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It is a natural thing for southerners to be drawn to Lee’s memory and to look up in admiration at a statue in his likeness. But the fact remains: such statues say to black Americans, in the voice of the unreconstructed white majority, “We’re back in charge, and don’t you forget it.”
There is no romance without the real presence of God, no sacramental imagination without the sacraments, and the wonders of fantasy cannot be asserted of primary reality itself.
These desires—freedom, virtue, and safety—were the underlying impulses of the libertarian, traditionalist, and national security elements of the “fusionist” conservative movement during the Cold War era. And, it seems to me that when you look at it this way, you will recognize that these yearnings persist on the Right to this day.
This book illuminates the path the modern conservative movement has taken heretofore and therefore will be an important aid to conservatism’s ongoing quest for self-definition.
In our fallen condition in which we are detached from relationship with God, our mortality is a gift. Scarcity grants meaning to our decisions, provides a merciful conduit for us to know the love of God and one another, and pushes us toward relationships broken by the Fall.
The movie’s most profound insight is its distillation of pop feminism: a praise of women so unceasing that we no longer feel comfortable being normal human beings with blemishes, weakness, and fertility.
Since the first social encyclical, Rerum novarum (1891), the Church consistently has taught that forming unions is a natural human right, an expression of the right of association and a right that governments may not deny.
In Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, Peter Heather wishes to dismantle some of the conventions that have governed how the story of Christian history is told.
Slavery, Jim Crow, and distributive discrimination assaulted natural rights and the dignity of persons made in the image of God on which these rights are based. They leave behind wounds, the most central of which is the standing victory of injustice, the moral fact of injustice itself that persists in time unless it is repudiated. While constitutional amendments, legislation, and policies have countered and delegitimated these injustices, the lack of a formal apology and reparations has left them still standing.
Modern life in the United States is atomizing, lonely, and hard on family bonds. Improving the housing stock would help alleviate these challenges.
Cormac McCarthy, who passed away today, gives readers reason to suspect that he did not shut the door on God before his life ended. His last two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, offer more than just an artistic representation of reality’s inescapable brutality. They forcefully struggle with the greatest questions of human existence. Like any good work of art, these books don’t allow any reader—religious, atheist, materialist, Christian—to walk away feeling perfectly comfortable in their understanding of the world.
What would happen if we dropped that charged word “liberalism” from the conversation and got down to specifics? I suspect much of Patrick Deneen’s postliberal magic would disappear.
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?”
“Stigmarketing,” which is appealing to claims of stigma to motivate social change, has become the backbone of legal efforts toward that end. Stigmarketing capitalizes on gay–straight differences, and the way these disparities can be measured by the absolute surge in research on “minority stress theory,” or MST.
James Bradley Thayer sternly taught an iron discipline in constitutional judging of holding one’s own views—even one’s conviction that one understood the Constitution better than the legislature did—firmly in check. And he taught this because he believed it was the only approach consistent with the Constitution’s text, purposes, structure, and traditional interpretation.
When it comes to premeditated murder, compensation is not available. As much of human history attests and as the biblical witness affirms, it is the one crime that carries a mandatory death sentence. To suggest or argue that the ultimate human crime should not be met with the ultimate punishment is a moral travesty because it fails to comprehend the nature and meaning of the imago Dei, and thereby undermines the common good.
Our Constitution’s carefully designed processes for democratic self-governance, and the means and mechanisms for ensuring accountability, are evaded and eroded. In his 2021 book “Purchasing Submission,” Philip Hamburger reveals the many hidden ways this evasion occurs—through spending conditions and contractual terms, yes; but also through “dangerously benevolent” nudges, incentives, intermediaries, accreditation, licensing, permits, and permissions.
The modern story of “argument” might seem troubling to many. Debate too often seems emotion-driven, and laden with fallacies and quarrelsome noise. By exploring the significance of argument for both individuals and society, Lee Siegel’s Why Argument Matters reminds us why to be human is to argue—and why that is something to celebrate.
Aside from a certain gruff nobility, the statue of John Witherspoon in Princeton is not overly stylized; he’s human, which is to say, flawed. A hero in bronze he may be, but with feet of clay, Witherspoon is worth remembering as he is portrayed there.
“What I see in modern America is something maybe a little bit different than what other folks see. I think the nation vis-à-vis its laws is far more just than it has been at virtually any point in its previous history. Racial discrimination is outlawed de jure. You have an extension of the First Amendment to all American communities. You have greater religious freedoms in a concrete way than we’ve ever enjoyed in the history of the United States. We have a lot of problems, but we’re better than we’ve been.”
As we decide what habits to adopt or discard in 2023, it’s important to carefully sort through the advice on offer to see if it’s based on a sound vision of human nature and of what constitutes a good life. Thankfully, the Public Discourse archives can offer guidance here, as on so many other topics.
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.
We must resist the sense that gratitude has no place in this era of frequently justified outrage. In fact, gratitude may be exactly what can help us distinguish justified from unjustified outrage. And, in any case, gratitude is the proper disposition toward all the good we have been given that we have done so little to earn.
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.