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Leo Strauss was an extraordinarily generous writer, by which I mean that he went to great pains to present the best case he could for the arguments of a serious thinker with whom he disagreed, before offering any tentative critique of that thinker. One never finds in his writings mere polemic or straw men. He invites the reader to take seriously and try fully to understand and spell out the serious and deepest thoughts of those whose thought he is confronting, even if he disagrees.
Lincoln saw the fundamental problem in democracy as one single, monstrous question: “Can the principle that liberates all and produces self-government remain disciplined and restrained enough in practice to retain self-government?”
As a moral framework for assessing regimes in an imperfect world, Nigel Biggar’s Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning has much to recommend it.
A woman can only navigate a world that demands self-ownership and self-authorship by neutering herself. What makes a woman’s body distinctively womanly isn’t a high femme presentation but the potential for biological hospitality and self-gift.
The “equality” that uncritical feminism proposes and that women settle for is the equal opportunity to be like the worst kind of man. And everyone benefits, it seems, except women themselves.
An honest reckoning with women’s interests today calls on us to reject the cyborg vision of sexless, fungible homunculi piloting re-configurable meat suits. The cyborg era began with women, and women must reclaim the power to say “no.” In its place, we can pioneer a new but ancient moral consensus. We can lead the charge for solidarity between the sexes.
For stay-at-home fatherhood to be a palatable option, our culture must value parents caring for their children at home as much as it values parents making money outside the home. The occasional stay-at-home dad will be respected only if the culture already respects the stay-at-home mom as much as the girlboss.
Fred Kaplan’s new biography of Thomas Jefferson, His Masterly Pen, gives us the Jefferson we deserve: Jefferson the writer, the listener, and the aesthete.
Too many universities treat students as atomized wills, encouraging them to follow their passions in and out of the classroom. Our colleges must change course and remind students that their familial relationships and their accompanying responsibilities can and should play a more decisive role in their lives than their careers will.
Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen’s The Way of Medicine shows how doctors who are committed to the Way can practice medicine in a manner that restores them to this vocation of healing, even in our pluralistic age.
Micah Watson and Ryan Anderson look back on his Piers Morgan interview, how the debate on same-sex marriage played out, what that might mean for our debates on transgender ideology, the nature of political discourse in America today, the future of the conservative movement, and what to look for in the next decade.
Reconceiving of marriage in terms of “self-expression” has been a terrible, value-laden mistake, betraying the pretensions to liberal neutrality. Plural marriage is inferior for raising children and for maintaining marital harmony; but most of all, in today’s climate, it creates a culture dedicated to adult sexual self-expression rather than the good of children and deep love.
Ernst Jünger’s 1957 novel, The Glass Bees, is prescient. But it also clarifies many of our own present challenges as we struggle with the role of technology over our lives. In a society defined by sound bites, 280-character tweets, three-minute TikTok videos, and deep fake videos, the line between what is authentically real and what is mere performance or imitation is blurred.
What continuing, large-scale “nonversion” away from traditional Christianity means for the nation—both presently and in the years ahead—is a huge “macro-level” question. And a pressing question, not just for sociologists and theologians, but for all of us one way or another. Stephen Bullivant’s prognosis in Nonverts: The Making of Ex-Christian America is neither grim nor naïve, not unduly pessimistic or optimistic, but realistic.
Renewals, revivals, and awakenings are unpredictable, by definition. Christians should not credulously accept them as de facto works of God just because they’re on the news, or on YouTube. But sometimes they produce godly results that last for generations: lives transformed and renewed, people called into vocational ministry, and communities brought to greater wholeness.
Conservatives should oppose “gender-affirming” surgeries with a positive account of human freedom ordered towards the goods that make freedom a blessing rather than a curse.
We are attempting a struggle against a dehumanizing revolution—but we are all attempting to overcome the same common threat. City building isn’t pretty, and it isn’t all that calm. At the same time, in our efforts against revolution, we should not respond with our own revolution.
If we are worried about wealth inequality because we don’t think the wealthy are using their wealth to help others, then it seems worth asking, who are the wealthy people? Can I, the writer of this essay, and you, the reader of this essay, afford to give $20 more than we are giving to something which will genuinely benefit those less fortunate?
My reading of the current economic and geopolitical situation is that at least in the short term, the United States will control enough pressure points to make life seriously difficult for the Chinese semiconductor industry.
To some, my rejection of “privilege” discourse revealed that I was arrogant, ungrateful, and ignorant of the ways in which I was not solely responsible for my success thus far in life. But to others, it was evidence of gratitude and the desire to share my forebears’ recipe for intergenerational mobility as widely as possible, to reject the pessimism inherent in systemic thinking.
Is it really wrong for a person who has saved enough funds to pay the cost of a new factory to ask for a portion of the returns from that factory? Why should anyone lend with no expectation of a return to someone who is going to use the loan to reap profits?
An explanation for the military’s recruitment challenges goes deeper than trends in the labor market. Ultimately, the civic honor on which voluntary service depends has quietly been eroding for some time, and is being replaced by an ethos of individual self-fulfillment.
The Greeks lost their marbles, and the British could kindly return them. Bad arguments why the British must return them do not gainsay the fact that they may. Such magnanimity, moreover, would put into practice one of most unexpected innovations in human history: St. Paul’s understanding of grace.
As economies developed, the idea that a commodity has an inherent just price faded away. We now think of the value of a thing as being a price on which a buyer and seller agree. But the legacy of this idea of a just price lingers in the popular imagination. It is an odd lingering notion, however. If asked, few people would be able to explain when a price is just.