purposeful, passionate, and true. Instead, we have been left with an aimless, bloodless, timid culture.
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