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Search Results for: social justice – Page 4

Benjamin

Common Good Economics

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Since our founding, Public Discourse has sought to promote an approach to economics that focused on the common good. From early essays from our Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Ryan T. Anderson, on a natural law vision of social justice (the subject of his dissertation), to more recent essays from Senator Marco Rubio on the dignity of work and from our Editor, Serena Sigilito, on economic policy and childcare, Public Discourse has been a venue for conservative thinkers to explore how to best understand the relationship of the market and human flourishing. Here is a small sample of some of those early essays and more recent ones from the past year.

Remembering the Jonestown Massacre

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The fortieth anniversary of the Jonestown massacre should remind us to beware of utopian causes with totalitarian methods, on either political extreme. Though they promise social justice, they only deliver deadly power.

Muslims and Christians Should Work Together to Support Family and Human Flourishing

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It’s time for Christians to partner with conservative Muslims and others who share traditional views on key social issues. And American Muslims should leave behind their lockstep alliance with the social justice left.

Sustainability’s War on Doubt

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Sustainability encompasses not only a particularly aggressive form of environmentalism, but also a strong attack on market capitalism and a progressive vision of social justice.

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.

Human Development and Human Flourishing: Creating Capabilities Isn’t Enough

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Rawlsian “public reason” approaches to human capabilities are insufficient bases for social justice.
Conservative wisdom

Conservative Wisdom or New-Right Dreams?

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We do not need more self-conscious crusaders for the nation or even for Western Civilization, but instead more priests, teachers, businessmen, artists, writers, and parents who perform their own activities faithfully, serving—to borrow a phrase from Russell Kirk—as “leaven for the whole lump.”
Literature

How to Justify the Study of Literature

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John Guillory’s Professing Criticism is a thorough and complex work of scholarship. It’s also a bracing call for literary scholars to significantly reform how they think about their profession, and its relationship to their students and reading public in general. At its core is a challenge that is simultaneously reasonable and radical: professors of literary study must be more modest in their aims and promises to suit the realities of their field in the twenty-first century.
Clear circular glasses on the table with blurry background

Is Bias Actually Bad?

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If we take seriously Thomas Kelly’s ideas about bias blind spots, then we should seek public universities composed of a high degree of biased parts. Such universities would intentionally hire faculty members and administrators who harbor contrary views on divisive cultural issues. This would probably create campuses that can boast of having teaching and scholarship that have much less pejorative bias than their peer institutions.
Lonely senior patient sitting on the hospital bed at night

A Glimpse into a Post-Christian Future: Public Support for Killing the Poor and Disabled

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Playing a strictly defensive game of knocking down attempts to legalize physician-assisted killing—especially as the United States secularizes and becomes more like Canada—seems like an untenable strategy for protecting the most vulnerable from this deadly violence. Locking in dignity and radical equality of all human beings will require more. In short, it is time to go on offense.
Riot police clashed with the protesters.

A Coalition of the Sensible: What’s Wrong with “The New Right”

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The New Right’s embrace of the “politics of war” is utterly reckless. No amount of friend–enemy Manichaeism or state-of-emergency governance will transform American pluralism into moral unity.
Photo of Ryan Anderson and Micah Watson

Ryan Anderson on a Decade of Debates, the Future of Conservatism, and a Time to Grow

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Micah Watson and Ryan Anderson look back on his Piers Morgan interview, how the debate on same-sex marriage played out, what that might mean for our debates on transgender ideology, the nature of political discourse in America today, the future of the conservative movement, and what to look for in the next decade.
China's Great Hall of the People

The Law Under the CCP Is a Sham

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Talking about the rule of law in a place like China (more specifically, CCP-occupied China) is as absurd as talking about traffic regulations in the wilderness. The so-called law is the law of kings, wielded at whim. Only ending authoritarianism, establishing the balance of power, and respecting the rule of law will stop the government from being a tool of the CCP’s desires and evil aims.
Van Wickle Gates at the Campus of Brown University

The Ivy League Is Breeding Professional Virtue Signalers

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To some, my rejection of “privilege” discourse revealed that I was arrogant, ungrateful, and ignorant of the ways in which I was not solely responsible for my success thus far in life. But to others, it was evidence of gratitude and the desire to share my forebears’ recipe for intergenerational mobility as widely as possible, to reject the pessimism inherent in systemic thinking.
Reflection of architecture on modern office building

America’s Commercial Republic, and Its Detractors: An Interview with Samuel Gregg

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Key Founders believed that America’s future was to be a polity in which free and dynamic commerce would play a powerful role in defining society, as opposed to, say, the priorities of aristocratic or feudal societies. The “republic” side of this political economy equation is that this commercial society would operate within the context of institutions and sets of virtues that draw upon classical, religious, and moderate Enlightenment sources.
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.
offices, towers, city

ESG, Woke Capitalism, and the Virtue of Humility

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ESG, the investment ideology that considers environmental, social, and governance issues, is an important part of the story of the rise of woke capitalism. Resisting ESG will require business leaders not just to communicate the good that they do, but also to cultivate the virtue of humility, which clarifies the importance of restraint and the meaning of community.
Depressed Teenager sit on the Roof Of Building

Can Fatherhood Cure the Modern Male Malaise? A Conversation with Richard Reeves

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“Masculinity is more socially constructed than femininity. The script is more important. It has to be nurturing, not in the same way as mothers, but by being similarly other-centered. Creating a surplus, caring for others, sacrificing for others. The question then is, what are we going to build that script around? That sense of being needed, giving, other-centered? My answer to that is fatherhood.”
welding worker with sparks arcing

The Economy Will Always Be Partial

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In The Next American Economy, Samuel Gregg argues that the free market is the answer to what ails our economy. But much of what’s understood as the blessings of free markets and free trade is no less the result of politics and partiality. There are always competing interests involved; a policy that works for families or for workers might not work for entrepreneurs, and vice versa.
Photo of piggy bank with coins falling out

Money Matters

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The state of the economy is on everyone’s mind. As you check (or avoid checking) your retirement account, the Public Discourse archives provide some excellent resources to consider the big picture of economic issues.
supreme court

The Magnificence of Dobbs

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Dobbs may be the most important, magnificent, rightly decided Supreme Court case of all time. It is restorative of constitutional principle. It upholds the values of representative, democratic self-government, and the rule of law, at the same time that it supports the protection of fundamental human rights. It is literally a matter of life and death. It is potentially transformative of American society, for the better. It is a rare act of judicial courage and principle. In every way, Dobbs is a truly great decision.
jacques maritain

Where Have You Gone, Jacques Maritain?

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Today, Jacques Maritain’s optimistic vision of Christian liberalism is often contested or dismissed as outdated, but a revival of his emphasis on Christian participation in society and politics is urgently needed—and is in many ways already in evidence in Christian political activity in America.
antonio gramsci

Antonio Gramsci’s Long Struggle

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It is strange to reflect that someone who died in 1937 at the age of forty-six with no obvious legacy has exerted more cultural influence than most of his successors, but Antonio Gramsci’s “long struggle” of the intellectuals continues to shape our political, educational, and artistic landscape in regrettable ways.
flag, church

One Country, Two Faiths

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In their rigorous sociological account of Christianity in America today, George Yancey and Ashlee Quosigk provide many important insights, particularly in relation to progressive Christians, though overall the book simply confirms the enduring truth that Christians have always disagreed among themselves about faith and politics.
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