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Pillar

The Human Person

The first pillar of a decent society is respect for the human person, which recognizes that all individual human beings have dignity simply because of the kind of being they are: animals whose rational faculties allow them to know, love, reason, and communicate. It also recognizes that human beings are persons, members of the human family who flourish in a community that respects their fundamental rights and who long to discover transcendent truths about the nature of reality.

A Spiritual Aeneid

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the Aeneid

A Spiritual Aeneid

By
Readers will find in this book an insightful and witty commentary, suitable both for the serious student of the poem and for the layman reading it in translation. If it encourages anyone to read Virgil with fresh eyes or for the first time, it will have served its purpose.  
Dawson

Religion and Revolution: Christopher Dawson and the “Great Awokening”

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Like all secular revolutionary movements of the modern age, wokeism is a religion in denial. We will only put an end to the cycle of violent political revolution if we return to the Christian religion that gave birth to our civilization.
The Good Samaritan

Ukraine and the Morality of Foreign Policy

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I agree with Professor Charles that a decent and just approach to politics must be informed by this elementary moral rule, even in the realm of international relations. At the same time, it is also important to note that the application of the parable to a problem like the Ukraine war is not as simple as Charles’s account suggests.  
end of life

Flourishing at the End of Life

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Dying is part of life, but most people dread their final days. The end of life, which often takes the form of protracted terminal illness, can involve significant pain and suffering as well as functional limits in day-to-day living. Is it still possible for human beings to flourish at the end of life?
Soviet flag

Does America Need a Sharansky?

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Unfortunately, Morson looks only at a handful of symptoms that are vaguely comparable to the pathologies of late Soviet society and concludes that the same disease is at work. He does not address the deep causes of Soviet and Russian dysfunction, all of which are absent in the United States—authoritarianism, a command economy, censorship, oppression, terror, the Gulag. 
Catholic Church

Beyond the Crises in the Church: Pope Benedict XVI’s Pontificate and the Reason for Hope

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Regoli’s book reminds us that the Holy Spirit is constantly at work—that the Church has overcome numerous crises, including in the recent past.
all gender restroom

Load-Bearing Walls: How Denying Biological Reality Harms Us All

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Man-made positive laws should follow the laws of nature. Americans cannot bear the load of the government’s latest attempt to defy reality. And the courts should ensure that we won’t have to.
dating apps

What Bumble’s Bumble Tells Us about Dating Apps

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Potential partners deserve to be encountered with dignity as whole people, not as reproductive data points with scores that may be higher or lower based on our checklists. True love, the kind that’s truly human, cannot be “added to cart.” 
babies

The Pronatalism of Silicon Valley

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The pro-family approach recognizes that marriage and family formation are the basis for overcoming the birth dearth in the United States. By encouraging family formation, we ensure that children are born into environments where they are most likely to thrive and nurture their own love for children.
Robert E Lee

Propriety without Principle: The Cautionary Tale of Robert E. Lee

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Robert E. Lee perhaps tried to be a gentleman, but his moral principles were weak. Therefore, when the flood of war came, he compromised with evil, then piled sin upon sin, as the rebellion’s corrupting logic swept away more and more of his moral foundations.
ethics advice column

Ask Chris Tollefsen: An Ethics Advice Column

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All three questions raise many more issues than I’ve been able to address, and I thank my writers for their rich and thought-provoking submissions.
premature baby

What is an “Artificial Womb”? A Response to Katy Faust and Samantha Stephenson

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It is vital that physicians and patients alike demand that bedrock concepts of the human experience like birth remain clearly defined and our most vulnerable patients remain protected. To that end, we must be clear-eyed about the unique ethical challenges that AAPT will pose.
euthanasia

Assisted Death and The Economist

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The American experience with assisted suicide should persuade Great Britain and other countries that the slippery slope to broader killing is disturbingly genuine.
homemaking

When We Outsource Every Hard Thing, What Do We Lose?

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Popular culture tells us it is often more efficient to outsource routine household tasks than do them yourself. This leaves an important question unanswered, however: efficient at what? 
Israel

Anti-Semitic Students and Jewish Isolationism

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From the river to the sea, human flourishing will only be advanced through a nuanced and empathetic attitude to both sides. Radical stances that dehumanize one side, turning its babies into colonizers and marking them as legitimate targets for attack, do not advance freedom or justice. Quite the opposite.
multigenerational household

Multigenerational Living: A Step Back to Healthy Communal Life

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The love that rebuilds civilization comes when we live together. This is an opportunity to make a serious, radical, countercultural sacrifice of one’s own selfishness, a sacrifice that can change the family culture. It is not an easy decision or an easy life. But it is good.
the self

In Search of the Self

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Our culture’s crisis of the self is a crisis of faith in our personhood; its cause is our ignorance of the God who best reveals what a person is.
abortion pill

Women Deserve to Know They Can Reverse In-Progress Chemical Abortions

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Abortion pill reversal is a potent reminder to those who profit from abortion that, if given the option, many pregnant mothers want assistance that will help them choose life.
Summer camp

Summer Camp: An Ailing American Institution

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The original rationale for summer camp is more valid than ever. Young people are struggling with mental health, addiction to technology, disconnection from the body, isolation, and many other painful realities. Summer camps cannot fix these problems. But for many adolescents, the experience of traditional summer camps might help them see that life is about more than accomplishment, and that is a start.
Dante's inferno

On the Cooling of Our Love

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Acedia is a path to mediocrity; it leaves glories unrealized. A man may accomplish much, but if his soul is cooled to the higher beauties of life, he lives an unfulfilled one. The soul must hear the call to ascend the ladder of love and rest in the beauty for which it was made: God. Only in him does the soul find fulfillment and the beauty of an ordered life.
pregnant woman

Three Abortion Stories for a Post-Dobbs America

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Dear reader, as you step away from my story, I have two requests: first, believe women when they tell you about sexual violence. And second, recognize that abortion coercion is real. 
Ultrasound

Pivoting to Unwanted and Coerced Abortion: A Manifesto

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While we continue to seek ways to extend robust legal protection to prenatal children and to persuade our pro-choice brothers and sisters that such laws are necessary to forge a truly just society, we should all be able to come together to stop unwanted abortion. 
baby feet

Artificial Wombs, Artificial Love

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When we reject suffering and seek to replace it with artificiality, we miss our invitation to submit to the conditions under which love flourishes. We also lose sight of the meaning and purpose of our existence, which is not to pursue our own comfort and convenience, but to love God and our neighbor, even when that involves sacrifice and hardship.
Coffin

Dying Alone

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Enabling “the good death” begins with reviving attentiveness. We must first attend to the dying in our own communities. Care for the dying, in turn, enlivens reflectiveness on our own death. To advocate increased attendance in the death chamber is not meant to scare, nor to set up a macabre museum. It is instead a reminder that all men are mortal and that one’s eternal destiny is of the utmost urgency. It is instead a way to reintroduce and refine the art of dying well. 
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