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Robert P. George

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. He has served as Chairman of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and as a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He also served as the U.S. member of UNESCO’s World Commission on the Ethics of Scientific Knowledge and Technology. His honors include the U.S. Presidential Citizens Medal, the Honorific Medal for the Defense of Human Rights of the Republic of Poland, and Princeton’s President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he holds the degrees of MTS and JD from Harvard University and the degrees of DPhil, BCL, DCL, and DLitt from Oxford University, as well as twenty-one honorary degrees.

free speech at universities

In Defense of Free Speech and the Mission of the University 

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If we were to adopt Yoram’s call for censorship in areas where I am calling for freedom of speech, I invite him—and you, gentle reader—to consider the following question: Would the result be anything other than the further entrenchment of current campus orthodoxies, and the further weakening of protection for dissent and dissenters?
Robert George headshot

Friend of the Court, Friend of the Truth: An Exchange Between Politico and Robert P. George

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I am quoted extensively in Ms. Przybyla’s piece based on responses I made to inquiries she directed to me by email. So that readers can assess for themselves the fairness and integrity of Ms. Przybyla’s reporting, I will here post, in its entirety, the communications between us.
Robert George headshot

Apostles of Life: Remarks on Receiving the Evangelium Vitae Medal

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We will never offer our beloved sisters the ghoulish pseudo-compassion of the abortionist’s knife. We will offer, instead, the healing balm of genuine compassion, compassion born of love, compassion that offers, not a quick and easy, but deadly, “solution,” but rather an open-ended, open-hearted, self-sacrificial commitment.
Photo of Pope John Paul II

Catholic Teaching on Jews and Judaism

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Faithful Catholics will affirm, with the Second Vatican Council and with the papal magisterium, that the Jewish people are indeed “the good olive tree onto which the wild shoot of the Gentiles has been grafted,” that God’s original Covenant with his chosen people is unbroken and unbreakable, that our bond with the Jewish people is a spiritual bond, rooted in a common spiritual patrimony, and that our Jewish neighbors are indeed our brothers and sisters in faith.
Photo of graduates in caps and gowns

Commencement Watch 2022

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In our examination of the top twenty-five US News research universities and liberal arts colleges, we found that not a single conservative was invited to give a commencement speech or receive an honorary degree. What we have here is, to put it bluntly, a scandal. It’s hard to see an explanation outside of ideological prejudice for the gross imbalance.
Photo of Gloria Purvis and Robert P. George

Catholic, Black, and Pro-Life: An Interview with Gloria Purvis and Robert P. George

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Someone who is subjected to racist treatment is negatively impacted. That child of God is treated as less than who he or she is. Those engaging in racist behavior are negatively impacted too. Why? Because they are behaving beneath the dignity of who they are. Too often people look at racism as a one-way thing when it’s an all-the-way-round thing because it’s a human family issue. Racism is a rebellion against God’s plan for the human family and for human flourishing.
joseph raz

Joseph Raz: Philosopher of Freedom

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Joseph Raz, the master of analytic philosophy of law who died in London last month, argued that law and policy should reflect a vision of the human good, with the good of personal autonomy—enabling people to be “authors of their own lives”—at its heart. He was a true philosopher, a truth-seeker: he had convictions, but he never sought to immunize them against criticism, nor did he allow himself to fall so deeply in love with his opinions that he valued them above truth itself.
Robert George

From the Archives: Can We Still Reason Together? A Conversation with Robert P. George

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Where there is a mutual commitment to truth and truth-seeking, relationships can be built between religious believers and secularists, and they can indeed reason together. The minimum condition is this: interlocutors, however wide and deep their substantive philosophical or other differences, need to share the conviction that business between them is to be conducted in the proper currency of intellectual discourse—namely, reasons, evidence, and arguments.
Robert George

Can We Still Reason Together? A Conversation with Robert P. George

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Where there is a mutual commitment to truth and truth-seeking, relationships can be built between religious believers and secularists, and they can indeed reason together. The minimum condition is this: interlocutors, however wide and deep their substantive philosophical or other differences, need to share the conviction that business between them is to be conducted in the proper currency of intellectual discourse—namely, reasons, evidence, and arguments.
Pope Francis Stained Glass

Pope Francis, Civil Unions, and Moral Truth

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More deeply understanding the truth about marriage and human sexuality will help all of us flourish. And that is what a pastor like Pope Francis desires. We can understand—indeed we share—the frustration of our fellow Catholics with the ways in which the Holy Father conducts interviews and the ways in which the media distorts them, but we must not do anything to undermine the truth that sets us free.
Robby and Chris

The COVID-19 Pandemic: What Do and Don’t We Know

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This is a fundamental human experience that we're having. Plagues have been described for a very long time. It's just that we ourselves are not used to having it. I would happily stay at home for three months if it meant that my neighbors are not going to die.

This interview is adapted from the Webinar conversation “Pandemic! What Do and Don’t We Know? Robert P. George in Conversation with Nicholas A. Christakis.”

Courage, Love, and Sacrifice in the Fight for Marriage Reality

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Every time we fail to muster the courage to do what’s right, what God is calling us to do, there is behind that failure a still deeper failure: a failure of love.
Child

Physical Interventions on the Bodies of Children to “Affirm” their “Gender Identity” Violate Sound Medical Ethics and Should be Prohibited

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Rather than teaching children to identify based on how well they fit prevailing cultural expectations on sex, we should be teaching them that the truth of their sexual identity is based on their bodies, and that sometimes cultural associations attached to the sexes are misguided or simply too narrow. There is a wonderfully rich array of ways of expressing one’s embodiment as male or female.

Immoral Conduct and Moral Witness

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Does the sexual depravity of Martin Luther King, Jr. negate his work and witness in the cause of racial justice?

Fr. James Martin, Friendship and Dialogue, and the Truth about Human Sexuality

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It is not merely that we “reject the sin, but love the sinner,” though we do that; we reject the sin because we love the sinner—radically love him, willing his good for his own sake, affirming the teaching of the Church in all its richness because we recognize that it is liberating and life-affirming.

Embryos and Five-Year-Olds: Whom to Rescue

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Both human embryos and human five-year-olds are human beings equal in fundamental worth and dignity. But there are differences between the embryos and five-year-olds that are or can be morally relevant to the decision concerning whom to rescue.

Fr. James Martin on Marriage, Sexual Morality, and the Church’s Teachings: A Solution to the Puzzle

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Does Fr. James Martin in fact reject the Church’s teachings on sex and marriage? If so, why does he insist that he does not?

The Soul: Not Dead Yet

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The traditional philosophical and theological concept of the soul allows us to integrate what the empirical sciences reveal with what we know about ourselves as rational and moral beings.
Public Discourse

Antonin Scalia: An American Originalist

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With the death of Antonin Gregory Scalia the nation has lost one of its greatest jurists and a man who embodied the principle of fidelity to the Constitution.
Public Discourse

Liberty and SOGI Laws: An Impossible and Unsustainable “Compromise”

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Big Business and Big Law are using Big Government to impose their cultural values on small businesses and ordinary Americans. Indiana does not need to create new laws on sexual orientation or gender identity for people who identify as sexual minorities to be treated justly. The best way to protect all Hoosiers is for Indiana not to adopt a SOGI policy at all.
Public Discourse

Could America Survive without Religion?

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Can freedom survive in a society in which most citizens believe that human beings, who are supposed to have inalienable rights, are merely material beings inhabiting a universe of purely material and efficient causality?
Public Discourse

Amy Kass: Teacher, Truth-Teller, Defender of Dignity

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The loss of Amy Kass is incalculable. But what cannot be taken from us are the lessons she taught, not only by precept, but by the splendid example of the life she led.
Public Discourse

Marco Rubio Is Right: The Life of a New Human Being Begins at Conception

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Senator Rubio is on the firmest possible scientific ground when he says that science shows that the child in the womb, from the very point of successful fertilization, is indeed a human being.
Public Discourse

Marriage and Equal Protection

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For the Court to strike down laws defining marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife would be to abolish the idea that men and women matter—equally—in the lives of the children they create. And it would be both a judicial usurpation of legislative authority and a federal intrusion into a matter left by the Constitution in the hands of the states.
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