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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.

Social Contract Theory in the Ruins?

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Parthenon

Social Contract Theory in the Ruins?

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Is government by consent irretrievably lost? I maintain that the principle of consent is not lost and that we can rebuild a different sort of social contract theory from amid the ruins.
Capital punishment

Wrongful Executions and the Pro-Life Movement’s Responsibility 

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While serious people can debate the underlying ethics of whether the death penalty is just, our country has proven that it is unable to carry out executions in a way that protects justice.
hospice

Consciousness and Sedation at the End of Life

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Consciousness is not simply a phenomenon that can be arbitrarily dispensed with or suppressed at whim: it is a critical element of the human experience, particularly in the last chapter of one’s earthly existence, during which one comes face to face with the mystery of suffering and the meaning of life.
cemetery

Reflections on Avelut

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Most Americans will not begin adopting avelut practices in any kind of wholesale manner. But it offers insights into the human condition that may nonetheless be helpful—about the timing of the grief cycle, the need to honor the departed free from distraction, and how communities might adopt robust mourning structures to support those who are suffering. 
Israel flag

What Conservatives, Catholics, and All Americans Can Learn from Israel 

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As the experience of many nations around the world shows, constitutions are easily dissolved, and constitutional order lost, when citizens allow their leaders to violate their charter to achieve partisan goals. When that happens, the delicate system of checks and balances usually gives way to an oppressive one-party rule. 
DVH

Pride and Concupiscence: An Excerpt from The Roots of Moral Evil by Dietrich von Hildebrand 

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If we are to understand how it is possible for someone to pursue the subjectively satisfying in such a way as to disrespect a good possessing a morally relevant value, we have to realize that in man live two mighty tendencies that are incompatible with value-response: pride and concupiscence.
Charles Maurras

The Anti-Transcendent Politics of Charles Maurras

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Many of the causes championed by the New Right are worthy ones. But a prudential calculation made in good faith, and which refuses to compromise on principle, is something quite different from the enthusiastic advocacy of positions that contradict principle entirely or the embrace of ideologies that are fundamentally anti-religious.
grandmother and granddaughter

To Die Well, We Must Live Well—And for Others

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Living for others is hard for everyone, in any stage of life. And in a culture that exalts the autonomous self, it is hard to remember that sacrifice is the only path to flourishing.
IVF

An IVF Primer 

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These essays are not provided out of callousness or a lack of empathy, but if we are to be responsible, we must be well-informed so that we can judge and choose in keeping with the truth of things.
the Aeneid

A Spiritual Aeneid

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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.
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