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Constant reminders about the challenges of parenthood, though seemingly innocent or even compassionate, can do harm.
The long debate over who should be speaker was a healthy expression of Madisonian transactional politics, and it had helped illuminate the path toward restoring the People’s House as the seat of American self-governance.
For the United Nations Population Fund, a few key concepts—sex as integral to well-being, and the importance of caring for others, consent, and bodily autonomy—exhaust the moral significance of sex. Its recent statement implies that sex is nothing but a purely physical act between two bodies. But can sex be distilled so simply?
For the most significant choices of our lives, we only learn what the decision entails after we make it. This creates something of a dilemma. We only get the information needed to make a well-informed decision after we have committed to a particular choice. We are confronted with choices whose outcomes, potential goods, and impact on our lives we cannot fully anticipate.
As efforts to chronicle the breadth of the problem, both Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex and Louise Perry’s The Case against the Sexual Revolution are nearly unimpeachable. But neither goes far enough in recognizing exactly how deep the rot of this ideology goes. Both authors are reluctant to jettison or even criticize essential aspects of this worldview, which significantly limits their imagination when it comes to developing solutions beyond the obvious.
As a social scientist, I have grave concerns about the methodological mess that has characterized this synod’s massive, unwieldy data-collection-and-analysis venture.
As our dependence on technology reshapes the moral imagination of our culture to see human beings as psychological wills that need not respect material limitations, so the old order that was built upon the vision of human beings as both body and soul will become increasingly implausible. The things that make Christianity stand out from the wider culture—belief in the incarnation, the resurrection, and embodied human nature as a real, universal thing with moral consequences—are antithetical to the terms of membership in the emerging world order.
What is most original in Koons’s book Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? is his argument that quantum mechanics is best interpreted as vindicating the Aristotelian hylomorphist’s view of nature. Koons is the first prominent philosopher to make the case at book-length, in a way that combines expertise in the relevant philosophical ideas and literature with serious and detailed engagement with the scientific concepts.
Stephen Wolfe’s dedication to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest two centuries of sources for a popular audience is impressive. However, if scholarly recovery alone were the aim of the book, it is doubtful that Wolfe would have written it, Canon would have published it, or American Protestants would buy it. Why not? Wolfe wants his admittedly idiosyncratic vision to improve the future, not simply engage academic specialists. That turns out to be a mixed blessing.
George Weigel’s book on the meaning and legacy of Vatican II is persuasive as a history of ideas, but in focusing on context and content it seems to miss the sense in which the Council is an unfolding event that calls Catholics to encounter Christ and walk away changed and challenged.
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.
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.
In his new book, Jamie Boulding uses the metaphysics of participation to argue that multiverse proposals do not really call into question the notion of God central to Christian theology. Infinite multiplicity and diversity do not challenge the claim that all that is is created.
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.
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.
Francis Fukuyama offers a useful account of the pathologies of liberalism and argues that it still has the internal resources necessary to resist its critics. But his defense of liberalism seems designed only to appeal to likeminded centrists. Liberalism today should not be about splitting differences and seeking moderation, but staking out its ground and affirming its beliefs.
Readers of Thomas Kidd’s book, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh, are left with a portrait of a brilliant, morally flawed, and often contradictory, overindulgent, and undisciplined man—a combination not uncommon in great men. The biography is careful and balanced in its presentation of the evidence, revealing a man of monumental achievements and profound failings.
We Princeton students should recognize that each of us has a critical role to play in making sure our common good—the truth-seeking ideal—is cherished and protected by our shared culture. No matter how impressively our institution formally stands behind free speech, and no matter how spot-on our president is in his defense of it, the truth-seeking endeavor will be decimated if Princeton’s students—you and I—fail to foster an atmosphere in which the vigorous exchange of ideas is considered sacred.
“We shall not cease from exploration,” wrote T. S. Eliot in “Little Gidding,” “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” Such is the task of a liberal education, rightly understood. It is a liberating exploration that results not in being permanently uprooted and alienated but in being more fully at home in the world that we already inhabit—and more fully able to enhance it, beautify it, ennoble it, and sustain it.
Tearing Us Apart is just the book we need: it understands and works within our current rhetorical and political impulses. Unfortunately, it is silent on specific policies to address how to reduce abortion demand. Nonetheless, with pro-life leaders like Anderson and DeSanctis at the helm, we have every reason to believe that the future of our movement will be guided, not by ideology, but by what will best serve the good of babies, women, and families.
Articulating and responding to common misconceptions concerning the ethics of abortion will help to clarify and advance the debate, moving past misleading slogans to engage in a forthright and respectful public dialogue in the wake of Dobbs, and seeking to build a genuine culture of life that supports the needs of both women and children.
The past half century has seen the breakdown of institutional Christianity on which Jacques Maritain’s political project relied. Nonetheless, the limits of his thought do not vitiate the valuable insights Maritain offers for Christian politics in the twenty-first century. He reminds us that politics is about how to order our life together, not just creating ideals or defeating our enemies. He teaches us that we can order a society toward the temporal truths of Christianity, but that the temporal power of the state is no substitute for the spiritual power of the faith.
Today, Jacques Maritain’s optimistic vision of Christian liberalism is often contested or dismissed as outdated, but a revival of his emphasis on Christian participation in society and politics is urgently needed—and is in many ways already in evidence in Christian political activity in America.
It is strange to reflect that someone who died in 1937 at the age of forty-six with no obvious legacy has exerted more cultural influence than most of his successors, but Antonio Gramsci’s “long struggle” of the intellectuals continues to shape our political, educational, and artistic landscape in regrettable ways.