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Tower of Babel

There Is No City of Man Without the City of God

By
Given modernity’s inability to realize Augustine’s thesis of the necessity of a common love, we have two options: we must either reject a universal socio-political vision as entirely unworkable, or the world—or at least the West—must learn again that a transcendent foundation and telos are essential to political order.
Pile of books

The Bookshelf: Books That Stick

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Some of the best perspective-altering reading experiences I’ve had in recent years have come from books that I read well outside the bounds of my own research. Nonetheless they made their way into my thinking and writing in various ways—they “stuck.” And books that “stick” in this way we are apt to recommend whenever an opportunity arises.
Barbed wire

Muriel Spark in Jerusalem

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The British author grappled with the Eichmann Trial in her most ambitious novel. The book is worth revisiting for its fascinating portrait of Adolf Eichmann’s rhetoric and his ability to obscure the reality of the Holocaust.
Ohio Statehouse

Dobbs Won’t Fix State Courts. To Do That, Pro-Life Lawmakers Must Step Up Now.

By
In some states, it’s almost impossible for pro-life governors to appoint originalist judges. That’s why we must pursue state-level judicial reforms before Dobbs is decided. To make the most of this opportunity, most of us need to turn our attention away from DC and toward our state capitols.
Robot hand and human hand

Artificial Intelligence Can’t Solve the Knowledge Problem

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The only reliable method we have found to aggregate preferences, abilities, and efforts is the free market. Through the price system, it aligns incentives with information revelation. This method is not perfect, and its outcomes are often unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, like democracy, all the other alternatives, including “digital socialism,” are worse.
Six_Tuscan_Poets

How to Build Your Own Renaissance

By
The historical parallels between fourteenth-century Europe and our own times can be useful in our current civilizational crisis. Petrarch aimed to create a new synthesis between classical and Christian civilization, to use the resources of antiquity to heal the spiritual diseases of his own time. What he and his followers created over the next century and a half is known to historians as the Renaissance, the rebirth of antiquity. It followed a formula that can still work today.
Declaration of Independence with an American flag

In Defense of Common Good Originalism

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Many key constitutional clauses were drafted as compromise provisions intended to win over the members of intensely warring intellectual and political tribes. This ought to cut strongly in favor of a dispositional humility about an interpreter’s ability to definitively discern the most accurate original meanings of these clauses. In these situations, statesmen ought to err on the side of certain substantive ideals of natural justice, human flourishing, and the common good.
Constitution

The Bad History of Common Good Originalism

By
Common-good originalism’s historical understanding of the Constitution’s adoption is perhaps its weakest link. The Constitution emerged from a negotiated consensus of a complex popular sovereign—a fact that ought to reinforce a judge’s commitment to the written text.
Bill Lee

Common Sense Conservatism: An Interview with Tennessee Governor Bill Lee

By and
Used to be the Democrats called themselves the “Party of the Little Guy.” Today, I think that’s us. As the Democrats move farther and farther to the left, I think they’re scaring normal people. If their party keeps acting crazy, scaring regular people, and we don’t—if we just act on principle with a smile on our face, articulating a vision that allows Americans to thrive, while they keep pushing the latest idea from the Harvard Faculty Lounge—well, I think our vision will win out.
Religious symbols

Don’t Rain on Fulton’s Parade: Religious Freedom Is Winning at the Supreme Court

By
Defenders of the free exercise of religion need to accept that we are playing a long game. Religious freedom is winning, even if the Court’s religious freedom jurisprudence develops over the span of more than one term.
Piggy bank and books

The Decadence of Economics

By
Economics today is a decadent discipline, with a rich legacy but atrophied creativity. Uncredentialed economists and maverick academics offer the best hope for reviving worthwhile economics.
Feminism sign

Can Contemporary Feminism Come to Grips with Reality? Four Responses to Abigail Favale

By , , and
Today at Public Discourse, we are featuring brief responses to Abigail Favale’s essay, "Feminism's Last Battle," by four writers: Erika Bachiochi, Margaret Harper McCarthy, Leah Libresco Sargeant, and Angela Franks.
Women's March

Feminism’s Last Battle

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We are witnessing a kind of last battle, a feminist Armageddon that will determine whether feminism, as a movement centered upon the wellbeing of women and girls, will endure into the future or self-immolate. Only a return to realism can provide a stable definition of woman, the requisite ground for effective feminism.
woman holding smartphone

Big Tech and the Battle for Republican Liberty

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Control of public deliberation and political action in America is quickly passing into the hands of an unelected oligarchy. To truly break the tyranny of Big Tech, Josh Hawley and his allies may need to drop the Jeffersonian fig leaf and forthrightly embrace a contemporary revival of Hamiltonian republicanism.
Happy family

The Original Feminist Plan for Women’s Equality: Marriage, Family, and Sexual Integrity

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In her new book, Erika Bachiochi presents a compelling vision of female equality and happiness that embraces a woman’s capacity for childbearing and encourages sexual virtue and strong marriages as an antidote to difficulties that abortion can never hope to solve.
Boy waving French flag

What the French Can Teach Americans About the Electoral College

By
Pitting as it does two different conceptions of popular sovereignty against each other, the debate over the Electoral College is a proxy for a more fundamental debate over what kind of regime should govern America. The history of French republicanism teaches that the closer Americans come to changing the way they elect their president, the closer they come to regime change.
Woman with raised hand

The Art of the Question

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A seminar should lead students into exploring a great work, rather than presuming to master it. This may reawaken the intention of contemplation. In the end, happiness is species of contemplation, and—as Aristotle shockingly reveals—everyone wants to be happy.
Reading in a hammock

The Bookshelf: Summer Experiments and Attempts

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Summer—a time of lounging in a shaded hammock between two trees, or under a beach umbrella—is a great time for bite-sized nonfiction. With Public Discourse taking a publishing hiatus for the week following Independence Day, now is a perfect time to stretch out with some small provocation of thought.
Public Discourse

The Best Defense Is a Good Offense: C.S. Lewis’s Abolition of Man

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A new critical commentary on Lewis’s classic 1943 work provides a treasure trove of interpretation and supplementary material. Lewis’s warnings about the consequences of jettisoning natural law—what he referred to as the Tao—remain as trenchant today as they were when delivered during the Second World War.
Fireoworks

Pity, Piety, and Patriotic Love for Our Imperfect Nation

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Man on cliff

Our Self-Defeating Pursuit of Happiness

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Written in an engaging and compact style, Benjamin and Jenna Storey’s new book is essential reading for all observers of the persistent, often hidden, but increasingly visible unhappiness of contemporary life.
Vermeer Painting

Taking Literature Personally

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Truth is not something “out there,” but a relationship between person and thing. Good literature arises out of that relationship, telling truths in a personal way, making the world it reflects more personal.
Book Cover

Nominalism, Nihilism, and Modern Politics

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The belief that human beings and human communities can be rearranged in any way that suits our creative fancy is, as the examples of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union show, an invitation to tyranny and disaster.
Civil rights protesters

National Reparations Can’t Create Justice, But Local Ones Might

By
Reparations for racial injustice are necessary, but they will be effective only on a local level, not a national one.
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