fbpx
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Search
Close this search box.
Search Results For:

Search Results for: contract – Page 4

Supreme Court chambers

The Smith Case, Religious Freedom, and Originalism

By
One might wish that the Free Exercise Clause, as originally understood, had provided a basis for more judicial protection of religious rights than it does. But wishing doesn’t make it so. Judges don’t have the authority to interpret the Constitution to get better policy results, even if those are really, really important results.
Suburban neighborhood

The Universal Destination of Goods and Private Property: Is the Right to Private Property a “Second-Tier” Natural Right?

By
Catholic tradition has never considered the relationship between the principle of universal destination of goods and the right to private property as one between a “primary” and a “secondary” right. The former does not formulate a right at all, but only a fundamental principle from which the right to private property receives its ultimate justification.

John Rawls, Contemporary Liberalism, and Natural Law

By
John Rawls cannot get to the most fundamental issues of political philosophy because that would entail a comprehensive theory, which is too divisive, in his own view, to serve as the basis for a public philosophy.

Natural Law and American Civil Rights Movements

By
It was on the foundation of St. Augustine’s natural law theory, then, that Martin Luther King, Jr. discovered the grounds of civil disobedience: “A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of Harmony with the moral law.” Nor did he stop there. He invoked Aquinas, Martin Buber, Socrates, Tillich, and Niebuhr (among other authorities) to establish that the claim he defended was not a parochial claim merely derived from majority rule. To defend civil rights for black people meant to prove that “segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful.”

Natural Law and the Declaration of Independence

By
To those who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence, political liberty and natural law went together: Nature summons man, individually and collectively, to self-government and guides him in the exercise of his power of choice.

Common Law and the Law of Reason

By
Like cousins who resemble one another, common law and natural law are sometimes confused. There is in fact a deep affinity between common law and natural law, but it is better at the outset to describe their differences, and best to do this historically.

Kids on an Island, Female Edition

By
A 1937 novel by Carol Ryrie Brink offers a feminine version of the popular “kids shipwrecked on an island” plot. The protagonists do not have to spear boars or devise a polis. Rather, they must show that they can live as women, taking care of the four babies shipwrecked with them. Can the girls make the most of the resources available to them, remain cooperative and kind to each other under tremendous strain, and prioritize the well-being of the vulnerable people entrusted to their care?

Why American Conservatives Should Be Wary of “One Nation Conservatism”

By
One Nation Conservatism is itself a type of fusionism, a traditionalist-progressive mix rather than a traditionalist–classical liberal one. Traditionalists should not abandon a pragmatic alliance with the latter for intellectual commitment to the former.
Barbed wire

Muriel Spark in Jerusalem

By
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.
Declaration of Independence with an American flag

In Defense of Common Good Originalism

By
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.
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.
Wedding Party

When Marriage Becomes a Private Matter

By
My marriage is an entity with ramifications and consequences that echo outside our home. The same is true in reverse: what happens in other marriages can affect ours. A marriage needs friends, and it can likewise supply friendship to others’ unions.
Two wedding rings

Why We Should Push Back against Platonic Marriage

By
Sex makes marriage much more than just friendship with “benefits.” The sexual excitement, the powerful bonding, the oneness, the potential creation of human life, even the vulnerability—all of this alchemizes friendship and sexual attraction into marriage. We have been separating sex from marriage for decades now, with foreseeable destruction. This latest innovation adds more fuel to the inferno.
Bride & Groom cutting wedding cake

Who Knew Émile Durkheim Was a Conservative on Sex and Marriage?

By
Today, sociology is overwhelmingly dominated by the radically individualistic and gender–feminist ethic that drives contemporary American culture. Yet it was not always so. Émile Durkheim, the Frenchman whom many call the founder of sociology, offered a rigorous scientific and philosophical account of sexuality, marriage, and the family that affirms the traditional view.
Coworkers

For Love or Money: Business as a Formative Community

By
We often fail to see that business is a morally formative mode of solidarity even as it also serves as a means to prosperity. Aristotle might describe it as a “friendship of utility.” Respecting the communal form of the business firm, which is essential to its productivity, demands a deeper vision of the proper goals and just governance of businesses.
Roth

When Good Books Are Written by Bad People

By
To believe that we cannot both enjoy the work of a disreputable artist and condemn the artist is to underestimate our own capacity for ethical discernment and to deprive ourselves needlessly of sources of wisdom.
Plain white church

Ramona’s World: The Quiet Christianity of Beverly Cleary’s Beloved Books

By
Beverly Cleary did not make Ramona a specimen of moral improvement, or a Christian evangelist. She made her a Christian child. Unlike Christian families today, however, Ramona’s family lives a world in which traditional morality is the cultural default. Going to church makes you normal, and practicing Christianity garners social rewards. Christian life simply means living.
Statue of Liberty and NYC

How to Kill a City: Learning From De Blasio’s Dystopia

By
Progressive strongholds face unprecedented fiscal challenges. The example of New York City illustrates what not to do—and suggests a way forward.
Fast food restaurant

The New York Times Was Right the First Time: “The Right Minimum Wage: $0.00”

By
Minimum wages, despite good intentions, harm the very people they are intended to help. The right minimum was $0.00 in 1987, and it still is now.
Howl Cover

The Censorship of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the Unbooking of Ryan T. Anderson

By
It may seem strange to pair Lawrence Ferlinghetti with Ryan Anderson, who argues against virtually everything for which Ferlinghetti stood. What they have in common is the courage of their convictions, a willingness to challenge the conventional pieties of their respective ages, and to do so in ways that conformist critics are quick to label offensive, obscene, unsafe, or misframed.

The “Great Dissenter”: Justice John Marshall Harlan the First as a Role Model of Resistance in a Post-Constitutional Age

By
Justice John Marshall Harlan the First courageously stood against his learned opponents on the Supreme Court. By his example, we too might muster the courage to be “Great Dissenters” against the intellectual and cultural classes that progressives have come to dominate.

Why Corporate America Loves the Left

By
The leftward drift of many American business executives is driven by both dubious economic calculations and cultural and political pressures that will corrode business’s legitimate freedoms and damage the economy’s capacity to generate wealth.
Man reading

Refreshing, Rejuvenating, and Improving Our Public Discourse: 2020 Book Recommendations

By
Reading recommendations from The Witherspoon Institute staff.
Santa with two children

We Are (Politically) Who We Love: Klaus, Christmas, and Re-Founding

By
The film “Klaus” is a tale of political refounding that tells of our need for a common good based in common loves. It shows how a political order can mold souls, whether for good or for ill.
Facebook Twitter Instagram Youtube Rss
Public Discourse © 2024 | All Rights Reserved