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Embracing Our Limits: Dedication in a World of Endless Choice

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Millennials and Gen Zers have been subjected to decades of social messaging that the good life is predicated on fostering unbounded dreams, reaching for ever-towering heights of achievement, and “changing the world.” Two new books push back against this narrative, urging readers to make a stand against the chaos and vapidity of our world by delineating a small corner of it that will demand our care and attention, making choices that limit yet enrich our existence.
Photo of bride and groom leaving wedding

Thinking Beyond Roe: The Bible, Orthodox Judaism, and Sexual Virtue

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While the legal end to abortion will be an important step in the pro-life movement, we also need to shift away from the sexually permissive culture that has resulted in high demand for abortions. Modern feminism’s widespread dissatisfaction with the “anything goes” approach to sex could spell renewed interest in restraint, commitment, and even the good of children—all themes and virtues that the Bible displays with wisdom.
Plastic Mannequin

Our Plastic World—And Plastic Selves

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The collapse of traditional, external anchors of identity—perhaps most obviously those of religion, nation, and family—explains the attraction of the turn inward. The rise of technology feeds the notion that we can bend nature to our will, that the world is just so much raw, plastic material from which we can make whatever meaning or reality we choose. We no longer think of ourselves as subject to the world’s fixed nature, or of it as having an objective authority or meaning. We are the ones with power, and we are the ones who give the world significance.
Processing plant with factory smoke

Why Addressing Climate Change Should Be a Top Conservative Priority

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We are not isolated individuals, free to create our own moral codes and obligations based on our preferences, desires, self-identifications. We enter a world already tied up with pre-existing relationships, duties, and obligations. These are basic principles of conservatism. Given the drastic environmental changes awaiting future generations, conservatives ought to start considering climate change a top priority.
Dome of the United States Capitol

Fictions and Lies in a Lawless Age

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The law must stand above the powerful, and we should worry when the law is suspended or disregarded. But where is the law to be found? Most of the law consists of important fictions which live in the minds of lawyers. But what makes the fiction plausible? And how is the law’s benefit to be assessed unless we measure it against fixed, non-conventional, non-fictional standards of justice?
Renoir painting picking flowers

What Makes a Man: Reflections on the Virtues of Manhood

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Given that there are natural sex differences, it’s no surprise that those differences include some tendencies that can cause problems. This is true for both men and women. Yet the tenor of contemporary academic discussions about men, such as in the discourse about “toxic masculinity,” is much more negative. Properly understood, however, the problematic tendencies within the male condition actually present opportunities for virtue. Thus, they can form the foundation of a positive conception of manhood centered on the virtues of gentlemanliness, moral courage, and chastity.
Couple walking outside

Is Sex Political?

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Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, published last September, explores not only the question of sex and to whom it is owed, but also the rise and corporatization of the modern feminist movement, among other topics. Some of Srinivasan’s arguments sound surprisingly conservative, but others remain mired in the reductive view of politics and power that has plagued feminism for years.
Painting of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Youthful Cynicism and Dostoevsky’s Case for Hope

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Why do we choose to believe in a framework where suffering and violence are the most fundamental reality of the world? How can pain and grief coexist with the small joys that we experience daily?
Memento Mori painting by William Michael Harnett

The End of the Pandemic

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Perhaps the end of the pandemic is not a matter of eliminating COVID-19 but rather coming to terms with our own mortality. We need to learn how to survive and thrive in the pandemic, even as we try to mitigate the effects of the virus. For guidance, we can turn to Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, who was delivered from his anxious, tormented bondage by conquering his fear of death and adopting selfless concern for others.
Two open books stacked

The Bookshelf: A Little Help from My Friends

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Anyone who has spent his life in the academy, as I have, has reason to keep his mind open and his interests broad—namely, friends who write. My professional association over the last dozen years with the Witherspoon Institute and Princeton’s James Madison Program has introduced me to a dazzling array of brilliant and productive minds. No, I don’t want my writing friends to stop. They have given me much to ponder, and I look forward to what they will all write next.
Xi Jinping photo

The CCP’s Fake Democracy: How the CCP Controls China and Fools the World (Part II)

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In the first part of this essay, I showed how the CCP persecutes individuals, and discussed the CCP’s structural control of the government and the nation. In this second part, I will compare the U.S. democratic system with the CCP regime to more clearly demonstrate how one-party rule results in authoritarianism.
Chinese National Congress gathering

The CCP’s Fake Democracy: How the CCP Controls China and Fools the World (Part I)

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The CCP regularly employs violent tactics to persecute and silence its opponents and operates with impunity as a shadow power. China’s political structures enable it to maintain monolithic control of the nation. By discussing my own experience under the CCP and shedding light on its opaque structures, I hope to show that comparing the CCP’s authoritarian regime with democratic governance is like comparing barbarism with civilization: there is no comparison.
Photo of voting booths

Can Truth and Democracy Co-Exist?

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Democracy Rules (2021) is Jan-Werner Müller’s attempt to explain populist authoritarianism, while at the same time setting out what he believes are the true pillars of liberal democracy. But he does so, understanding that democracy always operates under the handicap of uncertainty.
Image of woman receiving vaccine

A Conservative Case for (Voluntary) COVID-19 Vaccination

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Freedom is certainly a value conservatives cherish, but its application has limits. It is not conservative to assert an individual right to act without considering the welfare of his community. Conservatives should choose to get vaccinated and boosted because doing poses almost no risks to their health and is in their community’s interest.
Baylor University

Higher Education Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: A Conversation with Baylor University’s Thomas Hibbs

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The continuity between administration and teaching for me has always had to do with the question of the moral, intellectual, and spiritual development of young people. Finding creative ways to meet students where they are and draw them into the most important questions is a source of endless fascination for me. When it comes to education, it may be the case that, as Alasdair MacIntyre argues, the only way to carry on sustained debate is from within and between rival traditions, assuming, that is, that members of a particular tradition are genuinely interested in engaging perspectives quite different from their own.
American flag with LGBT colors

Progressive Nationalism

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Today’s progressive nationalism is secular, yet it also relies on popular adherence to the civil religion of the left. There are two prominent manifestations of this civil religion—critical race theory’s (CRT) philosophy of history and the LGBTQ movement’s anthropology. We see evidence of this secularized-yet-religious nationalism in many places—media, bureaucracy, Hollywood—but perhaps it is most readily apparent in education.
Photo of street in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan

The Demographic Future of Humanity: Social Change (Part III)

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Precisely because our demographic future is uncertain, we should be even more careful and consider all scenarios. Many children grow up surrounded by a high number of adults, but with very few children in their family environment. Many regions, especially rural ones, will begin to run into problems in providing basic public goods, such as universities or hospitals, which require certain minimum sizes to operate with reasonable efficiency. The housing market, higher education, and electoral distribution will all be dramatically impacted by these demographic changes.
Woman reading book in chair

The Philosophical Nowhere Place of the Contemporary Novel

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If the novel is by definition tightly bound to the human subject, then contemporary novels will suffer from the same decay and corrosion from which the contemporary soul suffers. Yet, despite the uneasy conditions facing both the novel and the world, the human soul remains remarkably resilient and fascinating. Sally Rooney’s latest novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You? ponders the profound disenchantment that haunts today’s souls and novels alike.
Doctors performing surgery

Should the Unvaccinated Be Denied Organ Transplants? A Debate between Two Bioethicists

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Two bioethicists, Greg F. Burke, MD, and Emanuela Midolo, PhD, debate whether or not healthcare providers should require COVID-19 vaccines for organ transplant recipients.
William of Ockham stained glass image

Theorists of the Poison Pill

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For the conservative theorists of the poison pill, everything becomes about ideas. According to them, Ockham, Scotus, Bacon, Descartes, Locke—they are the important bad guys who determined the decadence of our time and the problems we should be talking about. But ideas don’t work this way; reality does not proceed with perfect logic like it so conveniently does in the textbooks.
Prague cathedral

On Tech and Dignity: How We Can Stay Human (Part II)

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The only way to avoid a posthuman future is by affirming the goodness of being human in both our personal choices and social and legal institutions. Most importantly, we should recommit to the virtue of religion: giving God His due. Religion teaches us to value the ontological goodness of our creatureliness, exhorts us to take steps to preserve it, and gives us the confidence to do so. When we’re steeped in a religious mode of being, we’re content just to be human; we have no need or desire to grasp for more.
Group of people using their smartphones

On Tech and Dignity: The Posthuman Technology That Threatens Us All (Part I)

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Part I addresses the threat that technology poses to human dignity because of the threat it poses to humanity itself—both elites and non-elites. Transgenderism is the first step on the road to a miserable posthuman future. Part II argues that we must recommit to the virtue of religion if we’re to resist this technologized, posthuman threat.
Robert E. Lee

“A Yankee from Yankeeland” Takes up Robert E. Lee

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Allen C. Guelzo has written a perceptive character study (and military evaluation) of Robert E. Lee that is alert to the many contradictions that seem to pepper his life. What emerges is a portrait not unlike the one peering off the dust jacket: thoughtful and appealing, yet facing two directions at once.
Five babies sitting side by side

Pope Francis Is Right: Dogs Can’t Replace Kids

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In the face of the uproar with which Pope Francis’s recent message was received, I’d like to offer a brief defense of his address and some words of encouragement to my fellow twenty-somethings who are discerning marriage and parenthood, unpopular though they may be. We are all called to fatherhood or motherhood (adoptive, biological, or spiritual), and suppressing that call diminishes what it means to be fully human.
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