fbpx
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Search
Close this search box.
Search Results For:

Search Results for: look – Page 15

Photo of US Capitol Building

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

By
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.
John William Waterhouse Narcissus painting

The Advice Column of Expressive Individualism

By
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.
Photo of Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt’s Vision of Freedom

By
In the face of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt’s independence of spirit—her reluctance to attach herself to a partisan or intellectual movement—exemplified precisely the sort of political action that she believed to be the foundation of freedom. In our own age of polarization, she stands as a powerful reminder of the necessity—and even the nobility—of political engagement.
Photo of dad holding sleeping newborn baby

Liberal Individualism Is Undermining Itself

By
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.
Photo of books of Russian literature

The Bookshelf: Lost (and Found) in Translations

By
Is literalness the true criterion of a good translation? It may be that for study, the literalness to which Allan Bloom and Harvey Mansfield aspire in their translations of Plato and Machiavelli is the thing needful. But a good case can be made that for readers of English translations to get a sense of a story’s power, small departures from literalness, and perhaps even large ones, will be necessary on the translator’s part.
Photo of Mt Rushmore

The Piety of Patriotism: A Reply to Susan Hanssen

By
As the American story enters its fifth century, the list of those who have earned the right to be called fathers and mothers of our country grows ever longer. As we retell our national story to each generation, we will of course continue to argue about whether some of the characters were really heroes or villains—a debate that is part of every nation’s storytelling. But unless we can recover a certain generosity towards those who came before us, we will find ourselves with nothing to pass on to those who come after.
Photo of Marine Corps memorial statue

Discovering America

By
Conservatives must be patriots—it is not possible to be a conservative and say that there is nothing valuable or worth preserving from your own nation’s cultural tradition. The desire to fight for the integrity of your own country has got to come from a visceral love for your country or else it will not seem worth any struggle against its corruption.
cambridge university

Truth-Seekers or Coddlers at the Elite University? A Conversation with James Orr

By and
An ideologically captured university creates the illusion of consensus on questions that in fact are highly contested off campus. That makes public disagreement a puzzling and unintelligible phenomenon. It creates a cascade of resentment and negative sentiment throughout the rest of the elite classes towards any dissenting views in the public square. It shatters a society’s understanding of itself and its role in the world, of what social flourishing looks like.
LGBT protest

What Happened to “Live and Let Live”?

By
Liberalism cannot survive as a political philosophy capable of fostering human flourishing if it abandons its supposed virtues of protecting freedoms of religion, speech, and commerce. Yet, as we observe the march of the left on human sexuality, we see an incredible Javert-like intensity in hounding those who offend its sensibilities. We’ve forgotten that liberalism means winning incomplete victories and living with disagreement.
Photo of Independence Hall in Philadelphia

Bare-Bones Religious Freedom

By
In Religious Liberty and the American Founding, Phillip Muñoz believes that there is a kind of natural rights logic that leads to his minimalist version of religious freedom. His central premise is that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the “natural rights” logic that was prevalent in the Founding period; and he tries to follow this logic to its conclusions, come hell or high water.
Baptism of Constantine by Raphael

Antiseparationism: A Response to Scott Roniger

By
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.
Patrick Brown headshot

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

By
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.
Two gold wedding rings on rainbow lgbt flag. Homosexual marriage.

The “Respect for Marriage Act” Will Harm Children

By
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.
Painting of the signing of the Constitution in Independence Hall

What’s Wrong with Social Contract Theory

By
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.
Woman on phone laying in bed

Confessions of a Comatose Son of Liberalism

By
Even the healthiest patriotism does not address whether America’s political regime ought to re-main basically neutral about whether its citizens flourish. If what our politics can give us is fair procedures for resolving disputes, and protections for speech and property, and a broad enough distribution of power that tyranny has difficulty taking hold, that is remarkable and we should be grateful. That still isn’t living well.
Photo of marble arches with twin stairways and stained glass

University Life Depends on the Moral Life  

By
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 of William F. Buckley

Where Does National Review Stand Today? A Conversation with Ramesh Ponnuru and Matt Franck

By and
National Review midwifed and nurtured the modern conservative movement into being. Conservatism today is in a very different situation from the one that Bill Buckley confronted in 1955. There is this vast conservative enterprise now; it’s kind of hydra-headed. But the basic need is, first, to think about the circumstances in which we find ourselves and how to apply conservative principles to them—or a conservative disposition, if one prefers—and second, how to build a coalition that is large enough to take these ideas off of the shelf.
Image of a digital room

The Metaverse Is Not Morally Neutral Technology

By
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.
Photo of book with pages ripped out

The Bookshelf: Dangers of the Siloed Life

By
A temptation today is that we will “silo” ourselves, choosing to listen only to voices congenial to our own views, and walling off our access to other points of view. This temptation to live in a cozy silo can afflict our book reading habits as well, which is too bad. You won’t know how to shore up the weaknesses in your own arguments unless you encounter critics of them, and you won’t know even what is mistaken in others’ perspectives until you grant their strongest form a patient hearing.
Cartoon of ragged school

A School Model That Could Transform Society

By
Lord Shaftesbury’s success in transforming education for the poor provides a variety of lessons for us today. His “ragged schools” suggest that by increasing local control of schools, expanding vocational training, and introducing curricula that recognize the integrated nature of human beings, our society might become more enriched—both materially and spiritually.
Photo of Vietnam War protest from the 1960s

A Novelist on the Progressive Left Everyone Should Read

By
Although a committed progressive, through his novels, Todd Gitlin hedges his commitments by both recognizing the limitations of his worldview and portraying the merits of his political adversaries. No matter one’s own views, Gitlin’s intellectual virtues and fairmindedness displayed in his work are deeply instructive.
Photo of Pius XII

The Spurious Effort to Make Pope Pius XII a Villain

By
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.
Person holding iphone on Twitter

Truth and Debate During COVID

By
One lesson my students and I learned during the pandemic is that, in politics, our debates don’t rely upon pure reason. Government, media, and popular opinions—all in different ways and for different reasons—are shaped by their factional commitments. And, as we saw during COVID, the internet magnifies the viral nature of ideas, both for good and for ill.
Carravaggio's Bacchus painting

Did Ancient Greeks and Romans Really Believe in the Gods?

By
In Belief and Cult: Rethinking Roman Religion, Jacob Mackey argues that the ancient Romans’ participation in polytheistic rituals necessarily implied that they believed in their gods. But his discussion of Roman religion would have been even more persuasive if he had spent more time discussing ancient documents and less time explaining modern theories of belief and practice.
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Public Discourse © 2024 | All Rights Reserved