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How to Make Abortion a Winning Issue: Midterm Lessons for Republicans

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Imagine if every GOP politician gave interviews explicitly detailing why elective abortion is not a health-care procedure and is never medically indicated—why, indeed, abortion isn’t beneficial to women’s health at all. The Republican choice not to develop such a strategy so doesn’t prove that the pro-life message has failed; it proves only that Republicans have failed to articulate that message.
Photo of rainbow flags

Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Law: Justifying Harms to Religious Minorities with Ideological Science

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While the minority stress theory has been effective in helping advance an “ideological agenda” for “social change,” it has been much less effective in explaining the negative health disparities found among sexual minorities, disparities which remain despite ever-broadening social acceptance. Invoking minority stress theory is not about protecting LGBT-identified people from harm. It’s about stamping out dissent and vilifying those who disagree.
John William Waterhouse Narcissus painting

The Advice Column of Expressive Individualism

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The expressive individualists promised a world in which moral conventions could be cast off in favor of something more beautiful, purposeful, passionate, and true. Instead, we have been left with an aimless, bloodless, timid culture.
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Liberal Individualism Is Undermining Itself

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By making the false ideal of independence the basis of our political and social order, we end up denigrating actual, dependent human lives. But life begins in dependence and remains inseparable from unchosen obligations. We have responsibilities to others, for which we have not signed a contract.
Catholic Church filled with people

The Catholic Church Must Be Allowed to Serve the Victims of Gender Ideology

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It is precisely to express Christ’s love that the Catholic Church has so many caring ministries: for the sick, for women in crisis pregnancies, for migrants, for the poor, and for others on the margins—including transgender-identifying people. Amid the debates over how to best care for those struggling with gender identity, the Department of Health and Human Services proposes so-called “nondiscrimination” rules that would prevent our ministries from helping people.
Luxury wedding photography. Elegant wedding couple, groom in grey suit and bride in wedding dress with long sleeves and long train kissing near white Just Married car with inscription "Wedding"

America’s Way Forward on Marriage

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Families, religious communities, community organizations, and public policymakers must work together toward a great goal: strengthening marriage so that each year more children are raised by their own mother and father in loving, lasting marital unions.
Norman Rockwell Freedom of Speech painting

Governed, Not Ruled: The Need for School Choice

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In a republic such as ours, the people grant certain prerogatives to the state, for the government exists by the consent of the people. The people do not beg for privileges and rights from the state. Parents have by nature, by justice, the right to educate their children. The state does not have a similar right to educate children; instead, parents permit the state to educate children.
Baptism of Constantine by Raphael

Antiseparationism: A Response to Scott Roniger

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If Hittinger does not think that the Church is meant to keep herself uninvolved with temporal politics, or that the temporal polis is meant to keep itself uninvolved with the Church, then his separationism does not conflict with integralism at all. This would be welcome news for Hittinger’s many integralist admirers. But it would also mean that Hittinger’s lectures, although rhetorically situated—and marketed—as a corrective to integralism, offer no such thing.
Photos of surgeons performing an operation

What Is Abortion?

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No particular terminology that is adopted in medicine or law determines the moral issues of abortion, nor does any common usage of the word. Pro-life and pro-choice advocates alike are capable of recognizing that a range of medical interventions can end an unborn human being’s life. They differ, often radically, about the justice of most such interventions.
Patrick Brown headshot

America Needs Pro-Family Politics: Announcing Patrick T. Brown as Contributing Editor

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A healthy culture, nearly every Public Discourse reader would agree, needs strong families. There is a growing number on the right—and I count myself among them—who recognize the family as possessing an inherent economic logic, in addition to its essential culture-shaping role. Families are influenced by market forces, starting from the very fundamental decision of whether to form a household or not. This requires some amount of getting our hands dirty in the nitty-gritty of politics and policy design.
Christ enthroned from Van Eyck's Ghent altarpiece

The Sign of Contradiction: A Response to Mr. Urban Hannon

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The source of disagreement between the integralists, as represented by Mr. Urban Hannon, and Dr. Russell Hittinger is at root Christological. If God in fact achieved the separation of his Kingdom from temporal politics in the person of Jesus—as St. Augustine, Pope St. John Paul II, and Ratzinger claim—then Hittinger’s lecture is not only correct, but also profound. Recognizing such separation really would be the beginning of wisdom.
Two gold wedding rings on rainbow lgbt flag. Homosexual marriage.

The “Respect for Marriage Act” Will Harm Children

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The law is a teacher, and the “Respect for Marriage Act” is a bad one. Enshrining legal lies about the truth of marriage harms all of society, most especially children. From facile heterosexual marriage dissolutions to novel family arrangements, children are harmed when their rights to their own mother and father are disregarded for the sake of adult desires.
Public Discourse

Jamie Boulding

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Painting of the signing of the Constitution in Independence Hall

What’s Wrong with Social Contract Theory

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Although social contract theory is a prominent feature of the American founding, it is both unsound and harmful to a proper understanding of politics. This fact presents a challenge to any form of conservatism that is based on protecting and promoting the principles of the American founding.
Perugino painting: Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter i

Aquinas’s Theology of Politics

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William McCormick, SJ, has written a new and welcome interpretation of Thomas Aquinas as a political thinker. His reading of Aquinas suggests that the political common good, as an intermediary between human and divine things, is a subject for ongoing inquiry, sensitive to the exigencies of a fallen world. McCormick holds that the “pedagogy of politics” unfolds teleologically as a community—in and through common deliberation and action—comes to greater knowledge of itself and its own ends.
Photo of marble arches with twin stairways and stained glass

University Life Depends on the Moral Life  

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Reason cannot become right reason unless the will is in love with the Truth; intellectual formation requires moral formation. And yet, as my previous essay argued, the university—the teacher of the intellect—cannot impart moral principle of itself. Moral communities, therefore, naturally complement the university’s work. But still more beneficial to the university is the moral witness of each person.
Photo ofa broken iPhone

Let’s Stigmatize Smartphones

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Between the individual and government is a great bulk of institutions that could help us address the cultural challenges posed by tech. In addition to policy reforms and individuals’ weaning themselves off tech, we also need to create stigmas around social media and smartphone use—culturally agreed upon limits, including designated times and places where screen time is socially unacceptable.
Photo of Nyvall Hall at North Park University

Hang On! Faith and Sexual Ethics

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North Park isn’t the only Christian university with inner turmoil about human sexuality. Not just colleges and administrations, but denominations and pastors have collapsed and caved on these teachings as well. Some of this is a lack of courage, a failure of spine in the face of cultural disdain; some of this is personal, an experience of a child or friend whose sexual appetites do not easily fit doctrine, and so doctrine must change. But it is always a loss of faith.
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The Metaverse Is Not Morally Neutral Technology

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French philosopher Gabriel Marcel’s writings on “intersubjectivity” help us see why the metaverse impedes our ability to grasp reality’s most important truths. When every aspect of how I present myself to others is a choice, all my relations become objects of manipulation. Without the authentic connections of involved, concrete, and personal relationships, I become irretrievably disconnected from reality.
Public Discourse

Patrick T. Brown

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Image of the Constitution

What Conservatives Have Forgotten about Subsidiarity and the Common Good

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In the last decade or so, various strands of the “new right” have fallen prey to the lures of governmental consolidation. But despite these conservatives’ attempts to justify bold state action in the name of the common good, subsidiarity remains an indispensable guide. Subsidiarity is perhaps the greatest expression of a polycentric approach to the common good.
Photo of Pius XII

The Spurious Effort to Make Pope Pius XII a Villain

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David Kertzer’s new book, The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler claims to uncover secret communications between the wartime pope and the Nazis, but the book makes numerous factual errors. Kertzer also fails to take stock of recent scholarly contributions on Pius’s record and ends up misrepresenting or entirely omitting key information.
Photo of 10 commandments monument

Rights and Liberty in the Western Legal Tradition

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John Witte, Jr.’s The Blessings of Liberty offers a wonderful overview of the development of human rights in the West. He contends that natural rights are found in the Bible, were developed by Christian thinkers, and played an important role in the West long before Enlightenment thinkers wrote about them. Witte also focuses on religious freedom more narrowly as the preeminent right.
Small child holding an iPad

Virtue Can’t Be Learned from Devices

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During the pandemic, schools deployed digital technologies enabling them to efficiently transmit content and monitor student engagement at a distance. Unfortunately, these technologies have become entrenched, and screen-based activities now dominate many classrooms. But to develop intellectual and moral virtue, schools must engage students’ bodies, minds, and souls. Screen-centered, digital modes of learning undermine education because they are incapable of fostering virtue in embodied human beings.
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