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Interviews
The only way to actually create a better future is to start with the world we actually live in and move forward—which may require “despairing” of the past, which cannot be changed.
Christians should always make the best of any pragmatic agreements they can find with non-Christians on any issue. But the evangelical reasons why we support, for instance, constitutional government should be made clear, not veiled in embarrassment by translating them into the idiom of natural law or human dignity out of a misguided concern to avoid blurring the boundaries between political and religious affairs.
At this moment, what we can do is the right thing. And sometimes the right thing is very risky—going out into the streets and demonstrating your opinions on the situation. It's risky, but I think it’s our right, and I think it’s what is right.
Religious conservatives should be open to the idea that progressives and liberals might be able to take their own path and still find some common ground on the essential question of the goodness of human life.
The belief that childrearing is prohibitively expensive could be understood as a fruit of our collapsing civil society. Some people today don’t even consider that extended family, neighbors, churches, and other little platoons can, at least theoretically, provide real support to parents. They fall into believing that the only places to turn for help are the market and the state. Parents without community support then shift more burden onto themselves.
I’m hopeful, therefore, that not just ordinary readers, but also readers at the higher levels of ecclesial leadership, will learn some new things about women and Church history from my book. I also hope that some might reconsider and refine what they say in connection to the past and present role of women in Christian ecclesial and social life.
In spite of all the difficulties they told me—“my body is shot,” “I’ve taken second best in my career, ” but “gosh, I would have one more.” What is this thing, that you could drag yourself through all this hardship and still want one more?
Demographer Lyman Stone projects that, on the current course, as many as one in three young adults in the United States might never marry and as many as one in four will never have kids. That’s a lot of kinless Americans. Given the importance of marriage and family for what Jefferson called “the pursuit of happiness,” this would be a tragedy. So let’s find new ways to make it easier and more appealing for young adults to get married.
It’s useful to heed the words of Gabriel Marcel when it comes to desire. To paraphrase his “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived,” perhaps we could instead say: “Desire is not a problem to be solved, but a mystery to be lived.” Girard himself refers to desire as a “mystery” on numerous occasions. I think he spent his entire life trying to understand that mystery.
Book Reviews
Despite Professor Jacobs’s forceful defense of this book, my opinion remains unchanged. Buy Auden’s Collected Poems, regularly visit his poems from the 1930s, then patiently scour the rest of his work for more gold.
Christopher and Richard Hays have presented plausible arguments supported by biblical warrants for welcoming sexual minorities into church membership and leadership. Yet their mercy trajectory approach falls far short of building a coherent, convincing cumulative case to support their vision of blessing same-sex unions in the church.
Originalism in Theology and Law is a welcome salvo in an ecumenical and interdisciplinary conversation that has been too long dominated by originalism’s critics.
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.
Smith's book is an excellent reminder that conservatives should never prioritize an idealized individual or nation. Rather, we must work to preserve those institutions that point us to better lives.
Rana’s history prompts us to reflect on how we ought to conceive of American identity and defend the Constitution’s anti-majoritarian checks and balances in the twenty-first century.
My interest is not in striking a blow either for or against Basham and the like-minded folks who feel empowered and justified by her claims. Rather, I want to talk about why I think the book is important and how a more expansive framework might help us understand the strife and atmosphere of suspicion more accurately.
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.
Cosmic Connections has intermittent charms. Those blessings were not sufficient, however, to justify the time and effort necessary to read the book.
Long Reads
Christopher and Richard Hays have presented plausible arguments supported by biblical warrants for welcoming sexual minorities into church membership and leadership. Yet their mercy trajectory approach falls far short of building a coherent, convincing cumulative case to support their vision of blessing same-sex unions in the church.
Today we might instinctively look at Nazi criteria for death as utterly baseless, but at the time seasoned medical professionals regarded them as reasonable. To have a sense of history is to grasp the arbitrariness of such criteria. When it comes to killing patients, there is no way to get the criteria just right because the stamp of medical approval sends a social message that there is a category of persons who should not exist.
The enduring source of the Children of Israel’s exceptional, future-oriented natalism is their intense, equally exceptional rootedness in their shared past.
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?
As I revisited the familiar lyrics from my childhood, I noticed new themes and deeper meanings. To my surprise, I soon reached the unlikely conclusion that this classic family film has much to teach us about women, work, and feminism.
Human flourishing does not require escaping the cares and travails of this world, but rather, it imbues them with significance in the light of the Eternal One, in whom we live and move and have our being.
So, why should a Christian study the humanities? Because it’s what God made us to do. Because by doing so we do participate in God’s knowing of the world and can thereby come to understand him. Because by study we can better understand scripture and our experience of God. Because it lets us enjoy non-Christian beauty and truth in the light of Christ. Because it can be a means of spiritual growth and shape our experience of the world. And because it can move us to praise God who is the Truth itself.
If we are to feel at one with the structures in which we labor and dwell, if they are to endorse our existence here on earth, beauty must take precedence over all other factors. Without it, the battle for the soul of civilization cannot be won.
If the stories can change, it stands to reason that they can improve—or deteriorate. Responsible cultural elites of the Left and Right alike would do well to consider not only what claims they make explicitly, but what kinds of stories underlie those claims, and whether these are the right stories to tell.
Newsletters
Procedures are necessary, of course, but we need substance as well. And our pages were full of substance this month, as every month.
A crucial aspect of Public Discourse’s mission is to be a beacon of light and a forum for serious, rigorous, and truth-seeking discourse even when temptations toward despair, radicalization, and provocative polemics abound. At PD, we charitably examine and challenge ideas and arguments—we don’t attack or demonize people, and we don’t serve any worldview, party, or ideology besides the cause of truth.
There are numerous ways that we increasingly strive to defy the natural limits our embodiedness imposes on us, and our pulling away from community and connectedness is just one example. In this kind of world, it’s easy to forget that our physical bodies, and all the limits and inconveniences they impose on us (or others!), matter a great deal. So it’s no mistake that our August essays seemed to touch on that theme.
If ennobling discourse is now countercultural, so too is our journal. Like the Witherspoon Institute, PD is an institution that bears witness to a virtuous (and virtuously “slower”) mode of public engagement: engagement that reflects an open-hearted, honest yearning for the common good.
We do our best to build, strengthen, and defend the basic institutions of a free and flourishing people, institutions of the family, religion, good government, and education. At times we critique and note shortcomings, but even those criticisms are for something rather than against: we are for flourishing, for good institutions, and for the nation.
We work hard at every level of the editorial process to ensure that our essays are well-crafted, that our language is precise and that our arguments are sound. But most of all, we want to encourage and teach our readers to appreciate a well-formed argument, even if they ultimately come to a different conclusion than we do.
Strap in, everyone, for we need to acknowledge that what is called for now is a generational effort, likely to be multi-generational, to recover reality. And it all requires the family. As the family goes, so goes our society. The flashpoint at the university, in the end, is far downstream from what is happening in the family.
The truth lurking inside the great morass of opinions, questions, and fears about the human condition is that a confluence of factors leads to greater personal, familial, and communal flourishing.
Reflections on right reason plus a roundup of this month's essays
