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Multiple storeys old library

Remembering Paul Johnson, the Historian of Human Dignity

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Underlying Paul Johnson’s historical writing was the sense that people possess an innate dignity. To Johnson, history was the story of people—flawed, creative, reasoning, exceptional—with the capacity for incredible achievement. People, he thought, were made with a purpose, and that meant history has a purpose.
Photo of Cardinal Pell in wine cellar

Seven Days with Cardinal Pell

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I consider myself lucky to have gotten to know George Cardinal Pell a bit—and that after his 80th year.
Depressed Teenager sit on the Roof Of Building

Can Fatherhood Cure the Modern Male Malaise? A Conversation with Richard Reeves

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“Masculinity is more socially constructed than femininity. The script is more important. It has to be nurturing, not in the same way as mothers, but by being similarly other-centered. Creating a surplus, caring for others, sacrificing for others. The question then is, what are we going to build that script around? That sense of being needed, giving, other-centered? My answer to that is fatherhood.”
A group of peaceful protestors with banners and posters

A Case for a March for Children

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The idea behind a March for Children is simple: if the institution of marriage is respected and strengthened, families—most of all children—will flourish. Just as the March for Life focused on the importance of legislative and judicial steps to protect unborn children, a March for Children would fight for legislative policies and judicial decisions that aim at strengthening the institution of marriage, which helps ensure the protection of all children.
Bnei Brak , Israel - October 18 . 2018: The interior of the synagogue Brahat ha-levana in Bnei Brak . Israel . Designated congregation and the altar.

The Legacy of Living Jews

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Instead of focusing on what the world has done to the Jews, it is far more worthwhile to investigate the way Jews have not only survived, but thrived.
Photo of GK Chesterton

The Bookshelf: Enter 2023 Laughing

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There is a lot of mileage to be gained out of mockery, and nowhere more than in satire and parody. But successful parody depends on close study, intimate familiarity with the target, and that can often produce a certain gentleness and sympathy in the result.
Man at crossroads

How to Make Life-Changing Decisions

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For the most significant choices of our lives, we only learn what the decision entails after we make it. This creates something of a dilemma. We only get the information needed to make a well-informed decision after we have committed to a particular choice. We are confronted with choices whose outcomes, potential goods, and impact on our lives we cannot fully anticipate.
Catholics in Pew at Mass

Census Fidei? Methodological Missteps Are Undermining the Catholic Church’s Synod on Synodality

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As a social scientist, I have grave concerns about the methodological mess that has characterized this synod’s massive, unwieldy data-collection-and-analysis venture.
Botticelli_-_Adoration_of_the_Magi_(Zanobi_Altar)

The Politics of Epiphany

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The story of Epiphany provides a timeless lesson on the corrosive influence of politics on religion and religious leaders, revealing the unique temptation faced by the religious establishment, at all times and places, to maintain prestige and power.
welding worker with sparks arcing

The Economy Will Always Be Partial

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In The Next American Economy, Samuel Gregg argues that the free market is the answer to what ails our economy. But much of what’s understood as the blessings of free markets and free trade is no less the result of politics and partiality. There are always competing interests involved; a policy that works for families or for workers might not work for entrepreneurs, and vice versa.

Joyous Surrender: A Rhapsody in Red (and Green)

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Christmas isn’t tasteful, isn’t simple, isn’t clean, isn’t elegant. Give me the tacky and the exuberant and the wild, to represent the impossibly boisterous fact that God has intruded in this world.
Book cover of the Betrothed

A Masterpiece Novel That Should Be an Instant Classic

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In Alessandro Manzoni’s recently translated novel, The Betrothed, the world is regularly pitted against the sanctity of a few. The novel often asks the reader, an implicit echo, how do you live as a faithful Christian when so much evil persists in the world? But more than anything, it shows us the reality of forgiveness and the possibility of fulfilling Jesus’s most challenging commandment: love your enemies.
Christian cross on USA flag

Treatise or Tweet? A Review of Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism (Part 2)

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A call to repentance or prayer would not preclude action, but it would certainly force necessary and prudent reflection about the very problems Wolfe diagnoses and what the first response should be. Creating a deplorables basket of enemies on the political Left, while ignoring spiritual enemies, makes the project more political for sure, but not more Christian.
Open book and reading glasses on the table, illuminated by sunlight. Stack of vintage books in the background. Selective focus.

Classic, Contemporary, and Controversy: The 2022 Public Discourse Book List

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Reading recommendations from Public Discourse and the Witherspoon Institute.
woman absorbed by her cell phone

Modern Man Is Psychologized, Sexualized, Politicized—and Digitized

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While the digitized promises of meta-man may entice us, they are ultimately false promises based on a rejection of fundamental aspects of human embodiment. There is an integrated wholeness to man that requires both resting in the givenness of human identity and actively engaging with the world.
Petri Dish with drops of material and micromanipulators over it in the laboratory of the in vitro fertilization. Macro photo with selective focus. Horizontal.

Lives in Limbo: A Case for Embryo Adoption

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Scripture and tradition tell us something astonishing about our embryonic brothers and sisters currently being kept in frozen storage: they are a vulnerable population that perhaps demands our attention the most. Indeed, embryo adoption appears to be smack-dab in the center of the demands of the Gospel.
Sunrise over the St. Peters Basilica in Vatican City. Morning at the most famous landmark, empty of people street, cloudy sky.

The Unfolding and Unsettling of Vatican II

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George Weigel’s book on the meaning and legacy of Vatican II is persuasive as a history of ideas, but in focusing on context and content it seems to miss the sense in which the Council is an unfolding event that calls Catholics to encounter Christ and walk away changed and challenged.
white masks patterned with on a black background

Cyborg Feminism

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The final frontier for equality between the sexes—the missing tech fix—was always, how do we deal with reproduction? How do we deal with the different reproductive roles between the sexes? How can we use tech to flatten those differences? So reproductive inequality is the final frontier in replacing the sexes with the atomized, sexless, liberal person.
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.
Fashionable restaurant and vintage store in Greenwich Village

Business Owners Have Rights, Too

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In the 303 Creative case before the Supreme Court, Colorado officials assert that all proprietors who open their services to the public have a duty to serve any potential customer on demand. But public accommodation laws do not give customers a general right to be served. Proprietors may terminate a customer’s license and refuse service for any good reason, as long as it is rationally related to the purposes of the business and not an arbitrary or inherently illicit classification, such as race.

Are Marriage and Parenthood Only for the Wealthy?

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In a post-industrial society where marriage and fertility are expressions of values, rather than buttresses for economic security, policies that strive to make it as easy as possible for people to get married and have children should be at the forefront of the agenda. Broader state investment alone cannot take the place of a pro-family culture, from media outlets to religious institutions to schools.
Assembly line

The Burden of Being a Family

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As some of the financial benefits to marriage have eroded, it can be tempting to use policy to make family formation more attractive. The rising median age at first marriage and first birth, however, largely arise from a mix of technological progress and preference for career, which aren’t things policies can reverse. Better solutions come from civil society, where entrepreneurs work to find solutions to the everyday problems modern parents face and religious communities help young adults order their priorities.
The marble columns of the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington DC

Dobbs and the Renewal of Federalism

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We should celebrate Dobbs—but cautiously, for it is only the beginning of the project of constitutional restoration that needs to be done. If Dobbs is to stand, American society must move away from the stifling, tyrannical concentration of national power that we are experiencing now and begin a return to the balanced government of the Founders’ Constitution.
Photo of Peter Singer

Effective Altruism’s Utilitarian Problem

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There’s a lot to commend about EA. It endorses good stewardship of resources; it recognizes the dignity of every human being; and it pushes back against the kind of presentism that disregards generations to come. But some iterations of EA should give us pause. Its core defect is its tie to utilitarianism, which is ultimately untenable as a philosophy.
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