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Eberstadt

From the Archives: Mary Eberstadt on What Plagues the West

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“Post-revolutionary men and women are living in ways that are profoundly unnatural for the ineradicably social creatures that we are; and many are suffering as a result, at times without even knowing the name of what ails them. This preoccupation, and the desire to do something about it, continues to shape my work.”
Antique books on shelf

New, Old, and Obscure: Public Discourse’s 2021 Book List

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Reading recommendations from The Witherspoon Institute’s staff.
Old books

Deconstructionist, Deconstruct Thyself

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The human soul is marvelously complex. Anyone who thinks he can definitively disentangle another author’s motivations—let alone his own—is fooling himself. He is engaging less in scholarly inquiry than self-projection. Only by listening attentively to others can we instruct our minds and enlarge our souls.
Gerard Honthorst's Adoration of the Shephards painting

The Forgotten Tragedies of the Christmas Story

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Christ’s advent is an astonishing story of God’s power and light breaking into our darkness, doubt, and suffering.
Statue of Karl Marx

Is Marxism Self-Defeating—or Self-Fulfilling?

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Sunday marks exactly three full decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. This anniversary arrives at a portentous time when Marxist critiques of capitalism is becoming relevant again. Marx’s legacy is hard to pin down because his influence is paradoxical. The measures Marx influenced “tamed” the excesses of laissez-faire capitalism and removed the need for revolution; yet his influence has led to the fulfillment of considerable portion of his programme.
Candles

Maintaining Faith Amid Modern Malaise: A Conversation with Public Discourse Contributing Editor Devorah Goldman

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I think PD is doing important work in addressing modern spiritual challenges: even just acknowledging such problems from an explicitly religious perspective can hopefully get us closer to mitigating them. Both Judaism and Christianity also engender a kind of humility, as we look to the past for wisdom and acknowledge our indebtedness to those who came before us.

How Can Education Unite Us Rather than Fragment Us?

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As recent debates about critical race theory in education demonstrate, trying to solve social problems while neglecting universally recognized virtues acquired through self-mastery—virtues like hope and love—not only fails to build democracy, it also makes us angry, anxious, depressed, and divided. Educators should not ignore historical complexities and conflicts, but they also need to teach students about the universal principles that unite us and sustain the hope needed for social harmony.
Public Discourse

Devorah Goldman

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Public Discourse

Micah Watson

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Library of Congress

Public Discourse and the Need for Reason, Good Government, and Moral Realism

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The texts I reflect on illuminate core themes of Public Discourse’s work: cultivating a proper understanding of reason, appreciating the indispensability of moral formation, and framing law around eternal moral truths. I was deeply honored and delighted when R. J. Snell and the current editorial team invited me to join them as a contributing editor, and I look forward to more conversations to come.
COVID-19 vaccine next to wooden gavel

Why the Supreme Court Hasn’t Ruled (For Now) on Vaccine Mandates

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Plaintiffs have filed lawsuits arguing that mandates without religious exemptions violate their free exercise of religion. Given the thorny legal questions involved, and the possibility of inflaming the polarized situation further, the Supreme Court will likely allow the issue to percolate in the lower courts and resist the invitation to rule on whether the First Amendment requires religious exemptions to COVID-19 vaccines.
Farm

Resisting Impossible Career Choices: My Family’s Move to the Farm

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Rory Groves argues in his 2020 book, Durable Trades, that we should secure careers that will see us through from entry to retirement while supporting—rather than opposing—the relational and economic development of our families and communities. In my family’s case, farming was a way to enjoy the benefits of a durable trade while making up the gap between a single income and a double income.
Map of United States

On State Powers

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Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton’s new book, Who Decides?, provides a powerful argument for ordinary people who feel powerless in their ability to affect the course of national politics. State constitutions provide an alternative venue for meaningful political change and are an important way to exercise constitutional self-government.
Textile workers in factor

The Bad Old Days: How Scientism and Market Logic Corroded the Family Long Before the Sexual Revolution

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American “family values” before the baby boomers and Roe v. Wade and second-wave feminism were shaped more by modern notions of industrial progress than by eternal truths about the human person. The sexual revolution emerged from axioms that had already permeated the mainstream for decades. Even among social conservatives, those axioms still shape our discourse about the family today.
Abraham Lincoln photo

The Soul of Politics: Harry V. Jaffa, Prudence, and Statesmanship

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In his recent book, Glenn Ellmers argues that the political philosopher Harry V. Jaffa can help us meet the manifold challenges of the crisis of the West. Jaffa’s teachings on statesmanship and prudence provide a path to reverse America’s decline.
Pope Benedict waving

Ratzinger’s Cross

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The second and final volume of a biography of Benedict XVI focuses on his place in addressing the crises shaking both the post–Vatican II Catholic Church and the West more generally.
Refinery smoke

Why Liberals Should Embrace (a Bit of) Social Conservatism

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When it comes to climate change, liberals are correct. Yet they fail to see how the same arguments they use for climate action—acting in the face of uncertainty, limiting individual choice for the common good—can also be used to justify a bit of soft social conservatism.
Crowded city

Augusto Del Noce and The Problem of Atheism

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Augusto Del Noce is the most important thinker we don’t know. Del Noce viewed The Problem of Atheism, his essay collection that will be made available in English early next year, as the cornerstone of his scholarship.
Stack of four books

The Bookshelf: The Comfort Food of Series Fiction

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When the hits keep on coming, it’s difficult for series writers to resist the market demand. Success builds the writer’s treadmill, and it can lack an “Off” switch. Perhaps “keep them coming back for more” should be replaced as the series writer’s motto by “make them wish there had been more.”
Woman holding flowers next to casket

Mourning Could Cure Us of Consumerism’s Hyperreal Delusions

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Houses of mourning allow us to see hyperreality for what it is: fake. Suffering leads us to ask questions that go beneath life’s surfaces and pushes us to become seekers, not just consumers.
Sleeping baby in mom's arms

Casey v. Casey

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Let Casey stand, and its abortion license fall.
Norman Rockwell painting

Rehabilitating Rockwell from the Culture of Kitsch

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Rockwell’s work may be pop culture rather than high culture, but his work is capable of real and “straightforward” sentiment. Rockwell’s work is humorous, and its humor comes from the joy in the mundaneness of things.
LGBT flags

The Autonomous Self Is a Coercive God

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Jim Breuer and Dave Chappelle are current darlings of the Right, because they refuse to bow to the orthodoxy of sexual identitarianism. Yet their own emphasis on autonomy and free speech shares in the same inadequate conception of modern humanity, which, in its never-ending quest for self-realization, inevitably descends into the very coercive behaviors it claims to eschew.
Woman studying

Should I Become an Academic? Maybe Not: A Final Response to Phillip Dolitsky

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The jealousy among fellow academics is often so strong that a good teacher or fair researcher is despised by colleagues. Many small liberal arts colleges will close. And, despite its reputation as a bastion of progressive thought, the academy usually rewards safe, uncreative thinking. If the academy still sounds good despite all this, then you should apply to graduate school.
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