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ideology

What Is Ideology? A Conversation with Mark Shiffman and James Matthew Wilson

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Ideology replaces respect for the dignity of the human person with celebration of a new humanity required for its perfected social and political order.
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.
studying the humanities

Why Should a Christian Study the Humanities?

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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.
Campus protests

Student Protests and the Old Gods

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The protests are not simply about Gaza, but concern incompatible ways of life and value. They are another moment in the long rejection of Western metaphysics, anthropology, ethics, and epistemology by Westerners coming of age in a culture that teaches them to despise their own civilization.
family

From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, April 2024

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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.
big family

Hannah’s Children: An Interview with the Author

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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?
torn American flag

Sociology in the Age of Trump: The Clash of Deep Stories on the Left and Right

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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.
college students

A Third Voice: Protecting a Regime of Robust Speech on the Campus without Falling into Relativism

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We must be clear that nothing in the search for the truth entails that we recede in any way from the surety that we have with us, now as ever, the standards for judging evil ends to be truly evil.   
homemaker

If We Value Homemaking, We Should Rethink Welfare Reform

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If you are willing to acknowledge that full-time caregiving may be a suitable, even preferable, use of one’s capacities, there can be little justification for policies that guard against it—in fact, you may want to construct policies that enable it.
oath

Disintegrating Conscience in a Fragmented Age 

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Although one might find oneself disagreeing with Smith, as I have on occasion, one will be better for it. And I can say that with a clear conscience.  
newborn baby

Assigned at Birth?

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To assign is to flail and thrash about as we try to exert control over the uncontrollable. But to wait in the ultrasound office or in the delivery room to find out, to then share with others in this first discovery of our child’s identity, to delight equally in male and female, is to recover our fundamental vulnerability to the gifts given to us.
Religious freedom

Religious Freedom Deserves a Right of Its Own

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Religion is a basic good for all human beings everywhere, therefore religious freedom is a universal human right. It is neither unfair nor parochial, but a requirement of justice.
Medical school

The Dark Kenosis of Medical Education

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Instead of submitting to the “thin” proposal for medical professional identity formation now advocated by the medical educational establishment, we should encourage our learners to lean into the richness of the various religious moral and faith commitments that are already manifest in them as they enter the profession.
Warsaw, Poland

A Nation (Still) Faithful to Its Roots? What St. John Paul the Great Might Say to Poland Today

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The recent election clearly shows that the Poland of today is no longer the Poland of the 1990s or even of the early 2010s. It raises the question whether Poles have sustained the kind of culture necessary to build a market society based on authentic freedom and the truth about the good, one with a robust civil society to support both the logic of the state and the logic of the market.
Richard Mouw

Timeless Truths: Encouraging Civil Discourse

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Actively cultivating civility in our relationships with those with whom we disagree is itself a crucial way of anticipating the kind of people we want to be when the end time appears.
suburban neighborhood

Empowering People through a Renewed Sense of Place

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Crucially, Kaplan sees the fragility of American life not just in the low-income neighborhoods of inner-city Philadelphia, but in the isolation of otherwise well-off suburbs. His goal is to resurrect the idea of the neighborhood as a specific place with a distinctive sense of community. It’s a cultural narrative that runs counter to a mentality that prioritizes mobility over stability.
Machiavelli

The Master of Machiavelli

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Mansfield’s Machiavelli’s primary goal is to subvert and overturn Christianity. It is important to note, as Professor Mansfield does himself, that this reading of a secular, indeed anti-Christian, Machiavelli is not the only reading of the Italian philosopher.
Thanksgiving table

The Bookshelf: November Is for Gratitude

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November is a month for looking back in gratitude at where we have been, where we come from, who has trod the boards of our stage before us. Gratitude is the proper spirit to lift us up during these shorter, colder days (at least in these latitudes), while the seasonal life of nature turns with the leaves and falls with them to the ground.
faith and fiction

Jon Fosse’s Septology and Faith in Fiction

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The phenomenon now arising around Fosse’s work, crowned by his widely honored and beloved Septology, supports the thought that the novelistic tradition’s centuries of exploring this tension have not yet come to an end. Fictionists of faith in the twenty-first century—far from being marginalized, suppressed, or silenced—face a wider horizon for hope and for endeavor than many may have ever dreamed of seeing. What remains to be seen is what writers will choose to do with such a vista of freedom.
The Catholic Church

Human Rights and Old Temptations

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Spurred perhaps by a mixture of reactionary cultural sentiment and dissatisfaction with contemporary church authorities—and with the encouragement of outspoken postliberal voices—a predominantly younger and traditionally minded class of Catholics has begun to rediscover and reconsider the merits of these ideas. But the Catholic Church’s enduring support of human rights will not, and cannot, change.
Classical education

Classical Education’s Remedy for America’s Loneliness Epidemic

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Classical schools embrace an older understanding of education, one that prepares students for festivity and friendship, rather than socially handicapping them. Like their ancient and medieval predecessors, classical educators maintain that a crucial purpose of education is to liberate students from a calculative, utilitarian mindset by teaching them how to enjoy intrinsically worthwhile activities for their own sake.
Person holding two pennies

In a Fallen World, Scarcity Is a Gift

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In our fallen condition in which we are detached from relationship with God, our mortality is a gift. Scarcity grants meaning to our decisions, provides a merciful conduit for us to know the love of God and one another, and pushes us toward relationships broken by the Fall.
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.
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