Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Pillar

Politics & Law

The third pillar of a decent society is a just system of politics and law. Such a government does not bind all persons, families, institutions of civil society, and actors in the marketplace to itself as subservient features of an all-pervading authority. Instead, it honors and protects the inherent equal dignity of all persons, safeguards the family as the primary school of virtue, and seeks justice through the rule of law.

When Religion Becomes Obsolete, Politics Tries to Save Us 

By and
Read More

Learn more about Politics & Law: get your free eBook today!

Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Subscribe
Founding Fathers

Competing Visions of America

By
Charles Kesler’s new book, Crisis of the Two Constitutions, offers a straightforward approach to the Constitution, a pointed (though always measured) characterization of progressivism, and an honest assessment of American conservatism.
united nations

American Conservatives Should Take the United Nations Seriously

By
The question was never whether or not conservatives should engage the multilateral system. It was always what kind of multilateralism conservatives want: one that is accountable to self-governing sovereign states and advances U.S. interests, or one that is wholly untethered from political oversight and unaccountable to the American people.
Legal scales

Rights, Natural and Legal: A Response to Nigel Biggar’s What’s Wrong with Rights?

By
Natural and legal rights are not like individuals of the same species, but analogous ways of identifying what justice demands. Natural rights provide a standard by which legal rights are to be understood and corrected; but legal rights are the means by which natural rights are to be secured and realized in a polity.
BLM Protest

Reforming Our Successor Civil Religion

By
Wokeness meets a religious need by mimicking a Protestantism that our society has largely left behind. Although it highlights important truths, Wokeness needs to retrieve the orthodox teaching on the universality of original sin, the Christian understanding of salvation through the divine Scapegoat, and the centrality of the Church in its social imagination.
Crusaders

Dulce et Decorum Est: In Defense of Healthy Patriotism

By
The things we’re willing to die for are tied to what we hold as sacred. In fact, the willingness to die for something also consecrates it as sacred. We need to entertain the possibility that love for our country might lead us to sacrifice greatly, even radically, in order to preserve the best that remains in it.
George Washington Statue

Virtue at the Origin: The Classical Foundations of the American Republic

By
Pulitzer Prize–winning author Thomas Ricks has produced a thoroughly researched and engaging book on the intellectual world of the American founders. We who live in a highly partisan age can hope, as Ricks does with mild optimism, that we can return to virtue to cope with the problems of modern-day factionalism.
Pope Benedict XVI

A Healthy Secularity Is Possible: A Response to Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley

By
Catholic citizens can hope for a society where the faith is more broadly shared, but we cannot escape the responsibility of political deliberation about our society as it is—riddled with its pluralism and confusion—not as we would have it be. A healthily secular society can acknowledge the freedom of the Church and a positive role for the Church in society, understanding that the state is rightly focused on natural norms and goods, not supernatural ones.
Saint Chapel, Paris

Building a Catholic “Civilization of Love”: A Response to Nathaniel Peters

By and
Why must a “serious Catholic politics” tolerate a regime that worships the profit motive and carnal pleasure but recoil from one that worships the Blessed Trinity? Why is it sophisticated to ask the state to recognize truth of supply and demand but simplistic to ask that the state recognize the truth of the sacraments?
in god we trust

It Is Right and Just Offers Inspiration, Not Serious Catholic Politics

By
In their new book, Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley provide a rousing exhortation for Catholics to unapologetically live out their faith. Unfortunately, the book contains too many generalizations, overstatements, and imprecisions to be a thoughtful guide to Catholic politics. Any serious Catholic politics must recognize that the problem of pluralism cannot be solved by dominating non-Catholics and imposing our view of the good on them.

The Unsoundness and Imprudence of “Common-Good Originalism”

By
After decades of struggle, the conservative judicial project has finally produced a possible working majority of five originalists on the Supreme Court. There are plenty of reasons to wonder how consistently they will coalesce in practice and how willing they will be to revisit wrong precedent. But trashing Antonin Scalia’s originalism and replacing it with Josh Hammer’s idiosyncratic, results-oriented version isn’t likely to help matters.
Three babies

Child Allowances Reduce Abortion

By
One feature of Mitt Romney’s Child Allowance proposal has been critically under-billed: the extremely high likelihood that it would reduce the abortion rate. Conservatives arguing that a rise in single parenthood is an unacceptable cost of a child allowance are necessarily arguing, as a corollary, that some of those children instead being aborted is an acceptable cost of the current policy regime. But if abortion is murder, then keeping single parenthood down by murdering the infants is surely not an optimal anti-poverty policy.
Aeneas

We Must Found Institutions, Not Just Preserve Them: A Conservatism of Creation

By
Conservatives are generally good at conserving, and we are particularly aware of the continuities across the human condition. But given today’s conditions, when so much has changed so recently and so many social problems bedevil us, we need to get great at creating new institutions.
Supreme Court

Toward a New Jurisprudential Consensus: Common Good Originalism

By
Common good originalism is the best constitutional complement to a politics of a conservative restoration. It is ordered toward a profoundly and distinctly conservative politics that elevates the concerns of nation, community, and family over the one-way push toward ever-greater economic, sexual, and cultural liberationism.
"1984 is now" sign

Orwell, Atheism, and Totalitarianism

By
Many have argued that without God there can be no fixed moral principles. George Orwell’s 1984 goes further, raising the possibility that without God there cannot even be “facts” in any meaningful, reliable sense.

The “Great Dissenter”: Justice John Marshall Harlan the First as a Role Model of Resistance in a Post-Constitutional Age

By
Justice John Marshall Harlan the First courageously stood against his learned opponents on the Supreme Court. By his example, we too might muster the courage to be “Great Dissenters” against the intellectual and cultural classes that progressives have come to dominate.
Apotheosis_of_Washington_-_Close_up_of_George_Washington

Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton: Against Right-Wing Gnosticism

By
Eric Voegelin’s warnings about the dangers of gnostic politics apply to the right as well as the left. Christians must make a clear and unequivocal distinction between the historic Christian faith and the misleading political religion that is more pervasive on the right than anyone seemed to realize.

A Conservative Case for Pro-Family Policy

By
As a post-Trump conservative coalition struggles to define itself, social and religious conservatives should seize the opportunity to step up and play a leading role, making support for families a central tenet of the American right.
American flags

Toward a New Consensus: An Invitation

By
The editors of Public Discourse invite conservatives of various schools to participate in the debates that will best advance our common cause. We believe that disagreement is not something to avoid. In fact, a real and productive disagreement is an accomplishment. Civilization, in the end, is formed by men and women “locked together in argument.”
QAnon Shaman

Timely Lessons from the Sack of Rome

By
If Christians truly believe that we are charged with protecting a moral vision in our country, then we must recognize that this vision cannot be imposed by force. If we want to remain more than an interest group, we must stop treating our first amendment rights as freedoms from interference and start treating them as freedoms for witness, laden with obligations of love.
Lincoln Douglas

The Bookshelf: Partisan Moments

By
Partisanship is strong drink, and moderate consumption of the intoxicant has always been difficult. Herewith some recommendations for reading on partisan moments in American history.
Baby

Open Letter to Pope Francis on Prenatal Justice

By
A moral theologian urges Pope Francis to bring his forceful defense of prenatal children into a more central place of his pontificate. It is time to stand up firmly and forcefully for their dignity in a culture which increasingly sees them as disposable things that can be violently discarded.
Bible on American Flag

Protecting Christian Political Theology from the Shibboleth of “Christian Nationalism”

By
It is hypocritical for secular critics to accept only those religious claims that conform to liberal sentiment and to label any disfavored religious claim as Christian Nationalism. Christianity cannot be permissible to polite society only when it meets with the approval of its cultured despisers.
map of America burning match

Liberty, Law, and the Peril of Arbitrary Power

By
To understand the connection of freedom, law, and arbitrariness, we must return to our eighteenth-century roots in Montesquieu.
Torn American Flag

When Pragmatic Politics Goes Bad: An Apology to the Never-Trumpers

By
I have awakened on too many days with gratitude on my lips for the blessing of living in a peaceful, orderly, democratic, and free society to see such hard-won advances thrown away for political ambition. Those who realized our inheritance was at risk saw more clearly than I did.

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