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King Solomon, The False Mother, and Alfie Evans

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Like King Solomon, the courts in England were presented with a straightforward question: To whom does this child belong? In both cases, the true parent was unquestionably the one willing to sacrifice for the child, to safeguard his life even at the expense of never seeing him again, while the “false mother” did not care whether the child lived or died.
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.   
Segregated drinking fountain in use in the American South. Undated photograph. BPA2# 1135.

The United States Should Give Reparations for Segregation, Not Slavery: A Response to Daniel Philpott

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The United States must apologize for treating blacks with contempt and compensate with reparations those American blacks who lived through racial segregation. But reparations for all black Americans will not erase the wealth gap between blacks and whites, nor improve the significant educational achievement gap rampant throughout the black communities in this country.
Benjamin Franklin

The Bookshelf: Writing in the Mirror

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Whether it is an account of one’s whole life, or a memoir focused on a certain period or aspect of one’s life, or a published journal or diary, the author of an autobiography is too deeply interested (in both senses of that word) to achieve a really critical distance. Can the autobiographer, the memoirist, or the diarist be trusted?
jacques maritain

Maritain for Our Time

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The past half century has seen the breakdown of institutional Christianity on which Jacques Maritain’s political project relied. Nonetheless, the limits of his thought do not vitiate the valuable insights Maritain offers for Christian politics in the twenty-first century. He reminds us that politics is about how to order our life together, not just creating ideals or defeating our enemies. He teaches us that we can order a society toward the temporal truths of Christianity, but that the temporal power of the state is no substitute for the spiritual power of the faith.
male, female, symbols

Anthropological Fallacies

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Body-self dualism, and its social manifestation in expressive individualism, underlie the rejection of our given human natures. Rather than seeing ourselves as somehow inhabiting bodies that are used as mere instruments, we should see ourselves as incarnate, bodily beings embedded in communities and bound by natural and supernatural laws.
Empty dark classroom

Critical Race Theory, Public Schools, and Parental Rights

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Today, in Part I of this essay, I explain critical race theory and show how many of its ideas have made their way into public schools across the country, prompting a backlash that has led to the introduction of anti-CRT education regulations in many states. CRT views values like “objectivity” as tools of oppression. It’s clear that many public schools are indeed incorporating plenty of CRT-inspired ideas like these in their curricula.
Candles

Maintaining Faith Amid Modern Malaise: A Conversation with Public Discourse Contributing Editor Devorah Goldman

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I think PD is doing important work in addressing modern spiritual challenges: even just acknowledging such problems from an explicitly religious perspective can hopefully get us closer to mitigating them. Both Judaism and Christianity also engender a kind of humility, as we look to the past for wisdom and acknowledge our indebtedness to those who came before us.
Civil rights protesters

National Reparations Can’t Create Justice, But Local Ones Might

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Reparations for racial injustice are necessary, but they will be effective only on a local level, not a national one.
Male and female

What Are Bodies For? Beyond Bathrooms and Women’s Sports

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When gendered embodiment is treasured, maleness and femaleness are understood not as acts we perform, but as our very bodily essence. Being a man or a woman is not simply what one does, it is who one is.
Classroom

Coming out of Our Burrows: Anti-Fundamentalism, Free Speech, and the Academy

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A new book pushing back against fundamentalism and advocating open conversation should make readers rethink their positions. What is the proper relationship between abstract reason and personal knowledge in the academic arena? Perhaps it is a sign of admirable intellectual resilience rather than feebleness to have traits of both the hedgehog and the fox.
Man reading

Refreshing, Rejuvenating, and Improving Our Public Discourse: 2020 Book Recommendations

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Reading recommendations from The Witherspoon Institute staff.
Phone

Bitcoins, Libra, and Your Google Checking Account

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Is the world of private money an inevitability? Do we all need to get used to the fact that whether we like it or not, Facebook and Apple and Microsoft and Google are going to dominate the monetary landscape of the future? Not at all.

The Founders’ Natural Rights Philosophy Does Not Entail Radical Autonomy

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It’s an error for conservatives to see the American Founding’s emphasis on natural rights as necessarily fostering extreme individualism in contemporary America. Eighteenth-century Americans would have viewed the notion that rights could be exercised contrary to natural law as ridiculous.

Respect for the Dignity of Every Human Person: The First Pillar of a Decent Society

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As our public debate coarsens and weakens, Public Discourse will continue to publish respectful, rigorous arguments. We will continue to stand up for the rights and dignity of the most vulnerable members of society.

Free Speech, Ordinary People, and Ordinary Judgments: Hadley Arkes responds to Robert Miller

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In drawing on the older teaching of the courts, Hadley Arkes argues that it is far more tenable for the Court to teach again the difference between epithets and arguments.

We Must Reclaim Parental Rights as Building Blocks to a Healthy Society

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In both the United Kingdom and the United States, the fundamental rights of parents have dangerously eroded, undermining the ability of parents to protect the welfare of their children, instill moral values, and pass on religious beliefs and practices.

Consent is Not Enough: Harvey Weinstein, Sex, and Human Flourishing

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What Harvey Weinstein is accused of is wrong not only because the victims did not consent but also and more importantly because of what he chose. Sex expresses self-gift, which is why it is such a violation when something that should only be a free gift is stolen by force.

North Carolina’s Bathroom Bill and the Constitution

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North Carolina’s state legislature recently passed HB2, requiring governmental bathrooms and locker rooms to be separate based on biological sex. Despite LGBT activists’ insistence that hateful animus against transgender people motivates this law, in reality the law does not discriminate against LGBT people any more than it does against other special classes, and instead offers a reasonable balancing of conflicting privacy interests.
Public Discourse

Justice Brandeis and the Birth of Liberal Judicial Activism

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The roots of today’s judicial activism stretch back one hundred years to the appointment of controversial Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a champion of “sociological jurisprudence.”
Public Discourse

“Shut Up, Bigot!”: The Intolerance of Tolerance

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Conservatives are called bigots because those who embrace the new sexual mores are beholden to the new tolerance as a plausibility structure. Postmodern liberals cannot comprehend the idea that one could simultaneously reject a belief and accept the person who holds it.
Public Discourse

Thanks for Everything, Justice Kennedy

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As a legal opinion, Obergefell is an utter failure, relying as it does on a tenuous and historically ungrounded jurisprudence of “dignity.” The debate over same-sex marriage is not over. A constitutional ruling so shoddily reasoned, so completely and easily dismantled by the dissents, must paper over a cause that cannot ultimately win in an open debate.
Public Discourse

Persecution, Past and Present: Candida Moss’s Unintentional Gift to Christians

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Candida Moss’s book on the history of Christian persecution is a case study in how scholarship gives way to politicized polemic—but it’s also an important reminder for contemporary Christians.
Public Discourse

“There Must Be a Reason”: A Father’s Final Gift to His Same-Sex Attracted Son

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I’m attracted to people of the same sex, and I’m glad that I was raised by a devoutly Christian mom and dad. My dad’s acceptance of me as a man, with full knowledge of my attraction to other men, was his gift to me. And though it was late coming, I am utterly thankful for it.
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