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

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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.
The Vatican

Across the Divide: M. Ciftci and Nathaniel Peters on Vatican II, Church–State Relations, and Political Participation 

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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.
expectant couple

What’s Natural (in Family Planning) Is New Again

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Women are increasingly embracing the reality that their cycles are beautiful, powerful, and healthy. This is truly, authentically, and enduringly empowering. 
The Vatican

Sexual Morality, Pope Francis, and Ascetic Christianity

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Because of our fallen and finite nature, we are all burdened with the impediment of concupiscence. But we are not victims or helpless creatures determined in our actions by the imperatives of biology.
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.
creation

Mere Humanity: An Ecumenical Anthropology for Human Flourishing

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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.
chastity

How to Think about Chastity

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Chastity is a way of being more holistically directed toward our happiness regardless of the desires and attractions we experience.
Thomas Aquinas

Courage to Engage the World: Thomism at 750

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Thomas Aquinas had an intellect fully alive. We might not share his title of Doctor of Humanity, but we have the same obligation: to cheerfully explore all, in service of all, for the good of all.
Catholic integralism

All the Kingdoms of the World

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Vallier has done a valuable service by patiently pointing out all the moral and political problems entailed by any attempt to establish integralism. The most important problem with integralism, however, is less in its conception of the state than in its conception of the Church.
Catholic church interior

Can Catholic Integralism Be Good in Theory but Bad in Practice?

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If you want to boil this essay down into one question for the soft integralist, it is this: You say you don’t want integralism now, but if not now, when? Answering that question is harder than you think.
Holistic feminism

Cultivating a Holistic Feminism

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Feminism has never been a phrase without its detractors—many men in the 1800s very much did see women as “skin and bones.” But today, Catholics seem to be split over the virtues and vices of the word “feminist” more than ever before.
Crucifix

The Religion That Remade the World

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Tom Holland raises many important questions about the connection between Christianity and contemporary Western civilization. All Westerners, be they Christian or not, would do well to consider his insights.
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.
Pope Pius XII

Misrepresenting the Latest Meeting on Pope Pius XII

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One of the biggest developments to emerge from the conference is that the Vatican under Pope Francis, far from slackening its support of Pius XII, has actually increased it.
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.
Pope Benedict XVI

The Soul of the Sower

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Joseph Ratzinger looked at reality straight on, without blinders, neither a pessimist nor an optimist; with trepidation but always with Christian hope. He persevered, trusting in the promises of Christ as we must. He did so as almost all of us have to, without benefit of any special grace.
Critical race theory

Critical Race Theory for the Rest of Us

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In his book All One in Christ, Edward Feser provides a succinct but comprehensive treatment of Critical Race Theory, its logical flaws and lack of basis in social science, and the Catholic Church’s alternative solution to racism: love for each person as made in God’s image and purchased by the blood of Jesus Christ.
Vatican

Papal Power and the Obedience of the Faithful

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While a book like John Rist’s is diminished by its flaws, it’s not entirely unfair about our current moment.
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.
The Vatican

Pius XII and the Politics of the Mystical Body

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Pope Pius XII exhorts the faithful to participate in daily Mass, frequent confession, personal prayer, mortification, and works of mercy. These practices are not minor, weak, or irrelevant responses to a world crisis; on the contrary, the pope believes they are powerfully efficacious and necessary, strengthening the bonds uniting the mystical body of Christ and sowing the seeds of peace. His counsel is spiritual in nature, but socio-political in its effects.
Unidentified young demostrator with megaphone and notebook protesting against austerity cuts

Graduate Student Unions and Catholic Social Thought

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Since the first social encyclical, Rerum novarum (1891), the Church consistently has taught that forming unions is a natural human right, an expression of the right of association and a right that governments may not deny.

Thomas Aquinas: Revolutionary and Saint

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Seven hundred years ago the Catholic Church canonized Thomas Aquinas. Today he is often considered a consummate authority for Catholic philosophy and theology. We should remember, however, how revolutionary his views were.
Ancient Roman ruins of temple in Jerash, Jordan

After Postliberalism

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What would happen if we dropped that charged word “liberalism” from the conversation and got down to specifics? I suspect much of Patrick Deneen’s postliberal magic would disappear.
Hands of women desperate to catch the iron prison

On Abolishing the Death Penalty: A Response to Daryl Charles

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Aquinas’s argument is not that killing an offender is always lawful, much less that it is mandatory. It is lawful upon a condition, namely, that it is necessary to protect the common good from a threat. Absent that condition, Aquinas does not argue or even suggest that killing a malefactor, including one who has committed murder, is lawful.
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