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

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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.
community

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

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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. 
from the editor's desk

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

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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.
American flag

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

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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.
modern apartments

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

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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.
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.
family

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

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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.
from the editor's desk

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

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Reflections on right reason plus a roundup of this month's essays
editors' desk; fountain pen

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

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Reflections on hope, plus a roundup of this month's essays
November newsletter

From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, November 2023

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Tension is something we at Public Discourse strive to handle well. Ours is a voice of reason, moderation, and calm even as storms swirl around us. The kind and thoughtful operation of reason always leaves peace, not awkwardness, not lingering tension, in its wake. 
newsletter

From the Editor’s Desk: Public Discourse’s Monthly Roundup, October 2023

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Such technocratic management, incapable of moral action, is, I suggest, what Magerman notes at Penn. But, alas, it is true of far too many of our institutions and those who manage them. Not so at Public Discourse, however, and not so for those educated in older, richer, wiser traditions of moral reflection and judgment—and thus of action. Our essays this past month are full of such riches.
Israel

Pray for Peace. Pray Also for Justice.

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Conflict is underway. Even already, so early in what could be a protracted war, the suffering is profound, the loss grievous and terrible. Things are almost certainly to become worse. It’s only natural, only human, to blanch at such pain, to avert one’s eyes, and wish for it to cease. But such sentiments, so natural and understandable, do not obviate the need to understand, deliberate, and judge according to the rule and demands of justice.
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